As with most posts, I wrote this in stages so there are temporal anachronisms all over. That excuse feels a little like the fools who take “I don tpye engrish too nice so dot complane,” as license to type whatever pidgin 1337speak they want. However, there aren’t ubiquitous context-checkers available to correct it and I can’t plan to not finish it until an indefinite future effectively, so I will leave them be. In fact, I wrote the next paragraph in November, but it is true yet again; funny how that works out, eh?

I have broken out of a cycle of interest with Zynga’s games in general. Hungry for more opportunities to waste my time, I made the unwise move back to Myspace rather than make a dummy account on Facebook. The expansion showed me that not all platforms are treated equal. In the end though, the uniform experience and demand overwhelmed me and I just stopped for a while. This became a shuffle with ennui as my dance partner until I could understand my ambivalence. Just what was so fun and what sort of fun was missing?

Yesterday, I figured it out by comparing it to what I liked about Newground’s games. Newgrounds is cousin to youtube and flickr, but archives user-donated Flash media. Some create games and some movies, which other users vote on to determine whether they survive. Directing my own flash movies remains on a marching horizon, so I opted to ‘level’ up via voting. A user’s vote weight is a product of hiser level and rank. Vote on any five submissions daily for level points. Vote on any number of submissions that haven’t been accepted yet for rank points. To be efficient, I voted on five or so new submissions to get the points for both before looking at the day’s headliners.

This and a couple other factors soured the experience. Specifically, I only accrued points if I had approved the candidate if it succeeded or ‘blammed’ it, if the community rejected it. This gave some pressure, not to vote about whether I felt a file was below average, but how other users would vote on it. This became pretty annoying if the people judging in the (generally) ten minute window are more permissive than I. On Youtube, no one cares if you submit a thirty second clip of your thumb. Here, it seemed like the point was to have better work and let people document their first tries on sites without voting systems (deviantart). I even penned a couple of reviews to castigate the very worst submissions. As an example, I dismissed die die fuckers die by saying “this is a ‘music video’ in that an asian song plays in the background while it scrolls a single image of a tikiesque skull at a snail’s pace. // Turn back any who read reviews before watching. // the preloader didn’t suck.” Eleven months later, I got a note that informed me that my review had been deleted because I hadn’t followed the guidelines. It was the sinning third message, because appearantly some ‘helpful’ moderator noticed a pattern in my reviews and deleted every sinning one. The only seemingly prohibited element is that I encouraged other people to blam the submission or not play it. The deletion swarm came at a convergence when I felt tired of trying to gamely predict whether ten year olds like crappy flash movies or not. I stopped visiting the site, which is foolish because its best submissions are top-notch.

So, in puzzling my ambivalence to Zynga’s games, I recalled a curious entry called “Upgrade Complete!” It came as a sequel in spirit to another called “Achievement Unlocked,” a metagame of maneuvering a small elephant around a static level trying to perform 100 admittedly arbitrary states. Upgrade complete has two elements. One is a simple starfighter game to earn money for the store. The store is the second and coequal element of the metagame. The author accomplished this by beginning with virtually nothing and forcing the user to buy and upgrade every element, from the title screen and menu buttons, to the game graphics and weapons. All of Zynga’s games utilize the passive elements of each to make pale clickstorm copies of ‘upgrade unlocked.’

Farmville commits this crime most obviously. Zynga’s other offerings – Mafia Wars, Vampire Wars, Dragon Wars, and Youville – hide the truth with various pairings but never surmount that core. Perhaps Facebook’s structure or market factors incentivize these forms. Others I tried, Tiny Adventures and Starfleet, support this idea. The point isn’t to belabor some perceived short-sightedness on the part of game designers. Their forums are full of whiners who ask for game-changing perks despite the injurious effect they would have on Zynga’s business model. I intend, with the preceding analysis and subsequent reviews, to warn potential players about the type of experience offered. For the longest time, I felt a varying ambivalence about the endeavor. Until I realized the superficial nature rationally rather than intuitively, I couldn’t decide whether I was wasting my time or having fun. Hopefully, I can save you some grief.

Youville

I did accuse Farmville, but Youville – on Myspace – tempts via a shorter review. I used to watch my sister play The Sims before my parents gave me my first laptop and we no longer had to share our family computer. She used it as a simple home designing program and rarely ventured into the mollycoddling proper. I recall trying that aspect but found the level of micromanagement beyond my patience. Youville attempts a substitute by cutting the biological foolishness and emphasizing more emotional activities: work, shopping, and pretending to interact with other people. The work consists of baking sweets at a ‘factory.’ Here, the clickstorm and scheduled return is a minigame to enable shopping and avatar abilities (like ‘the Egyptian’ or ‘anger). But, it makes the whole of Farmville’s world, so I’ll describe it in more depth below. Suffice that baking is a sequence of prep, choose your return time and profit margin, harvest and clean.

