Cityville on Facebook and Why I Now Hate Zynga

Everyone, meet the thing that has been keeping me up into the wee hours of the night, sabotaging productivity and work ethic and over-all wasting the precious hours of my young adult life. It's not drugs (although it would be way cooler if it was).

I'm actually ashamed to say that this evil time-wasting entity is Zynga's CityVille on Facebook, the latest game craze that has hit the FarmVille playing users of the social networking giant. Seriously, before I got lured by its powerful skyscraper-building claws, I often scoff at the  childishness of some of my friends for still playing Facebook games. I kept thinking, don't they have anything else to do?  Virtual crop-planting is so two years ago.

Little did I know that the end of that era is near.

So it turns out, curiosity killed the cat and my Facebook Game Sobriety. One day, when I pathetically had nothing better to do, I saw my Wall filled with free gold coins and invitation of mayoral friendship so I foolishly clicked on the cartoon link.

And the rest was history.

Not only was it fun, but the game is also quite addicting, even to young professionals (at least those who still have free time every night) like me. And yes, that is my way of sharing the utter dorkiness of this so-called obsession to other people.

Being a hybrid of FarmVille and Monopoly, CityVille is a one of a kind time waster that ingenuously utilizes everything good about almost every popular game on the social networking site. It harnesses creativity from the freedom to design your own city, it motivates daily visits by eliciting fear that your crops and ship cargo goods might get spoiled and most cunningly of all, it is overly-dependent on 'neighbors' for level progress. After a few minutes of playing, I got to understand why so many of my friends post requests for energy and other random stuff when in fact, most people view them as very colorful version of Facebook Spam.

Scoring a 1,000 on the Geek-O-Meter or not, I have found that playing the game is a good stress reliever especially after work when all I want to do is to stare at moving pictures and click at stuff. It is the time of the day when I can't even write a single paragraph much less a whole cohesive article or a story even though I know I have to get my writing neurons going. It is a good application for shutting down hyperactive thoughts for a while so that they can rest for a moment, at least until dinner is served. 

So with that defensive rebuttal, whether a childish time black hole, Wall irritant or a stress freeing visual candy, whatever others might say, I am at peace with my inner nerdiness. And I'm keeping my Empire.