Fantasy World

Playing the internet game, A Tale in the Desert (http://www.atitd.com ), can be insidiously absorbing! Role playing is taken to the max! Every activity in the make believe era of ancient Egypt is controlled by time. A fee for membership ($13.95/month) allots internet playing time while the sequencing of mouse clicks for each activity also revolves around time.

Not being accomplished in the art of computer wizardry, there was a lot for me to learn and I was quite frustrated trying to get the hang of playing a computer game. One day I suddenly realized I was actually paying to have myself tortured!

The complexity of the game is almost overwhelming. The ‘how to’ wiki pages (http://wiki.atitd.net/tale3 ) helped me tremendously as did the mentoring from so many other players. There are chat lines in the game to IM other players, privately or publicly. Unlimited telephone service has allowed players to put phones on speakers and converse with each other for hours while playing the game. Players come from many different countries: Belgium, France, Australia, U.S and other parts of the world. Avatar names are used when players contact each other and conversations ensue around game activities as if they were real life. If players know each other in real-life (RL) then they often refer to each other by their avatar names instead of their RL name!

When joining player friends for lunch or dinner in a favorite restaurant, comments about the game dominates the discussion. Difficulties and successes in activities like mining for various ores and having a mine shut down, growing flax in quantity, or how to grow onions, archeological digs, good fishing spots, trading guilds, raising sheep and which trees give the most wood are topics seriously talked about. We mention game icons we’ve noticed as we are out and about the town and then friends in turn give us locations of other interesting ones. If people dining at a nearby table over hear us, they must be quite amused if not perplexed.

Frustration comes in cycles as I try valiantly to move from beginner (growing flax), to the next level (I am now at Level 4) which will let me grow onions. There are serious gamers who know how to use macros (automated programs that repetitively click the mouse for you) and achieve great success in all aspects of the game but regardless of the level achieved, the reward is the same for all of us--- a highly developed skill in mouse clicking. We sit in front of our computers and willingly click so many times per game minute until we log off in either frustration or fatigue. I’m sure the game uses the same technique as the gambling industry: click x number of times for a reward, and then randomly change the frequency of the reward so you will keep clicking like Pavlov’s Dog. It quickly becomes an obsession! The developers of the game are very clever and getting wealthy because of our stupidity but the absurdity of it all doesn’t prevent us from continuing to play.

Iziz with flax