So, if you’re not familiar with MyMiniCity, you might want to check it out. I think it’s a rather clever idea.

The basic “play” of MyMiniCity goes as follows.

• Create a city. This gives you a subdomain, like http://cobweb.myminicity.com (Full disclosure: It’s a city I started). Each city page has a neat little Flash map of the city in isometric perspective, procedurally generated based on the city’s stats.
• Use the various URLs to improve aspects of your city. Going to the “bare” URL will increase its population. Once your population passes certain milestones, you can improve different aspects. For example, when you reach 50 inhabitants you can improve industry, using a URL like this: http://cobweb.myminicity.com/ind
• The first interesting thing is that the “improvements” need to come in a certain order. As your city’s population grows, it requires industry, security, etc.. If you don’t have enough industry, your unemployment rate will be high, and people will eventually leave your city to look for jobs elsewhere (decreasing population). If there’s low security, there’s high crime, and businesses leave. I don’t know all the relationships yet, but the point is that if you blindly go to the “base” URL over and over to increase population, you’ll eventually hit a point where it just doesn’t work. (Of course, there are city statistics that will tell you how far off you are from your targets, warning you when you’re a few points away from danger.)
• The other really interesting thing is that anyone can visit these URLs, but you they only have an effect if they’re the first person to visit that city from that IP address on that day. (Given that Motion-Twin is in France, the day “resets” at around 6PM eastern US time.)

This website visiting “mechanic” is unique as far as I know. (Well, there’s Graaaagh and its derivatives, but the “one IP every 24 hours” is a wrinkle I haven’t seen elsewhere.) This has a few interesting consequences.

• First, you want to recruit people to visit your city’s link.
• That is, visit it every day.
• However, you don’t want people blindly visiting the population link. You have to organize them somehow so that they go to industry, or security, or environment…whatever your city most needs at that particular time. And this need could possibly change with every visit by anyone.
• The final really interesting thing about MyMiniCity is that there are no passwords or other way to have “ownership” of a city. When you visit “your” city with one of the improvement URLs, you’re just like any random person on the internet clicking on a city link.

Now this surprised me when I first realized it. “Why can’t I log in and do special owner-only actions?” The truth is that there are no owner-only actions. The only actions available in the game are available to anyone. This is basically accomplished by removing choice from the game; either you get your city to develop well, or you don’t. Sometimes there are times when you’d say “Oh, I shouldn’t have done that, I should have done something else instead”. However, there are no times when you say “Hey, I wanted to do something else because I wanted to try out a different alternative!”. There are really no other alternatives, just forward or not-forward.

(Actually, I have heard that it’s possible to somehow “attack” someone’s city and drive their population down, but I don’t know how that works. I suspect it only works on really huge cities, anyway.)

So, because there are no alternatives, there are no real choices…So it doesn’t matter if everyone else can do the same set of things to your city. I say “no real choices”, but what I mean is that all the choices are more like skill tests; you can choose among different options, but they are definitely “right” or “wrong”, there are no valid alternate strategies.

Some of you may be thinking “Well, I’d just organize a website with a bunch of friends recruiting people to click on these links”. And that’s just what people have done. I found a couple sites, just out of curiosity, but I didn’t feel like exploring them very much (Google will show you, I’m sure). One important aspect of this
“link recruiting” is that you need a way to generate the appropriate link for people to visit. You might think that this is a confusing matter of caching the results shown on the page.

However, Motion-Twin has provided a feature to facilitate this very calculation and other bits of bricolage. If you append “xml” to your city URL, like this:

http://cobweb.myminicity.com/xml

…you will see an XML page describing your city’s stats. It’s important to note that visiting this page has no effect on the city, not changing the stats nor using up the daily visit. It’s simply a bit of information that you can use to learn about a city. (Besides the “link calculation” facility, I can imagine someone writing, say, a Facebook app that says “I’ve got a city with these stats! Click on it to do stuff!”.)

So, I’ve written my own PHP script to perform this calculation.

http://www.chaoseed.com/miniaut2.php

It should be easy to use. As the “documentation” says, you can give it a parameter to make a URL you can bookmark and visit every day:

http://www.chaoseed.com/miniaut2.php?queryname=cobweb

If you’re interested in learning how I did it, I’ve got the source of the script here.

http://www.chaoseed.com/miniaut2.txt

You can consider this “open source”, I don’t really care what happens to the code. It’s so simple, and lots of other people have written stuff like this already…If you can find a way to sell it for money, more power to you. I’m just posting it here because I’m proud of learning how PHP works, the script has got some nice heredocs and bracket syntax in quoted strings.

And one other thing about this script…I’ve segregated all the MyMiniCity-specific data into one area. It would be easy to write a script that took a different set of data but did similar calculations. “garrison” instead of “security”, perhaps. You could almost make it into a library. Of course, that would require another web-based game similar to MyMiniCity…

Edit June 15th: It turns out that the “original” version of MyMiniCity is Miniville. It seems to be exactly the same thing, only in French and with a slightly different ranking system. (You site your city within a province of France, rather than a country in the world.)