Zynga, the company that ended all your meaningful social interactions via FarmVille, is about to go public, and that means it's time for the company to step it up a notch in order to lure potential investors.
The number of FarmVille users has dropped to 44 million. This time last year, they had twice as many. Unsatisfied with holding a measly sixth of the population of the United States in their grasp, Zynga has decided that now they will pursue a new game called Allies and Empires, a war strategy game that will allow you to form alliances to fend off attackers bent on pillaging your island nation.
To sum up: Zynga built an empire on a game centered on peaceful agriculture and community cooperation, and now feels that the next logical step is to teach people to use whatever means possible to prepare for ever-present war. We could quip on that, but we'll let a Terry Pratchett quote handle it for us.
"This explains everything you need to know about human nature... or at least the bits of it that are still smouldering."-from Hogfather
All jesting aside, Art Attack is always on the look out for a way to escape the prose mines, so we'd like to offer up Zynga some more suggestions for games to feed the public's hunger for new product.
GodVille
People set up religions for all kinds of reasons. They do it because God told them to, to get laid, to control a populace, to get laid, to attain personal salvation, and sometimes to get laid. The average American just doesn't have time to sit in the desert and convince people they have the one true answer. Well, they do have the time but they won't do it.
That's where GodVille comes in. Users are encouraged to build churches, and have the ability to institute whatever wacky orthodoxy they wish. No umbrellas on Tuesdays? Let's do it. All cows are named Davey McSuavel? Why the hell not?
You'd be tasked with expanding your religion through conversion, maybe in a battle system with other players similar to Pokemon. Pastafarianism, I choose you. If coming up with your own religion sounds like too much work, you could always just join one of the already established ones and try to expand it. Absolutely nothing could possibly go wrong with that.
