Family Village mixes personal genealogy and the Sims in new game coming soon to Facebook

If you've ever wanted to play a game with your great-great-great-great-great grandparents, Family Village, an upcoming city-building game on Facebook, will allow you to do just that. Produced by Funium, Family Village will allow players to actually import their ancestors into a city with gameplay inspired by the Sims.

Your family members will be able to go to work, and interact with each other just like in the real world. As reported by the Salt Lake Tribune, Funium chief executive Jeff Wells says that "the vision of the game is to help people who play it to understand that we are all a part of one great world family."

The game will start players out by building a village, where you can then import your ancestors by creating individual avatars for each family member. Those family members are then allowed to have their own homes, have their own jobs, and buy items based on the timeline in which they lived in the real world. For example, if your great-grandparents are imported into the game, they could be seen driving around the town in a Model T.
As for social mechanics, Family Village will reportedly allowed you to visit other players' villages, and help them build homes or complete other projects together. You'll even be able to exchange real world information and documents about your ancestors, should your friends be interested in learning more about your own family tree. Wells has said that the game accumulates its ancestral information by partnering with various genealogy companies and by using Google.

Wells hopes to have advertising added to the game after its launch this Tuesday, and there will be premium currency available for purchase, such as new clothing or hairstyles for players' avatars. It will be incredibly interesting to see how accurate a game based on the past can ultimately be. With users knowing their own families better than the developer, will these partnering genealogy services be able to accurately represent each player's individual family history? I'll definitely be playing this one, and I'll let you know what I find.

What do you think of Family Village's concept? Would you like to see your ancestors brought to life in a virtual setting on Facebook?