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Come to Tiny Tower! The sun shines bright, and the skyscrapers stretch as far as the eye can see. Jobs are aplenty, and land is cheap. Every working Bitizen can have their own sparsely-furnished apartment, and inside every domicile, an obedient servant of the state (you). You can have all this, and who knows…you could land your dream job or at least dream about it. Life is good in Tiny Tower…it’s a veritable socialist paradise.
The Bitizens of Tiny Tower exist to serve you, their benevolent (or malevolent, depending on your mood) dictatorial overlord. You assign their jobs based on the needs of the community and their own desires. A happy worker (in their “Dream Job”) is more productive, but the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. The survival of the tower comes before personal whims and desires.
As both landlord and sole employer of your mini community, you pay your Bitizens just enough for them to give it back to you in rent. Money, for all intents and purposes, doesn’t exist. None of your loyal subjects patronize your sprawling businesses. The fruits of their labors revert back to the state (you) for the purpose of endless vertical expansion.
Upward mobility is heresy in Tiny Tower. Your Bitizens faithfully work at their tasks with no thought of material reward except the enrichment of their Big Brother. Nobody gets promoted, and no one complains. If they don’t pay rent (or they don’t have the necessary skills), you can evict them. From each according to his abilities; to each according to his needs. But really, what else would they spend their money on? You make every decision, from the Bitizens’ attire, to their jobs, and even the paint on the walls.
You manage the centrally planned economy; when a business depletes its stock of LOLs or Tacos, you click on an icon, and watch the paint dry as a delivery truck driven by a pair of donkeys from Madagascar slowly brings replacements.
Your tenants and employees are all progressive, well-to-do hipsters. You only need suffer the proletariat when construction workers arrive to build the newest addition to your tower. If you can’t bear the workers’s blue-collar stench, you can rectify the situation with a bribe. The proles can be “hurried” with a “donation” to the bureau of economic development. Instant gratification!
The Bitizens work tirelessly and faithfully around the clock — even when you’re not there to supervise. When you return (from a high-level meeting with the Politburo, no doubt), they eagerly surrender all accumulated earnings. After all, Tiny Tower allows no private property. Your subjects rely on you, their wise overlord, to make decisions governing their daily lives…or failing that, to play elevator attendant to earn tips.
You’re the landlord, building manager, and the tower’s sole employer. If a VIP arrives, you become a concierge service. The materialist patrons of your business enterprises subscribe to the tenants of capitalism; luckily, they’re just visitors.
Tiny Tower is an intricate microcosm of a worker’s paradise…or it’s just a highly addictive iOS game with no political subtext. Either one.