Just What Am I Playing? December 2010.

This will be an on-going, monthly article detailing games I've started playing and found strangely addictive. These games will admittedly be free browser-based games most of the time. Anyway, for the past few weeks, I've been playing a Facebook game titled City of Wonder. It is a civilization-building game of sorts, but it's very watered down, and it relies a lot on timers and Facebook invites.

City of Wonder does have a sense of gameplay hidden within its Facebook satire. If you look past the invites, you'll see a very friendly community of players. Almost everyone is willing to share items and help others out, because they benefit from helping others. You are even encouraged to send gifts to other people in order to have a good chance of them returning the favor.

The true fun is in designing the layout of your city. You can rearrange buildings and roads as you see fit. This isn't SimCity, so realism isn't the focus. I find it fun to just see if I can make a nice layout with the items I've unlocked, however, once you get to about level 20, this becomes more of a chore. Money gets harder to get and items get harder to unlock over time. Also, a lot of the items require real money (or what they call gold), so a lot of the buildings are off limits to most people.

Ironically, I find City of Wonder somewhat fun. It's hard to say why. Maybe I just enjoy the scenery. Perhaps I simply enjoy the social features. My best guess is that I'm simply addicted to it. This game constantly changes, so that may play a part in my addiction.