Zynga is often criticized for gouging addicted players with high priced in-game purchases, but we can’t knock its sense of humor. The Facebook games company, now bigger than EA, has turned its privacy policy into a game. Dubbed PrivacyVille, the publisher explains in a blog post, it is designed to be a game-like tutorial that rewards players for learning more about the company’s privacy practices and “provides easy access to additional privacy resources.” We’re not sure whether to be horrified or happy.
“PrivacyVille offers something that we believe is a first of its kind–we directly reward players for learning about privacy,” writes zynga. “You don’t need to be connected to Facebook or be registered as a Zynga player to tour PrivacyVille. However, if you are a Zynga player, you will have the option to connect to Zynga’s RewardVille and claim zPoints that can be used to redeem unique virtual items across our top titles as a reward for walking through PrivacyVille.”
Perhaps we’re cynical, but calling PrivacyVille a “game” is a stretch. The tutorial has you click on a bunch of different houses and read a short paragraph of information to fill up a progress bar. Once you’ve clicked on all of the houses, Zynga gives you a five question quiz that is so easy we answered it without reading almost any of the privacy paragraphs; each question has three ridiculous fake answers and one that looks like it could be plausible. Once you complete the questions, you get 200 zPoints that you can use in other Zynga games.
Zynga stresses that the new game is not a substitute for its Privacy Policy, which begs us to wonder why it built the game at all. It’s nice to play a privacy game, but we’d really like to stop having to play legal games and read pages upon pages of legal mumbo jumbo. Now we have to do both. But we suppose even PrivacyVille needs to cover its ass.
