Fanium is a new game development company located in Draper, UT and lead by founder Jeff Wells. What is most unique about this game is not its gaming style, not its graphics, nor even the game’s platform, which in this case is on the web at the social media website Facebook. What makes this game stand out is its theme, or purpose. Players in this game conduct family history. Here is how Fanium describes their new game:
“In Family Village, you’ll build a thriving village populated with avatars representing your family and ancestors. You’ll build businesses, assign jobs, and collect profits to earn money for your village to grow. You’ll build homes, buy cars, pets, and decorations from the time in which your ancestors lived, all while learning about your heritage.
As your village grows, Funium will be working behind the scenes to find family connections and interesting documents such as newspaper articles, yearbook photos, census records, marriage records, maps and many other interesting items that will allow you to know much more about your family. You will be able to save these documents in your library and share them with other friends and family as you wish.
As you play the game you may discover previously unknown family members from past generations or living relatives that might live down the street or in some distant land. This is just the beginning. We have many more features or angles we will reveal as the game grows with millions of happy people discovering family members and unique historical documents.”
To learn more about Family Village, visit the company’s dedicated game websites at http://familyvillagegame.com. You can also read this article from the Standard-Examiner:
Genealogy turns to Facebook
By JaNae Francis, Standard-Examiner staff
LEHI — A new Facebook game is designed to mimic Farmville, but instead of farming, participants will gather information about their families as they go.
The Family Village game debuted a couple of weeks ago without advertising — and the creator is boasting a following of 14,000 people who have installed the game.
“I’m surprised. It’s growing without any promotion so far,” said Jeff Wells, of Lehi. “Once we start to promote it, we expect it to grow phenomenally.”
Wells said his goal is to reach 2 million people playing the online game.
He developed the game because he wanted to share his enthusiasm for genealogy with others, and he saw a niche with 300 million people playing social games every month. Currently, Facebook has 850 million members around the world, he said.
Click here to read the full article. If you want to play, you can do so for free, if your on Facebook.
HUH??
This is *NOT* a new game- it has been there for a year or more!
It has also gotten worse with each ‘update’.
An example of a historical document…
My mom was born in Nashville, Tennessee.. and they try and give me a GERMAN newspaper because it is dated on her birthday!
Worthless!
I tried playing this game for several weeks but it is filled with “bugs” that I became tried of it. What it does is simply shows what took place on the day you or your ancestors were born (a time-line).
This game is no longer available anywhere