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[Stars]

Gaming on teh Interwebs
David English

I’ve always thought I was pretty good at computer games. Heck, I’ve been playing them since I was two years old, so I ought to be by now. I seldom play them over the internet, however. Why? Various reasons, really. Many people have warned me about certain games with particularly unpleasant online communities: the kind of people who are rude toward newbies and rude to each other for that matter. The worst, I think, are the games you have to pay a monthly fee in order to play. I don’t want to pay to use a game I already bought!

On the other hand, what can you do when close friends ask you to join them for a game that’s free to play? Such was the case when the staff of Tapir Productions (we call it TaPro for short in the forums) decided to get as many members as they could to play games communally online. Apparently the first game we’re all going to do is Age of Kings, an old medieval strategy game that I still happen to have a copy of. Fortunately for me, it looks as though I’ll be able to carry on with my aversion to online gaming, as I’m currently busy with a summer class and don’t have the thing installed yet anyway.
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So much for what I said yesterday… After a day of incessant pestering though my instant messenger, Sire Frank of Grimes (the head administrator at TaPro, a.k.a. Grimey) and the others convinced me to install Age of Kings and join their online battles. Since no one else appeared to be available to play at the time, Grimey offered to play me one-on-one. I hadn’t played in years, so I figured it would be a good refresher.

Once our match began, I sent my little villagers out to look for the resources I would need to build up an army while I re-familiarized myself with the user interface. Feeling comfortable with the controls, I also sent a scout across the map to explore and locate Grimey’s headquarters.

It didn’t take long to find a group of enemy villagers gathering lumber, so I thought I’d have a little fun and attack them with my scout. He managed to take one of them out easily enough, but I was forced to give a retreat order when a gaggle of peasants nearly did him in. Seconds later, I got a message from Grimey saying, “That was my favorite villager,” accompanied by a sad face. I knew it wouldn’t set him back very much, but I was still feeling good about myself for disrupting his economy even a little.

After making some technological advancements and gathering sufficient resources, I began training my military. Just in time, too, for no sooner was my last man-at-arms completed than a small force of mounted knights appeared to attack my city! Thankfully, I was able to fend the blighters off, which made me feel even better about my chances for the battle with Grimey.

My joy was not meant to last. Just when I finished building a stone wall across the entrance to my territory, an immense force of enemy knights appeared. If that weren’t bad enough, a line of catapults was wheeled in behind them. The powerful siege engines made short work of my inadequate fence. I watched in dismay as Grimey’s cavalry charged through my poorly defended town, razing buildings and massacring my townspeople. I had no choice but to resign from the fight.

Once we were back in the game lobby, I insisted that my quick loss was due to the fact that I hadn’t played the game in years. Since there was still no one else around from TaPro who was able to play, Grimey agreed to a rematch. I was determined to reclaim my honor (since I’m a nerd like that).

Sadly, it felt like the second battle was decided even faster than our first, the end result being the same. I had tried to adjust my military strategy by training masses of spearmen (who are more effective against Grimey’s knights than the swordsmen I had used before) but to no avail. It was then that Grimey told me that he had not lost a single battle so far. I thought I might be too intimidated to continue playing after hearing that, but as if on cue, I heard the jingle that plays on my computer when one of my friends comes online. It was Razz, a member of TaPro who only appears on rare occasion. With him as my new ally, Grimey arranged a three-player match for us.

Though I find it more annoying than helpful, Grimey tends to place our campaigns on very large maps, supposedly to make things easier for those he fights against. The biggest downside to this is that allies have a more difficult time coming to each other’s aide when someone’s village is under attack.

After scurrying to build up my army and defenses, we received a message from Grimey declaring, “So who wants to die first? Muahaha!” It was getting late, and I had to be in class the next morning, so I volunteered. I didn’t plan to make it easy for him to wipe me out, but nothing I did seemed to make much difference. Grimey’s knights fell upon me like water on a fire.

In desperation, I had one of my builders flee the scene of the battle and head towards Razz’s encampment. About halfway there, I had my builder stop to gather the few resources I lacked to build a replacement for my town hall so that I could start over and survive a little longer. My last desperate act was not meant to be, however. After Grimey had decimated what he thought was my entire populace, he was puzzled by the fact that the game had not declared my defeat as it should have. Moments later, the game informed me, “Spies have infiltrated your populace.” I knew then that the end was coming; the Spies technology reveals the position of every enemy building and unit on the map, including those that are too far away to be seen by your army. It didn’t take Grimey’s horsemen long to track down my final civilian after her position had been revealed.

