Day 52

So I foreshadowed this post a couple of days ago.  Enormous quantities of my free time (of which this ROM does indeed have enormous quantities) have been going into the game ARK - Survival Evolved. It's not a great game.  It's not bad, but its not one of those upper echelon, prestige games either.  It's glitchy, there's way to much grinding involved, and there's no coherent story line or quests to follow. But like its spiritual sister, Minecraft, those shortcomings become its attributes.

It's basically a survival game.  Your character wakes up on a beach, naked and unarmed.  Oh, and you're surrounded by dinosaurs.  The game basically involves trying not to get killed by said dinosaurs, and take my word for it, you will get killed, a lot, especially early in the game.  

Like Minecraft, you have to craft your own tools out of wood and rocks and then build a shelter for protection.  You have to hunt for food, and you have to find a water source.  Eventually, you get more sophisticated, smelting metal to craft better tools, building more aesthetically pleasing buildings, and then refining oil from off-shore seeps into gasoline to power small engines.  And probably the most attractive feature of all - you can tame individual dinosaurs, outfit them with saddles and ride them, and use them as beats of burden to carry lumber, rocks etc., and as combatants to fight off other, untamed predators.

It;s not rocket science and Russian literature has nothing to fear by way of completion, but gameplay becomes so addictive because there's always something that needs to be done.  Before long, you have a farm to grow berries to feed your herbivore tames, you need to hunt to feed your carnivores, you constantly need to forage for more resources (timber, rock, metal, etc).  Even after you tame a dino, you need to continue to "train" it to raise its health statistics so it doesn't die the first time it encounters a hostile dino, You can hatch dino eggs to raise new tames from infancy, you can explore caves and the ocean, you can craft rafts to navigate the world, and you can even fly on the backs of pteranodons.  

There's always something to do and there's always something that needs to be done (have you emptied the compost bin to fertilize your crops today?).  As a result, once you enter the game and start playing, it's hard to ever stop.  I have literally started playing at x o'clock in the morning, and continued until the same hour in the p.m. And vice versa.

I know that I'm playing the game "wrong."  You;'re supposed to play as part of a team.  There's so many tasks to keep up with that it's recommended that you form a tribe, either with your friends or players that you meet on-line, and divide the work.  One person tend the farms, one person be the blacksmith, one person care for the tames, etc.  In this multi-palyer mode, there's also combat with other, hostile  tribes of on-line players, that would just love to destroy your base to grief you, as well as steal all your precious loot.  

But I'm not interested in all that and the game does allow single-player mode.  One person to try to keep up with the million-and-one tasks needed to establish a base, all while trying to avoid raptors,  rexes, and worse.  At this point, I have a comfy house built of bronto-proof stone, two separate berry farms to feed my herbivores, three dino pens for small, medium, and large tamed dinosaurs, and a separate crafting workshop for forging tools and weapons.  

I'll put it this way - it may be escapism but it beats living in Trump's Amerika two months before Election Day.