Papa Smurf says to get back to work

I've never really embraced iPhone gaming. Sure, like everyone else, I play Angry Birds and Words With Friends. And I've gone through brief bouts of fascination with games like Flight Control, Skee-Ball and Canabalt. (I eventually had to stop playing that last one just because I found it was seriously bumming me out. Games needs to have endings. Or in the very least, achievable goals. Simply jumping from rooftop to rooftop to escape an alien invasion until you eventually plummet to your death over and over, is a profoundly depressing experience.) But in general, they don't do much for me.

So I'm a little surprised by how much I've become completely obsessed with, of all things, Smurf Village.

In the game, Gargamel has chased the Smurfs out of their happy little village, forcing them to relocate elsewhere in the forest and start all over again. You build Smurf houses, grow crops, complete mini-games like helping Papa Smurf make potions, and so on. As you progress, you get gold to spend on things to customize your village, and in one of the coolest features, you can look at other people's villages to see what they're doing.

Yeah, yeah, I know. It's not exactly Gears of War. But seriously, it's fun.

One of the more interesting aspects of the game is that you're forced to be patient, as it takes a certain amount of real-world time to complete various tasks. It takes five minutes to grow a bunch of raspberries in your Smurf garden, but 18 hours to grow pumpkins. Food is then exchanged for gold and experience points. Houses take two hours to build, but for some reason, it takes five days for the little bastards to build a small bridge. I'm told this is a lot like Farmville, but I think all Facebook games are stupid, so I'll have to take people's word for it.

(One guy thought of a clever way to game the system, but Capcom caught on and put a stop to it.)

You can also spend real money through your iTunes account to buy Smurfberries, which can then be spent on more elaborate structures. I haven't given into the temptation to do this. Yet.

Which brings us to the dark side of Smurf culture.

While Papa Smurf leisurely strolls about, supervising and assigning you tasks (i.e., build some paths, send a Smurf out into the woods to get rid of some wolves, etc.) and Smurfs like Brainy and Jokey just wander around aimlessly, all the nameless, personality-less Smurfs are left to work the fields.

It didn't take long to realize why this made me vaguely uncomfortable. The Smurf village is basically operated on a slave economy.

There's no upside to giving your slaves...er, Smurfs...breaks, either. It's to your advantage to have them working 24/7. Like I said, crops mean money and experience points. So once you've collected one harvest, you start growing another one right away. I usually try and time it so that they get to work on some tomatoes, which take eight hours to grow, right before I go to bed.

Sometimes, Papa Smurf has to remind his Smurfs of their place on the socioeconomic totem pole.

Yes...toil, my little Smurfs, so that the Prince can have his cucumbers!

For my part, I'm embracing this dystopian existence favored by Papa Smurf. You're given three sections of land on which to build your village, each one separated by a river. When my village is eventually completed, the left section will be exquisitely landscaped, containing only two homes: Papa Smurf's and Smurfette's. (In case you're wondering, yes, I'll be imagining they're fucking.) The right section will hold a fenced-in residential community of nicer mushroom homes, and high-end commercial space occupied by establishments such as Greedy Smurf's bakery and Painter Smurf's studio.

The middle section?

It's squalor by design. At one point, they had decorations like flowers and Christmas trees, but I took those away because if the Smurfs see nice things, that might give them hope, and that might spark rebellion.

Anyway, it's a great game. The only thing I would change is that it'd be nice to have the option of attacking other player's villages. Forcing my Smurfs into slavery in order to maintain the pampered lifestyles of their leaders is nice, but being able to conscript them into an army? That would be positively Smurfy.