Zynga offers two types of interfaces: primarily graphic and primarily textual. Some artists are sitting pretty because – despite cartoony character design, for self-identification and cheaper scripting – the backgrounds are very nicely rendered. Mind, Youville sits with point and click adventure games rather than any sort of dynamically rendered environment. The furniture fails to stimulate me, but it isn’t too far from the quality on Maxim’s (original) offering. While Youville compares favorably, given the platform, besides working and buying stuff, I couldn’t find anything else of note. Sure, I can make some flippant gesture in front of some ten year-old’s avatar and gain xp, but why bother? Perhaps if I had more Myspace friends playing it, we could make a flashmob in the 50’s diner, but then what? Fifteen turns at the wheel left me cold. If you like buying clothes and furniture for yet another avatar in your army, go right on ahead. (I bet the Facebook version is even nicer?)

Myspace

Zynga obviously showers most of its attention on its Facebook franchises. Myspace doesn’t get short shrift, but has missed out on most of this year’s events. I suspect users on Tumblr and the iPhone can relate similar stories. Very likely, Facebook’s fan advertising prominence (status updates) created the difference. Sure, Myspace has announcements that perform similarly; but, this is a liminal feature. It is a small panel on the left side of the homepage and only to friends. Barring self-censors, Facebook shows updates center stage. Further, Myspace’s messaging system is individual oriented. Gifting on Facebook uses a CC system, so I can easily send sweet meat to twenty people at once. Myspace lets me queue the recipients, but requires I reaffirm the message twenty sinning times. They are less obvious on the latter because Myspace doesn’t offer a filter for just friends who play that game. I added a few ‘friends’ for both Mafia and Vampire Wars, so it’s annoying to click another ‘yes, really send a gift’ prompt, only to receive another informing me that soandso blocked messages from this app.

Zynga does offer some incentives to stave complaints from the limited attention, but these are not compelling enough to encourage me to log in. I tried these games on Myspace because I felt like I was running through Mafia Wars too quickly. Plus, it seemed like a chance to start over better, with full understanding of its incentive structure and the strategy I wanted to pursue. Unfortunately, these clickstorms have the replayability of a one day dvd.

Dragon Wars

That is true of all of them but Dragon Wars had pretenses that ‘should’ have elevated it. The frame work is a resprite of the other Wars’ interface. But, some quests distinguish themselves by actual rendered play. You control a (quake level) avatar that fights enemies hiding in the corners of the room. Unfortunately, the room is always the same. Buying weapons doesn’t improve performance. Levelling up skills doesn’t improve performance. Frankly, the only thing that changes is the number of enemies. We can just see a second room to the left that, when clicked, promises it will be released in the future. Strictly speaking, I could be wrong about the 3D subgame’s operation for the later levels. I could only access the first two because Dragon Wars needs more players. Of the sixteen quests I can see, only five don’t have a friend requirement. Sure, they are modest, the highest only required five friends. At this point though, I am not going to ‘make more friends’ just to unlock some pretty thumbnail sized pictures. Nevertheless, a review I read beforehand warned of no progression in the rendered section as well. Not worth it.

Farmville

I have kvetched enough about the clickstorm quality to describe its exemplar edition. Your avatar scurries about a diagonally oriented grid of your arrangement plowing, planting, and harvesting. My farm – deepened three times with a bare two tile widths each time – measures 12 x 12 because I utilize the most efficient grid anchored to the bottom corner. As that leaves a wasted gutter around the upper two corners, I have plenty of space for all the fauna accrued. If I laid a single crop across the whole grid (insanity), that would be three bouts of 144 clicks. Then my animals or trees mature on various schedules and require two bouts of clicks. One opens the menu to move, sell, rotate, or harvest which is the second click. Perhaps you may visit your ‘neighbor’s farms and fertilize five of their crops or plowed fields for more xp. (That is a misrepresentation, but close enough.) That is the whole game. There are achievement embellishments, but those come pretty easily if you just reconcile yourself with repetitive stress syndrome of clicking ninety quintillion times. I have, obviously, tired of the game. I can’t say I have stopped, because I want to test one last feature: mastery.

Mastery is the third most important sliding bar to fill that sources promise me will eventually feed into experience. Planting and plowing cost money but reap experience. Harvesting earns the profit and mastery. Supposedly, when I have harvested through three tiers of mastery, the mastery will become experience for harvesting. I have no clue why I still log on for that subzero gruel (mainly to see if it is true). Unfortunately, the mastery curve is so steep, it works against the leveling – which could be the goal of a nut busting company, but they could just be wildly incompetent.

