The reason is to prevent developer abuses. There are fairly stringent rules over prompts and how they can be used: They have to clearly ask the player to share or invite friends, for example. The purpose of a prompt is to get the player to either broadcast to all of their friends, or send a request directly to another friend. Other kinds of prompt include gameplay tutorials, guides, reminders and game crashes. At the start of the game it asks a lot of these sorts of questions, but they tend to trail off into the more routine questions by the time you’ve reached level 5 or so. The following image is from FrontierVillebecause I missed the chance to screen-grab the one that CityVille asked, but the same function is in CityVille: There are also prompts that it asks only at certain points during the game. When a particular task needs friends to complete.When you leave the game open in a browser window for five minutes.When you build a building that needs employees.However because of the way that the game’s activities, timers and open loops work, those events happen very frequently. The game asks these questions mostly in relation to specific events. Would you like to grant a friend’s request for help?.Would you like to send a friend a gift?.Would you like to ask your friends for help?.Would you like to tell your friends what you have done? (as in the image above).Although there may appear to be many variations, there are actually only four types of question that it asks: The actions are in the form of a response to a question. In one ten minute session of CityVille that I played yesterday evening, the game prompted me with a question three times, and that is not unusual.ĬityVille is constructed to routinely prompt users to take an action. PromptsĬityVille asks you to invite friends, share your latest accomplishment, or ask your friends to send help so that you can complete a task.
![cityville game cards cityville game cards](https://cdnfuturartshop-9d53.kxcdn.com/61267-thickbox_default/monopoly-cityville.jpg)
![cityville game cards cityville game cards](https://i.pinimg.com/474x/13/df/77/13df77794513fde15269a84e3bd476cb.jpg)
There are three kinds of social activity in CityVille: prompts, suggestions and visitations. But they also play a key part in building retention in the game. I already touched on publishing as an example of how social features increase visibility, and how they are used for unlocking gates. Now let’s move on to the social features.