Jan 10 2009
You Play The Game To Learn
Sure it’s a twist on “Herm” Edwards “You play to win the game” but we’re not talking about football here.
The game is Tribal Wars, a browser-based team strategy game about doing battle in medieval times. You start out playing the game to win but soon realize that no one ever wins this game. I don’t recall when I signed up to join. On a scale of 1 to 10 for complexity it’s an 11. It’s not for everyone.
I’m a member of the number one tribe in our “continent”. I just moved up to 4th in the tribe today by nobling one of our enemies villages with a 5 pronged attack followed by 2 more noble runs to complete the task. Overall I’m ranked 70th out of about 40,000 players still in the game. Pretty good for a rookie I guess.
But I’ve had a more rewarding time interacting with the players in the message centre. Three from our tribe—gordo, ivan and fellow Canadian, Señor Stretch Spheres (I’ll explain later) and two “allies”—JW and 109. No one uses their real name and their isn’t much information in most players profile to give you any indication as to who they are. So your message conversations are all you have to go by.
So you probe to find out some things about each other and eventually you gain a trust and start discussing things outside the game which is referred as RL, the real world as opposed to TW, which is Tribal Wars. They’re all really interesting people and I know they think I’m crazy or maybe from a different planet but I enjoy the good natured fun. We use lol and lmao a lot in our messages.
Here’s some of the things we have talked about.
- Who are your favourite philosopher’s of recent times? Wilson Wilson Jr. from Home Improvement was high on the list, along with George Carlin and many others.
- The involvement of U.S. big business in aiding the war effort of Nazi Germany . Two of us even googled the same article at the same time. That got an lol. Not the story itself. That got us upset. You read the story.
- World War II airplanes. Specifically the P-51 Mustang and the German Me109. (Where else would I get the name from) He just appeared today so we’re just getting to know each other. He wants to join our tribe.
- Family values and how they’ve degraded. How it’s important to teach your kids properly.
- The state of the world economy and possible solutions.
- Thinking outside the box.
- Alternatives to war.
- How General Motors makes huge profits from it’s side business in pornography.
Quite a change from the “water cooler” conversations I remember in the workplace where the subject was your child’s latest bowel movement or some stupid comment some overpaid jock just made. They both have one thing in common. Both parties are trying to find an escape from the difficulties they face everyday in the working world. A sort of mini-vacation, in my opinion.
I’ve got all kinds of ideas for future stories and have cut and paste some of our conversations. The problem is gordo and Stretch both want royalties.
Yah right! Don’t everybody go to the Ferrari dealership at the same time.
And Señor Stretch Spheres real name in the game, mrlongballs. I don’t like to get people upset. I’m Canadian, we’re soooo polite.
Well at least some of us lol.
