A few days ago, Matt convinced me to make an avatar for this online world called Yoville, accessible through Facebook and Myspace. In a rather poor judgment of time commitments, he got me to join up during the last part of a work-related course I am taking. Between writing a paper on human capital theory and wandering around a fake pixel world, I chose the latter.

In Yoville, you create a mini you of delectable cuteness. Then you decorate your apartment. There are set themes, like “girly,” “Shaker,” “Tiki,” “Medieval,” and so on. Some people love their Yoville homes: this kid (?) prefers to live in Yoville because Yovillian residences never get messy.

My favourite rooms are the more creative ones. Some people turn their bedrooms into hot tub dens and invite their (real-life) kids for a soak. Today I visited a hospital-themed one, an Egyptian one, a desert island with a cave, and a labyrinth one with teleporting devices.

Before you can decorate, however, you need to make money. As far as I can figure out there are six ways to make money:

1. Work at the factory every six hours. The base wage is 200 coins.

2. Spam your friends so they join your factory crew to increase your wages. Yoville works like a pyramid scheme. The growth rate is very small.

3. Do 15-minute long consumer surveys for a pittance. I read that these are a scam. Many Yovillians have not received their coins.

4. Play tic tac toe or rock paper scissors with Yovillian strangers for ten coins. The game is real time, so you are playing with real people, probably teenagers, from god knows where. Other Yovillians tell me that there is a 200 coin maximum win allowance per day. The trick is, I have learned, to get ties – both you and your opponent get five coins each. This makes everyone happy. The other trick is to approach Yovillians in the factory for games; that’s why there is always a glut of us waiting there to make money.

5. Perform actions on your friends. You can joke with them, dance with them or kiss them. But you can only do this once a day per friend.

6. Leave messages. I found out that if you leave the first message on a friend’s message board, you get ten coins. Another Yovillian told me that, if you get up to twenty crew members, you can get around twenty coins per friend per day by leaving messages. The trick here is to use the perform action function, not the room’s message board, to send messages. This Yovillian also pointed out that this is what is called a “coin run.” Many coin runners simply leave a message reading “coin run.”

This brings me to a little Yoville joke:

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