The iOS platform has not helped the cause here: games priced at 99 cents or even nothing, with in-game devices built to take your hard earned dollars and keep you playing well beyond when reason tells you to stop. Indeed, these games are designed to never stop and to keep you coming back. They follow a specific formula that is unbreakable and quite frankly, it' scary.
My friend introduced me to a game on the iOS called Tiny Tower. I'm on the lookout every so often for games for my iPhone because there just aren't very many that I find appealing. I spend most of my iPhone time on Reddit, and the occasional Angry Birds session. So I do a search for Tiny Tower in the App Store and discover that it costs nothing. This is not a good start. I download the game and start "playing" although you have to use that term loosely. I had no idea what was going on; you play a few rounds in tutorial mode, which is basically you stocking and building a floor, among a few other things. They throw you into the thick of it and I was lost. But, after some investigation and random clicking, things work out and I'm well on my way to building a grand tower.
Then I see it. I see how people get addicted to these casual games. I see the structure they put into place that keeps pulling you back in. You build a floor and decide what type of business should move in (including apartments that can house five "bitizens"). That place takes a while to create - every new floor takes longer and longer (I think it's taking about 15 hours to build one now and I'm at floor 30). That business opens, and requires you to stock product in there. In order to stock the floor, you need somebody to work there. And you need to build residential apartments for those people to live in. So people move in, then you can choose where they work.
Each bitizen has different interests and depending on where you put them, will perform better at their job (which equates to the cost of stocking the floor) and if it's their dream job, you get twice as much stock for the same price. When an item is in stock it starts selling, which is your primary income, which you use to build more floors and in turn, more business. It's a never ending cycle of building and stocking.
The horrible thing is, it takes no time at all. I can open the program and stock all the floors in 20 seconds, start the construction of another floor and be on my way. Place a few employees and we're laughing. Again, the problem is the cycle never stops: I don't believe there is a limit to the size of your tower. At this point in the "game" you can build a floor a day, with as little as five minutes invested. But you invest so much more, because you want to keep floors stocked: you are constantly checking their levels and pressing those buttons.
And it's all about waiting: you wait for floors to be built, stock to be filled and items to sell. You wait for bitizens to move in as you deliver them via elevator to various floors. And here's the rub: if you get impatient, you can use "Tower Bux" to speed everything up. You get Tower Bux slowly by finding people whenever requested, and sometimes your bitizens tip you. But you can use real money to buy Tower Bux in bulk, allowing you to quickly build your tower as you see fit. And that's where the microtransactions come into play and the developers make their money. The app is free but the gameplay is not. Well, being a patient individual I haven't sunk a cent into it, but I could see how I would. I've put a few hours into the game over the past week and it would only be kind for me to give a little. Plus, it helps my tower.
In the end, I'm addicted. I've now been taken into the Farmville cult without actually playing Farmville but one of its clones instead. I don't feel great about it, but let's be honest, I don't feel bad either. It's pretty harmless - so far.
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