“And when they removed from the east, they found a plain in the land of Sennaar, and dwelt in it. And each one said to his neighbour: Come let us make brick, and bake them with fire. And they had brick instead of stones, and slime instead of mortar: And they said: Come, let us make a city and a tower, the top whereof may reach to heaven; and let us make our name famous before we be scattered abroad into all lands.” (Genesis 11:2-4)
“Time is money.” (Proverb)
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The point of Tiny Tower – the latest iOS free-to-play juggernaut (read our review here) – is to build a monument. A monument to what, you ask? Why, to its maker’s monument-building prowess, of course. Just as the stonemasons in the Old Testament yarn about the tower of Babel set out to tickle heaven’s cloudy underbelly, skyscrapers continue to be one of humanity’s great metaphorical kiss-off’s to gravity (and, by extension, to the divine legislator who allegedly wrote that law to begin with). If altitude is God’s way of keeping heaven beyond our reach, we’ll just keep building away. Higher and higher. And higher. Until we have to draw the curtains of Babel’s penthouse apartment to block St. Peter’s gaze as he distractedly mans his gilded security kiosk.
But Tiny Tower isn’t merely an adorable pixel-art sim of mixed-use development and the feats of structural engineering. It’s about the vanity that fuels such ambitions, and the wealth required to make them reality. This is an immutable truth in the Tiny Tower universe: with enough in-game coins in the coffer, you can always add another floor. Go crazy, the game urges. Grow your tower a smidge taller – taller than your friends’ towers, taller than the one you saw some stranger bragging about on the internet, taller than you imagine the game’s own developers at NimbleBit ever dreamed players would be able to approach.
As my own building in Tiny Tower crossed the 40-floor threshold – which, oddly, the game’s zoom-out view depicts as dwarfing a snow-capped mountain range – I felt a growing disconnect with Tiny Tower’s title. I even started referring to my building as ‘my not-so Tiny Tower’. Why call a game that revolves around building comically massive skyscrapers Tiny Tower?
Then one day, as I was restocking my 19th-floor Sushi Bar for the umpteenth time, I had an epiphany. The name Tiny Tower is designed to give you a Napoleon complex. No matter how tall you build, the developers found a way to force you into referring to your masterwork as a ‘tiny tower’. Maybe it’s not tiny according to your iOS Game Center friends list. But it most certainly is, compared to somebody’s tower out there. And it’s that niggling insecurity that prompts us to answer the question, ‘How many floors will it take to make your tower tall enough?’ with the addict’s refrain: ‘Just one more’.
Tiny Tower belongs to a genre I like to call the waiting-game – which includes titles such as FarmVille, Millionaire City and genre parody Cow Clicker. You earn coins to build your edifice taller by stocking – and re-stocking, and re-stocking – your various businesses with the three tiers of whatever product in which they happen to specialise.
My 42nd-floor comedy club sells LOLs, LMAOs and ROFLs, for instance. My 40th-floor tattoo parlor; Butterfly, Demon Skull and Fancy Parrot. Since the Fancy Parrott tattoo earns three coins per unit sold, it takes longer to finish restocking than the Demon Skull, which only sells for two coins apiece. When you’ve closed out of the game, the clock continues to run, which means you need to check back in regularly to keep things humming along. Or if you’re a complete masochist, you can turn on notifications so your iPhone chimes when your museum’s audio guides are ready to be restocked.
If you’d rather not wait, Tiny Tower has you covered. The game has a second currency – Tower Bux – that allows you to bypass such delays. Tower Bux can be amassed in a number of different ways. Each time you pair a resident (or, as the game calls them, ‘bitizen’) of your tower with their dream jobs, you pocket three Tower Bux. You earn a small bit of coinage for manually ferrying visitors in the elevator from the ground level up to the floor of their choosing, occasionally receiving a Tower Buck as a tip. In a sort of Where’s Wally minigame, you periodically receive a chance to go searching for a particular bitizen in your tower, earning a Tower Buck for tapping on the floor in which you find the pixelated bitizen who matches the photo you’ve been given.
But even these methods of earning Tower Bux become yet another waiting exercise, as there’s grind involved in ferrying enough visitors to secure that random tip or waiting for the bitizen-finding minigame to become available. This is where the allure of micro-transactions begins to weigh heavily on the mind. By using real money to purchase Tower Bux, you can make the experience of playing Tiny Tower 100 per cent grind-free. Restock whenever you want, instantly! Upgrade to a faster elevator immediately without having to spend hours scrabbling around for those 75 Tower Bux! It’s the videogame equivalent of Faust’s bargain with the devil. Instead of having to work hard, be patient and save your money, a tower to trump even Trump’s can be yours! For a modest price, if you order now.