Cityville Update

J.P. Mangalindan has written an interesting article about Zynga's Cityville phenomenon by interviewing Yick Kai Chan, the architect hired to help design the game's buildings. As you'd imagine, this fellow faces some bewildering constraints when trying simulate a complex and dynamic urban environment on a computer screen:

"It's about exaggerating the important real-world elements, blowing up the gestalt of the building, like a caricature artist would do when drawing people."

With an estimated 95 million monthly active users (a drop from a recent high of around 100 million) Cityville continues to draw attention for its clever intersection of fauxcale and easy altruism.

Read the entire article: Meet CityVille's Frank Gehry

BTW, here's the current iteration of my city. It's change a lot since I first wrote about this game.