1 RISE OF CIVILIZATIONS
It is cloudy outside and I just woke up after 6 hours of deep sleep. Yesterday, I was forced by my boss to work till 1:00 AM in the night. Even after working for 12 hours straight, there is no improvement in the project completion status and if nothing goes wrong, it would be the same case today also. I still have two more hours to get ready and go to work.
I completed the routine I do every morning and opened the 'Rise of Civilizations' (Author Notes: Abbreviated as 'RoC') game on my Android phone. This is a game that I am playing for the last 2 years from its beta version days. Considering the amount of time a regular person stays loyal to one mobile game, the time I spent on RoC is humongous.
In the early days, I used to play the game for more than 14 hours a day while searching for a job. The moment I got a job, though the amount of time spent on RoC decreased by 5 times, the amount of money spent on RoC increased by 'infinity' times. I didn't like Pay-to-win gameplay when I am studying. But after a fixed amount of money started entering my bank account every month, I started to spend almost 50% of my salary on games.
My game time recently reduced to a meager 30 min on weekdays and 1-2 hours on weekends. Though I struggled through various situations in the game, this time was a bit different. A lot of loyal players of the game left in the last few months and this resulted in a depressing atmosphere in the game. This coupled with my extra hours at work because of a devil project undertaken by the company, my game time reduced to that extent.
I have a free time fo 30 minutes and I logged into the game. My main account is already the highest level and currently, there is peacetime going on in my kingdom in the game. So, I just did the customary things like collecting resources, helping my guildmates, looking at mails and checking the events page. Then I did thieves grinding for 10 minutes and opened the guild dashboard.
The guild has 200 members, the highest number possible in the game. This limit is reached after multiple completion of skills and donation of hundreds of millions of guild gold and resources. Though, the number shows 200 the active players are only 67. Though many guildmates left the game, their accounts are still in the guild hoping that at least some of them will return. Some players jumped servers and some low-level players created a new account after seeing the never-improving situation in the guild.
Currently, the number of people active in the game is only 6. The guild I am part of is an International guild and players from all parts of the world can join it. The advantage of being a member of an international guild is that we can meet lots of interesting people from different cultures from all over the world. But the disadvantage is many people cannot log into the game at the same time. Therefore, there are only 6 people that are playing the game currently.
I opened the guild chat.
pix - Good Morning everyone. What are you guys doing
snsdforever - Hey. just grinding thieves and contributing my part to the kingdom event. shall we do it together?
pix - not intereted. only habe 15 min free time. should go to work
snsdforever - come on, just couple of hideouts or one stronghold
unregulatedmonster - @snsdforever I can do that for some time.
pix - @snsdforever there you go. you can play for whayever time you wanr
snsdforever - allright. with @unregulatedmonster help, i can take on level 13 stronghold. starting the rally
unregulatedmonster - kool
pix - there is @bardofshadows and @mindfreak also online. you can go for a lvl15 or even 16 stronghold
snsdforever - shit. i already started the rally.
snsdforever - fine, if they are free i will increase the level next time
bardofshadows - my troop dispatch queue is full. I will have one free after 20 min
snsdforever - alright. @mindfreak seems to have his queue free. he sent his troops to my rally
pix - okay. i will also sens my troops. i have some time left
snsdforever - hey man. when will you rectify your habit of changing your decisions at last minute
pix - haha
In this way, I engaged in some conversation with my online friends. I helped 'snsdforever' with 3 strongholds and then logged out of the game. While traveling on the metro to my office, I started thinking about the personalities of my guildmates. Though we have a discord server and my co-players do audio chats, I never participated in them. I like chatting through text no matter how many cons it has. And one of my habits is to guess the personalities and patterns of my guildmates through the guild chat.
For example, 'snsdforever'. His profile name is 'snsdforever' and his profile picture is a cute Asian girl in close up. Though many people get attracted to the account because of the picture and try to make friends and also send personal messages, I personally know that SNSD or Girls' Generation is a Kpop girl group and 'snsdforever' is a fan of that Kpop group. His/her profile picture is one of the eight members of that group. There is a high probability that the account belongs to a male because men listen to girl groups more than females, I heard that this particular Kpop group have a large female fanbase also. His/her chats don't have many mistakes when typing and some of his/her words are crude. And coupled with the fact that the account has time to follow Kpop groups, he/she should be 13-20 years of age. In one of the chats, the account mentioned that worked for 20 hours last week to get money to buy a special package. So, the account should have more than 18 years of age and also living in a country where part-time jobs when studying is legal. In this way, I guess an account's country, age, game time, habits and personality through the different data I get via chats.
One of the reasons I think I do these predictions is because of my occupation. My job requires me to go through thousands of files and articles and make proper reports for the client. This gave me an inherent skill of digging deeper into any text. So, I visualize and guess the person chatting in guild chat without even wanting to. Sometimes I analyze my own self through these chats. For example, the test I typed just a while ago. There are a lot of typing errors and I didn't even look at them before sending them. I only do this when I am chatting with people I know and people who understand me. When chatting with strangers, I try to be as formal as possible and write as little text as possible. This tells that I am afraid of talking to new people and friendly to acquaintances.
While I am thinking about this stuff, the metro already reached 75% point. There are 4 more stops until I reach my final destination. I blinked my eyes and suddenly my atmosphere changed. There is nothing around me and my surroundings became black in color. I tried waving my hands to touch my office bag. But I am not able to feel the bag and also not able to see my hands. All of a sudden, the environment brightened and my surroundings became clear.
I am present in a building, too large to be a house. It has a Western-style architecture and it resembles an Italian church I saw on the internet. A screen appeared in front of me when I am observing my surroundings. The interface is something that I have never seen, but there are some familiar words on the screen.
After looking at the screen, checking whether this is a dream and assessing my current situation, I realized that I am transported to another world that is based on the android game I regularly play, Rise of Civilizations.
