Fun with Motion-Twin

Over the last couple days, I’ve really gotten into Motion-Twin‘s games. They’re all web-based, flash-game-styled affairs meant to be quick diversions. You make a few quick choices and then take off until enough time passes for the game to allocate you some new actions. While a painful style for the kid at home for a lot to do, it’s perfect for the working man. 

My two favorites are My Brute and Dino RPG. My Brute is sort’ve like Street Fighter that plays itself. You get your own brute and he or she auto-tussles your friends’ brutes. As he wins and loses fights, your brute levels up and gains random armaments like stilletos, whips and caveman clubs. He can also level up by recruiting pupils to his dojo. This is done multi-level-marketing style as you send a URL to friends to create their own brute. Built-in marketing, but it’s fun this way.

DinoRPG can be a bit tedious, but it keeps me engaged for some reason. You basically buy a pet dinosaur and train it as you click your way across all creation. You get 1 turn every so many hours (though I still haven’t figured out the scheme for making you wait). Their sales model lets you buy coins with which you can buy extra turns and mitigate the patience required to wait 6-9 hours to finish a fedex quest to a town only two moves away. It’s another approach to micropayments and you can pony up through credit card, SMS, or phone.

Motion-Twin’s game that originally got me thinking is MyMiniCity. Basically you create a city that starts out with a population of 1: you. Like MyBrute, the player must recruit her friends to the game by sending out the pages URL. Every unique visitor (IP-wise) adds another person to the city’s population and a picture of the city begins adding roads and houses. I created a town called Cronkberg after the namesake of my grad program. So far, we have 11 people. The game alludes to new stages opening up after hitting certain population requirements. This mystery is part of the appeal. The page also features a simple message board to post thoughts to the other visitors.

If anything, MyMiniCity could serve as an excellent model for a Coming Soon page for a new community news site. I think there are other ideas here as well. I think a good community journalism site would take note of unique visits andrepresent that back to the community in some way. I think a lot of sites just rely on sign-ups to represent unique, invested participants, but I like MyMiniCity’s way of sidestepping the need for a login. MyBrute does this too and I think it is a strength of some of Motion-Twin’s creations. In addition, I could see a site that allows real-life neighborhoods to initiate a digital neighborhood the same way. All you would need is a map, a message area, and some fun stats to create a reward for people coming back.