After a little bit of playing FrontierVille, I found it to be not very inspiring. The gameplay was not at all deep, revolving around only a lot of clicking. I could see a bit of the appeal of playing a game that most of your friends were involved in as a social connection, but I did not like most of the game mechanics. One bothersome mechanic is that the game gives you a limited number of actions per time. I tend to enjoy budgeting a fairly large window of time to play games, not spreading my playtime out throughout the day. I also dislike the "spam your friends" rewards in the game.
I do know a number of people who play and really enjoy PetVille and FarmVille, but don't see myself ever playing these games.
In the articles we read, we learned that Zynga profits from the approximately 3% of players who buy virtual goods, things that allow them to get around the annoyances of the limited number of actions and make their town better than their friend's (or just catch up if the player is behind). It is interesting that nearly everyone is playing the game for free, and all profits are based on impatience and jealousy. It reminds me more than a little of the story of Connor Prikkel in For The Win, where he notices that people value exotic goods more than easy to get things, even if they function no differently. And Zynga makes people pay real money for these exotic items!
After your brief playing of FrontierVille, do you plan to play it more? Why or why not?
I do want to say that while it is addictive, those messages were flooding my wall and I hated really much, I discontinued from playing farmville. I am sure many others share same sentiment as well..
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