f) attend a virtual event

Ok now that I actually think about it, I’m not totally sure that what I did for this assignment was what you had in mind originally professor… but that’s ok, I still learned something!!!


So, I was looking online at random “virtual events” to attend. Then I saw an advertisement for this multiplayer interactive game called Evony. I see the annoying ads all the time on random sites I go on, so I decided I might as well try it out. Basically you build a medieval city – you build up your town (with houses, resources, etc), you can also build alliances, wage wars and so on – it’s rather like Age of Empires. There is also a chat box underneath with a number of different groups you can choose to chat with – as a beginner you only have access to the beginner group. That was really annoying because so many people use the site that there were too many people trying to talk or find out how to do something that no one actually had any kind of a conversation at all.

After about 20 minutes of playing the game and telling myself I wasn’t wasting my time I learned a valuable lesson – there are a lot of weird creepy people online. Some guy started emailing me through the game, and when I didn’t respond right away he kept asking me why. I lied about where I live and who I am, as it both amused me and made me feel safer. I continued to play the game a while longer however, because to enter a chat that didn’t have 100 people talking about unrelated things, you have to join an alliance with other gamers. So I upgraded my city until I reached that status and then started talking on the chat box. It was very interesting to see how many wars different alliances waged on each other. I purposely joined one called FRIENDLY so that wouldn’t be as much of a problem. However there were still gamers who wanted to wage wars on everyone. The game even gives you awards for talking in an alliance chat or sending a personal email for the first time. It really does encourage you to interact with the other players and create the feeling of a larger, complex world.

Overall I think it’s a fun experience… definitely not an essential one, but it’s something fun to pass the time with. I think it provides a similar appeal to Second Lifers – you do have to spend some time figuring the game out, how to utilize resources and gain as much power as possible, which stops a lot of people from playing past the first 5 minutes – and you create another world where you can be someone totally different. In this game you are forced to be someone different in fact, seeing as very few people these days are in charge of a medieval empire. It’s an interesting way of interacting with other people, and I could see how some would get sucked in to it – I witnessed a number of the chatters in the alliance that had really created a relationship of sorts. Some of the members got annoyed with others, some were clearly leading or trying to lead, others constantly looked for help from certain people, and so on.

Now my problem is that I’ve finally worked myself into the network, but the assignment is over, so I’m torn between wanting to play more and work on my finals… figures.