In my first blog entry about my virtual world of Cityville I will tackle the subject of identity. In my virtual world I decided to be a white, obese male who was an avid gamer. On February 1st at around 12 PM I was on the virtual world working on my city. The Cityville game is very unique in that you can build your own city up but you can as well help others build their cities up and vice versa. My city was coming along very well and many people seemed to want to be my friend and I believe that this was because they felt that I had nothing better to do with my time so I was a hard core gamer who could help them get bonuses and build their cities up quickly. I remember interacting with a fellow Cityville gamer who was a black female from Australia. I found it very enticing in the interaction with her because she was very polite and very helpful. The way she spoke to me was if we knew each other very well. I did indeed help her with her city and she was very appreciative. Being American on this virtual world was very interesting because it seemed as if several other countries were represented in this world. I was friends with people from Asia and I have no idea what their names were because they were written in their language and I am not equipped to decipher that. In many instances people would initiate contact with me first. Especially after I wrote on the games fan page and gave the game a rave review. I said that I was a avid gamer and played every day and night. People wasted no time to send me a friend request and reap the benefits of my so called virtual world obsession. The interactions in this game were very interesting because people often times give you something to get it back in return. If you don’t send something back within the next few hours they will get very inpatient and send you messages asking you for items. I found myself doing the same as well just to keep my city buzzing and up to par on the game. Some of the task you partake on in the game varies from watering plants to building police stations and post offices. An interesting feature that forces you to interact with other people is that when building structures such as post offices or police stations you need to hire police officers and officials to run these buildings. This makes you send request out to your friends on the game and ask for their services to fill out the positions. I found this a nuisance at times because people would often times be so backlogged with request from others that it takes for ever for you to get your building filled with officials. Eventually they get finished so I can’t complain.
If you were on a virtual world would you send people messages and ask them to send you gifts so you could advance faster?
I think that I would send messages to have people send me things to advance faster on a virtual world. The whole point of being in a virtual world is having the chance to be someone your not, so I don’t believe that I would try to advance as much as I could in these worlds. I don’t really use virtual worlds any more, but I used to use Farmville on Facebook. This was kind of similar, because people on Facebook could find you and send you gifts to make your farm better. If I were really into being on a virtual world it would be good to know as many people as possible and to get as many ‘free’ gifts as possible! Farmville is a place where to get any where on it you have to have people send you stuff. You make money by using the things that people give you, so all and all you have to pretty much do this in order to advance any farther. I wouldn’t want to be one of the people who pretty much harasses people to get stuff though, because that is so annoying.
ReplyDeleteI think it’s interesting that you have to interact with people through the building of post offices and police stations. That is a good idea to me, because having to hire and organize those tasks would give you the opportunity to meet people that you might not meet by just searching through the virtual world. I can also understand why it might be annoying. There are probably millions of people on your virtual world, and I bet you get hundreds of requests a day (unlike the 10 I would get a month on Farmville).