Upon being defeated, the entire map was revealed to me – though my chat function was disabled – so that I could watch the remainder of the war. Apparently, Razz is about as skilled as I am, and it only took Grimey a few more minutes to win while attacking him from multiple fronts.

Back in the game lobby, I told Grimey that I had to leave but that I would also practice more before challenging him again. Grimey stayed online a while longer since he’s further west, and it wasn’t as late in the day for him. Meanwhile, I came here to write this all down, and now that I think about it, I should probably go get some sleep before this post becomes too long.
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We didn’t play quite so many games today, so I should be able to finish this in time to get my homework done before bed. Before I even signed on this afternoon, I made good on my promise to train and set up a battle against an AI opponent. When I played Age of Kings years ago – back when it was still new – I seldom played on any difficulty level higher than Easy. To prepare myself a little more thoroughly, I changed my opponent’s skill level to Moderate; I thought it would help even if it wasn’t a huge change.

But I was wrong; Moderate proved to be much more difficult than Easy. Out of my three practice matches, I didn’t win a single one. Instead of improving, it felt like I was getting worse at the game. Disheartened, I switched off my computer and left for my part-time job.

While at work, I couldn’t help but try to think up new strategies to use against Grimey. It was a slow afternoon with few customers, so there wasn’t much to distract me from this. Thankfully, my shift only lasted a few hours today, so I hurried home and went online to see if anyone was ready to play.

Most of the others had begun and already completed their own matches while I was away, and most of the TaPro people said they had had enough of the game for the day. However, I was glad to find that BottomGuy (often called BG for short) had also just signed on and was looking for someone to play with. He hasn’t been very long since he joined the TaPro forums, but I already knew him from other websites, and we chat often. I spotted Grimey again as well, and we agreed to another three-player game with BG on a team with me.

Predictably enough, we lost the battle to Grimey. I was attacked first yet again, and when I called out for “Help!” I discovered that BottomGuy had not actually started training his army yet. With no assistance on the way, my town fell quickly. I tried the same gambit I had used in the last game yesterday and told three of my villagers to flee. Surprisingly, they all made it to BG’s territory and were able to rebuild some semblance of a town. Still, the miniscule military force I managed to pull together was nowhere near enough to help BG defend his border, and we both fell from power simultaneously.

After this game, I heard Grimey say that he was getting bored of winning all the time and was considering having TaPro move on to something new. Now that I was getting into the spirit of the game, I didn’t want to just quit playing. In response, I asked around and convinced a couple more people to join forces with us to give Grimey a fight worth fighting. Unfortunately, it was too late for our battle to take place today, so we all agreed to meet online again tomorrow.
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Today was the day of reckoning. I rushed home from work as fast as I could to find the others waiting for me. For our epic battle, we had Sire Frank of Grimes’ forces facing off against the combined powers of BottomGuy, OtherNick (a “real life” friend of Grimey), Amethyst (I’m told that he has actually beaten Grimey twice, though he claims that it was due to blind luck both times), and myself.

When the match began, the four of us sent out our scouts to locate Grimey’s camp. As it turned out, I was the farthest away from him, so I was able to build up my defenses much more thoroughly than in my previous sessions. I prefer to play a slow but sturdy “Turtle” strategy whenever I have the luxury, so this was a nice change for me.

OtherNick ended up as my neighbor and was located second farthest from the enemy. He and I opted to use our positions to become an economic support for Amethyst and BottomGuy on the front lines. Grimey somehow managed to sneak small groups of units through the forest and attack our trade routes, but they were easily fought off.

After passively building up my military might for a time, I heard Amethyst send out a distress call. My city was the closest to his, so I sent a portion of my troops to help defend his gates. When they arrived, I found that his walls had nearly been breached already. I commanded my infantry to destroy Grimey’s siege engines, but they were all struck down by his knights before they could carry out my order. I hate those knights…which is only fair since Grimey hates the fact that the rest of us use spearmen to attempt to counter his knights. When I sent in another group of soldiers to check up on Amethyst, almost nothing remained of his city. I found out later that his survivors had fled to OtherNick’s territory to rebuild, but that left nothing more than a wide-open field between Grimey’s forces and my own walls.

Fortunately, it seemed that BottomGuy was putting enough pressure on Grimey to keep my people from being attacked. In order to give ourselves a better chance, the four of us pooled our resources so that I could gain the Spies ability and watch our foe’s every move. It felt good to finally turn the tables on him. After finding the easiest routes into Grimey’s base, I informed the others, and we all sent in our armies to demolish him.

