Stuck in SimCity BuildIt
My fun but worrying experiment in mobile gaming
I spent long stretches of my childhood hooked on computer games. Like many nerdy millennials, I consider Civilization and Roller Coaster Tycoon just as crucial to my development as Little League and themed lunch boxes. My parents enforced hour-a-day limits on my computer-time. These limits probably ensured that I stayed calibrated enough to the real world (or, at least, kept me clear of utter vegetative slobbery). That said, I’m pretty sure Civilization had something to do with my excitement for History, my eventual college major (teaching me, among other things, that “Industrialization” was a prerequisite for building tanks). Railroad Tycoon taught me as a pre-teen the merits of funding new tracks with Debt vs. Equity (I’m not sure how thankful I should be for the early guidance towards banking).
Despite these early experiences with desktop games (maybe because of them), I’d steered clear of their mobile descendants. Other social, professional and lifestyle pursuits took priority. Messaging and “feed” apps commanded enough of my attention when I was plugged in. That said, I was aware that mobile games had come a long way from Snake and Brick.
I also knew mobile gaming had turned into a serious business. I’d watched in the press as this…
…turned into a $6 billion company. And I was as surprised at anyone to see this…
…airing during the Super Bowl. At the end of 2015, there were an estimated 165 million mobile gamers (the same source estimates total mobile ad spending to be around $30bn in 2015 and to grow to $65bn by 2019, it’s hard to tell what proportion of that is in gaming apps). Game developers themselves spent roughly $630m on TV ads alone in 2015. In any event, the growth in the space has been staggering.
With 1) a childhood of gaming and 2) eagerness to see what the fuss was about from a business perspective as my justification, I decided to download and experience SimCity BuildIt firsthand. Will Wright’s classic series was one of my favorites as a kid and I was curious to see whether a mobile game could take on the complexity and depth of the desktop original, as well as its addictiveness. After an unconscionable number of hours spent over the past month (mercifully, the exact number of hours is not readily available to the user), I’ve tried to salvage some insight.
Gameplay (in a nutshell)
You are the mayor of a city, or rather a plot of land for you to turn into a city. You build Residential properties that pay taxes and that you can develop with goods produced in Industrial and Commercial properties. The more and more developed properties you have, the more population and therefore taxes your city can earn. You earn taxes in real time at a rate proportional to the population x a tax-rate reflective of the happiness of that population (e.g. my city currently earns 15,532 “Simoleons” per 24 hours… pre-tty cool).
You keep people happy by providing basic services (power, water, fire, police, heath-care, etc.) and premium ones (parks, entertainment, beach developments, etc.). These services cost money, so most of the “work” you’re doing as mayor is spent in the cycle of building properties so you can earn money to provide services to support ever more properties. As the city expands, you reach higher “levels”, which make more buildings and resources available and allow you to do things like trade with other cities or compete in various contests (against other BuildIt gamers around the world). I should also get it out of the way now and say that I named my city “Fernandopolis.”
Addictiveness
This game did not take long to get inside my brain. Production of all assets is based on timers of various length. If I want to make a unit of plastic, I have to wait 8 minutes from giving the instruction before I can collect it and use it to develop a property or make a more advanced good (such as a tape measurer). I can choose to either spend those 8 minutes in the game or go about my life knowing in the back of my mind that soon my plastic will be there for the collecting. Either way, BuildIt wins!
The game requires attentiveness (you have to be logging in at regular intervals to make sure your factories are not lying dormant) as well as patience (you can’t just sit there staring at the screen). The more complex items taken so much longer to produce (e.g. “electrical components” take 7 hours), that I have found myself logging into the app before bed to put them into a queue to be ready for when I wake up… in other words, the app has found its way into my routine.
The game is also clever in its incorporation of randomness. Thought bubbles that appear above my city’s buildings will occasionally yield surprise items I can use to build or trade. Tristan Harris and others have done a brilliant job investigating how our smartphones have become slot machines, offering us intermittent variable rewards every time we check them. Through the thought bubbles and in numerous other instances throughout the app, BuildIt presents us, the users, with opportunity for potential rewards of a variable nature (including the in-game ads discussed below), drawing us even further in.
Monetization
Like many mobile games, SimCity BuildIt is free to download. Electronic Arts (the gaming megacorp behind Madden, FIFA and the rest of the Sims franchise) makes money off of in-app purchases and advertisements. In a stroke of genius, no part of the game is blocked off from a non-paying user. There are no special structures you can build or policies you can put in place only by opening your wallet. Theoretically, the full game can be enjoyed free of charge. However, enjoying the games “coolest features” (the biggest buildings, the sexiest landmarks) without paying requires a superhuman amount of patience. I would imagine at my current rate of play, earning the Simoleons to build the most advanced structures or expand to fill the full map would take at least another three months. The alternative is to buy them in-app:
As has been highlighted in the many cases of children who accidentally saddle their parents with multi-thousand Apple bills, the real cash used to buy SimCash comes straight out of one’s App Store account (frictionless… in a disconcerting way). Whether you want to spend money in BuildIt or not boils down to the type of experience you want to have: Do you want access to the “fun” parts of the game without sinking months of your life into getting there? Or do you want the satisfaction of having built your city organically (and economically)?
Even if you follow the latter route (which has been my decision), BuildIt still has ways to monetize you through opt-in Video Ads. You, the user, are occasionally presented with the option to watch a 30-second advertisement (often for another mobile game), which can earn you one of three prizes (varying amounts of SimCash, objects or resources).
These in-app rewards (intermittent and variable) cleverly align the user’s interests with the advertiser’s. I voluntarily have watched dozens of ads for some pretty dubious mobile games and some admittedly promising ones. Just as the user doesn’t have to spend money in the app, she also doesn’t have to watch any ads. However, in either case, she doesn’t get to enjoy the benefits.
Other
The app is visually striking, it’s easy and fun to zoom in and watch the ground-level action on the baseball field or at the deluxe wind plants or the beach. The attention that has gone into depicting each individual car driving prom A to B to C is impressive. It’s pretty striking to think that the graphics on my 4.7" pocket computer screen is laps ahead of what we watched.
The “strategic” elements of the game are not as deep as those I remember the desktop versions having (SimCity 3000, the last one I played, offered a fair amount of nuance w.r.t. fiscal budget, etc.). That said, there’s plenty of room for creativity and thoughtfulness when it comes to layout and specialization (e.g. some will choose to develop their beachfront as opposed to a public transit system). The game is also very clever in making new challenges available at higher levels. Just when the game becomes repetitive, new opportunities appear.
Drawing a line
My experience with BuildIt has been illuminating and fun, but it should probably come to an end. There are too many new things to learn in the world to get sucked too far into the cycle of Sim-property expansion. Even in the simulated world, I think there are deeper and more challenging games to take on (maybe ones that could lead to a career). If you haven’t noticed, I’m treating this post as a kind of exorcism for BuildIt… I will be hanging up my mayor boots upon posting. Without a doubt, I will keep the 296,000 Sim-citizens of Fernandopolis in my thoughts. I also may be looking for a new game in a month’s time, so let me know if you have a good one.
