Inside Social Games

Sim games are increasingly popular these days. In open ended “sandbox” style sim worlds, players are given a set of tools and can do more or less whatever they want within the game parameters, setting their own goals. Ever since the success of games such as The Sims and GTA, there have been more and more sandbox-style games released.

The social space is no exception, with titles like Pet Society, YoVille, and Citypixel. Another game has been rising in the Facebook ranks in the past few months called myFarm by PlaySocial, and you can probably guess where this game is set.

In myFarm, players begin with four plowed and seeded plots of land within a grid of empty grass. The game is very simple from here: You can (a) harvest crops that are grown for money, (b) plow new land for planting, or (c) purchase items to improve your farm. Those are the basics of the game play, but that is all you need, as the real depth is figuring out the best crops to grow and earn the cash you need to make your farm bigger and better.

The game plays very similar to Roller Coaster Tycoon (in its most basic format), where you plop items down in an isometric plane. At the moment, you can purchase trees, new crops, animals, and various buildings, each of which have unique attributes that add to your farm (i.e. if you purchase a woodshed, you can now cut trees and sell lumber). As it stands, however, not all items have something special to contribute, but based on what the developers state in game, they will soon. Thus, a lot of the items are more aesthetic than functional. (Of course, there is nothing wrong with that. Trying to make something others will see look good is half the fun.)

In fact, that is one of the key social elements in the game. If you so desire, you can peruse around the various farms your friends have started, and send each other gifts to help grow your respective lands. On the surface, that might seem minor, but it adds a moderate competitive flare to the game, as there tends to be a strong allure to the prospect of being better than your friends (whether one admits to it or not).

Regardless of whether or not you want to compete against friends for the biggest and best looking farm, the game is still a fun little sandbox to play in. Its very simple game play makes it quite easy for anyone to pick up and start having some fun with it right away. Also, with any luck, the developers for myFarm will soon add in some of the functions for purely aesthetic items soon, which should add some further depth to some already entertaining game play.