Living the Good Life in YoVille

Day One:

To paraphrase the singer, Madonna, I am a virtual girl living in a virtual world in YoVille.

YoVille is an interactive virtual community built by Zynga games, (http://www.zynga.com/).

According to Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, “Zynga is a casual game developer located in San Francisco, California, United States. They develop browser-based games that work both stand-alone and as application widgets on social networking websites such as Facebook and MySpace.

Founded in July 2007 by Mark Pincus, Michael Luxton, Eric Schiermeyer, Justin Waldron, and Steve Schoettler. they received $29 million in venture finance from several firms lead by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers in July 2008, at which time they appointed former Electronic Arts Chief Creative Officer Bing Gordon on to the board. It was at this time that they also bought YoVille, this large virtual world social network game.

According to their website, as of December 2009, they had 60 million daily active users".

I am one of those users, and access the game through Facebook.

In YoVille, you can do almost all the things that you do in the real world, except there is no illness, no death, and no family units. Another exception is that the games give you a place to live, so no one is homeless, and a job to do, so there is no unemployment. Members of the community can communicate with each other, and participate in social activities, through the computer keyboard. One can do things that you have difficulty doing in real life. As a handicapped person in real life, in YoVille, once more I can run and walk.

The concept of the game is to accumulate items. The basics of the game are fairly straightforward…One performs specified missions (tasks) and receives payment in coins, and points. One then uses the virtual payments to buy things to decorate the apartment given you by the game, and to subsequently, buy more property (houses) and clothes. You further receive points for the things that you buy. You also use the coins received to buy food (energy) to meet the requirements of your avatar (your graphic representation of yourself).

Completing your "missions", a main feature of the game, consume a certain amount of energy. After expending energy, it slowly replenishes to the character's maximum amount. This can take minutes to several hours (energy replenishes whether or not you are logged into the game).

Your avatar can engage in additional missions, after you refill your energy. Waiting for your energy to replenish is a significant limiting factor in the games, so it is necessary to buy “food”.

There are fifty levels to the game. My goal is to reach level 50 in only 50 days.
I plan to blog about what I learn.

I invite you to follow me through this world.