Crops, flowers and foodstuffs alike, mature at one of ten rates: 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, & 16 hours or 1, 2, 3, & 4 days. At each level a new crop unlocks, so after roughly ten levels, you may receive a crop with a reproduced maturation date, but a slightly higher profit margin. If mastery was at all fair, I would be two tiers into, say, strawberries (4 hours) when blueberries unlock. That way, I must decide whether money or future experience is more important. The highest mastered crop – rice – is just short of the third tier. It became available at level seven. I am level twenty-nine. The ridiculous disparity is not from crop rotation. Only four our other crops have the next most mastery: just over one tier. If this incentive is taken seriously, I can play the game with the first few crops exclusively (not really, those are multidayers which are for dummies). That is rather ass-backward since the goal of accruing levels – by earning mastery xp – is to get different crops that should be significantly better. I don’t think I have ever encountered a game that set its players the conundrum of ignoring the upgrades unlocked or leveling ineffectively.

Of course, there is a faction that epitomizes the ‘casual gamer’ demographic. Appearantly, some of the youville gamers see all this farming as a minigame to unlock simfarm furniture. They don’t play the game as much as arrange their clutter into pretty designs. I’m not just referring to players who order hundreds of trees to simulate Central Park. I mean people who order hundreds of blue hay bales to simulate a river. Farming is a pain in the a-scaphoid, but arranging a simulated skyline blows my mind. On Mafia Wars, I can understand paying Zynga for skill points to buy energy and be able to do more missions, as those are the ‘fun’ part of the game. Spending money to buy lawn ornaments that I spend ten minutes lassoing into the right niche of my hay bale Christmas tree speaks of wasted talent. (Even if it goes to crooks, spiriting away fools’ money always helps the economy at large.) If you have the ‘ocd’ to meticulously clear away droopy flowers and replace them with new ones, I have some dusting for you to do. (The flower setting prompt warned that flowers only last 14 days. I thought, cool: I set them out, earn my achievement button and then they disappear in two weeks. No. They become droopy but never die, so I had to click all forty sinning pots twice to delete them.)

While I’m not on the subject, forget about that profit margin, it is only better by a tenth of a gold piece per hour. If you want to delve in despite my warnings, I highly recommend reading through that blog’s advice. The author wrangled a good table for seed profit per hour and experience per hour but not much else. His table for trees is a waste of time to study. He gave the harvest time and reward, but trees – unlike crops – offer a fraction of the price paid for the tree at each harvest. The correct focus is time until the tree is profitable. Obviously, any gifted tree is immediately profitable. Here follows my table of breakeven dates for purchasable trees:

ornamt	20 days
cherry	25 days
apples	34.8 days
oranges	42.5 days
plums	35 days
peaches	42.5 days
lemons	34.8 days
limes	50 days

With the exception of the Ornament tree, a limited Christmas offer, the more expensive and longer duration trees have a much slower profit margin. This stands as more evidence that zynga has a solid art department and their daycared children are in charge of deciding the difficulty curve.

Animals compound still slower profit times with double the wasted space. I didn’t bother to make a table because we can only buy three for coins. The rest demand legal tender or a perceptive friend. Recently, zynga did some remodeling so the above trees are being phased out as gifts and weird fruit takes the stage (cashews, starfruit). In fact, zynga must have realized their grind lost meaning at level 10 because they concurrently introduced a collectibles aspect. Various knick-knacks are paired with certain actions; so only shears are gifted, only a rusty faucet comes from plowing, and only a hoe comes from planting (or whatever). I paid little attention because in the time since I kvetched about the droopy flowers, I mastered rice. It indeed returns experience to harvest them and I do not care.

Perhaps you think, “Nicholas, you complain this whole time, but you are still playing, right?” No. I am sinning done with this one-trick pony. I have not accepted nor given gifts in three weeks, and that was out of weakness. I have not planted anything since early January. Fool that I am, I returned to harvest trees (because they involve fewer clicks) and broke the habit. I steadfastly do not recommend Farmville. I played it, essentially to write this post. I played it because I hoped that it would get better somehow. No, the game is just click ninety times to decide when you have to click ninety times to remove the pretty flowers, earn achievements and collections by grinding even harder. If you tire of that click one thousand times to make a picture from giant, hay pixels. Take hammer, apply directly to forehead.

If you ignore my suggestion, at least block off your avatar with four hay bales. It wastes a tremendous amount of time poorly pathfinding. It is so bad that zynga gifted everyone a ‘biscuit’ that sped the avatar up for a while. I imagine they offer more for cash. If you are one of the ten friends who still play this, don’t send me any gifts any more.

Rather than keep this hidden for several more weeks as I begin to displace lazy vacation weekdays with homework hours, I published this rogues gallery of shitty zynga games. I will publish my thoughts about the two I still play, Mafia and Vampire Wars, forthwith.

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