Grimey put up a good fight, but after about three attack waves, BottomGuy and I destroyed the bulk of his city while OtherNick kept his army from escaping. Amethyst wasn’t able to contribute much to the main assault, but he located a sizable group of villagers that were trying to establish a new base of operations while the rest of us were occupied. In exchange for being nearly wiped out in the beginning of the campaign, he was satisfied to deal the final blow that ended the match.

After reviewing the breakdown of the final score (BottomGuy ended up with the most points), we celebrated our victory in the game lobby. It was fun to compare our individual accomplishments while poking fun at each other’s blunders, but Grimey piped up to complain that he was still bored and wanted to move on to a new game. Those of us who had won gloated that he was just being a sore loser, but Grimey explained, “I’ve defeated two of you by myself in under forty minutes. It took all four of you working together nearly two hours to beat me.”

After a moment of silence, we all agreed that it was time to play something else.


Afterword

For my short story, the intentionally misspelled Gaming on teh Interwebs, I was inspired by Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper to compose a story written as a series of journal entries. Though it was not what I had originally intended, the journal entries became a collection of posts on an internet blog once I decided on a plot. Aside from that, there are several aspects of our two stories that ended up being similar but distinctly different.

In both stories, the narrator is also the person writing down the events that take place around him or her. One key difference here is that the woman in Wallpaper is writing secretly in her diary, even though it is forbidden of her, while on the other hand, the narrator of Interwebs is writing his posts in order to tell others of what he has been doing over the course of the story. He is writing for the benefit of others instead of as an intellectual release.

One of the things I like about writing as if in a journal is that the piece can be self-aware. In both stories, the narrator notes periods where he or she has to stop writing temporarily until the next opportunity presents itself. In Wallpaper, these interruptions often come in the form of somebody approaching the room, where the writer does not want to be caught in the act. The blog entries in Interwebs are instead constricted by time, usually ending because the writer needs to go to sleep for the night. They are also written at more regular intervals, being updated on a daily basis rather than whenever the writer is able to sneak out a notepad while no one else is around.

Something that is much more distinct between the two works is the level of imagery used in each. Wallpaper goes into great detail about the house the story takes place in, especially the room with the titular paper. Since Interwebs takes place entirely in either “instant message” chats or a computer game, there is little to describe in the way of scenery or other sensory stimuli. It felt rather strange to write such a story, and I worried whether or not it would work out. I tried to avoid using too much computer and game jargon or else explain the terms I did decide to use. I didn’t want the story to be inaccessible to people who don’t play computer games themselves; hopefully I succeeded in that.

I was also concerned at first about the near lack of dialogue in my story, but after looking back on The Yellow Wallpaper, I noted that Gilman’s story also has very little spoken text. She also uses rather a lot of incredibly short paragraphs, oftentimes only a single sentence long. I tried to avoid that myself until the very end since I’ve had a “minimum of four sentences” rule drilled into me since high school.

I admit that my story is also related to Gilman’s in that it is auto-biographical, although no doubt more so in my case. As opposed to taking a general situation and building a story around it, as in Wallpaper, Gaming on teh Interwebs is almost entirely based on actual events (with most of the proper nouns being either fabricated or modified for the purposes of this assignment).

I was actually surprised at how well the actual events in the games between my friends and I formed a story, even going as far as to involve allusions and ironies, such as using the Spies ability to win a match after losing a previous one because of it; I had honestly not thought of the significance of this example until I had nearly finished writing the story. Still, after we finished the five-player game on the last day, I declared to everyone involved that I needed to turn it into a story, and here it is now.

[Monkeydog]

Awesome.

I hope your teacher got the Simpsons reference.

You have a blog?

AND FUCK YOU ALL FOR USING SPIES ON ME

[Hyperlisk]

That was pretty epic. Which is not a word I use much, if at all.

[Amethyst]

Hey. Hey. I had Rams and Petards all up in that business for the ending main assault. >.>;

Ah, good times.

[Stars]

I have no actual blog. I just acted like it for the sake of the story.
Lol, Spies.

I wasn't planning to make this into a story while we were playing, so I didn't pay close attention to what all was being used. All I remember by now are Fox's War Wagons that Monkey didn't like.
Lol, Rams.

[Amethyst]

Lol, you.

...=(

[Stars]

Rude! D=

What happened to my "noble sacrifice," person who lost to me one on one?

[Amethyst]

I think I would probably lose to most of the players one-on-one. I only win through alliances.
And your sacrifice is still apreciated!
But don't dis' the rams. >.<

[Stars]

*disrespects the rams*





>_> <_<
j/k