Hobowars

As part of my research for my major project, I signed up to a community based web game called hobowars.
Hobowars is a text based massively multiplayer online game. Thousands of people play it daily and within the game you are in control of your hobo, which is your avatar within the online environment who you can equip weapons to and strengthen for different purposes, fighting and begging.s within the game than you can build up within the game (strength, speed, intelligence) which you can build up at different centres (library for intelligence, and the dojo for strength and speed.) I found out 1st hand that this game is incredibly addictive for a number of reasons. Firstly; There is a huge sense of accomplishment when you set particular milestones for your avatar and then accomplish them. Its a simplistic accomplishment that can be seen by all players within the game, ie level gains, attribute values etc. You can sit on this game all day, "training" your hobo. to complete actions and tasks within the game it uses up time, which regenerates every ten minutes. Therefore the more time you spend playing this game, the stronger your hobo will become.

The boards

The social side of hobowars is probably the biggest part of the game. Hobos within the game can post onto various boards (allocated by themes such as "whos smokin who") and talk about anything. You can get help from more experienced players. This game initially seems simple because its a text based game but in actual fact there are many complexities to it and ways to make your hobo stronger, ways that could only be worked out by a master mathematician! Its an interesting thing, posting on a board that hundreds of people see and comment on daily.

Gangs
Once your hobo is strong enough you can apply to become part of a gang, which is just a collective of hobos that have their own posting board, perks and "battle chamber", a group of the top ten fighting hobos who can battle against other gangs battle chambers. Gangs also provide its members with better weapons and "security" ie if somebody attacks you multiple times, a stronger member of the gang will go and attack that hobo for you!

Personal Experience

Once I had played for a month or so my hobo was strong enough to be part of a gang. There is a lot to be said about the sense of accomplishment and excitement this had for me personally, it was more than an aquired accomplishment within a linear, story based game where many individuals before myself had already accomplished the exact same thing, this was unique to me, its just a very real sense of accomplishment. Even though its a text based game that you are playing at a computer screen on your own you know that nearly everything within the game is generated from other real people playing the game as well.

I then started using the boards and this was a whole new revelation. I started posting my own threads that were intended to be humourous; I would basically talk about how I was the most powerful hobo in hobowars and how everyone else was inferior to me.It was amazingly fun seeing the responses I'd get. Most of it was negative, and I quickly became one of the most hated hobos on hobowars! however Id developed a name for myself which meant I had fame among this select group of people. I also developed a small following of people who knew I was using the boards as a joke and eventually got offered the chance to become a co leader for a small gang. Hobowars has a very real worldly feal to it, the only metaphor I can think of is its like climbing the career ladder, just within a game. Social status is a big thing within the hoboworld and as I continued to post more controversial posts I became an enemy of the "staff" of hobowars. I enjoyed the very loose but humorously real parallels that hobowars had to the real world, it had its own economy that would go up and down depending on demand for certain weapons etc. Eventually the "staff" sent me to jail within the game for a year for stealing millions of hobo dollars from another gang!

Even though my hobo came to a sad and shameful demise, I really enjoyed the time I spent playing the game and came to realise that with the evolving nature of games, we see games coming through that are more like real life, not in their graphics, but in the social aspects of the game. this makes for an online game that is so much more engaging and exciting. I can live an exciting life within the game and take risks that I would never take in real life, say and do things that I wouldnt say and do in real life. Through the avatar, I could become whoever I wanted and that is a pretty awesome experience.