People have always enjoyed customizing and personalizing everything they touch.  They want things to work how they think things should work.  They want things to be visually appealing.  Some people are so obsessive that they will continuously tweak something over and over until it’s perfect, and then repeat the process again.  Games like Farmville and Petville, just two of many social games, cater to this obsession.

In Farmville, you can choose a number of different crops, decorations and animals to add to your farm.  While some of these items are strategic in progressing through the game, it is interesting to look at what users actually add and where they place each item.  Do they have a nice little patch of land for a cow?  Do they organize all their strawberry crops together, having each type of crop in separate sections?  A user could randomly choose a square on their farm to place an item, or decide that everything should start from the top left and progress down and to the bottom right corner of their farm.

In Petville, there are so many items in the store that you can purchase to decorate each room in the house.  Depending on your taste (and the available cash), it can be the cheap dinner table, or the more expensive dinner table.  Why do users sit for hours tweaking a virtual environment?  Is it because the game is so slow that users don’t have much to do except decorate for the majority of the game time?

Being able to customize the enviornment is very psychological.  If you customize something, there is a personal attachment to it.  What use to be a standard look is now something you have made more appealing.  If you like how the room your pet lives in looks, you’ll stay longer.  And if you see a piece of furniture in the store, but can’t afford it, you’ll work for the extra coins or even hand over real money to buy it.

Customizing the experience allows the user to make a personal connection and want to continue using and customizing it as their taste changes.  If done right, a user may spend many hours moving things around and never get any work done.