September 13, 2009

• Gamer’s Prank or Passive-Aggressive Sabotage?

  I thought that my son, Doug, and I had worked out such issues as this years ago.  When we first started playing the old PlayStation, we had only one memory card.  He saved over my saved game a few times, I came mildly unglued, lectured him, and implored him to empathize with me — to try to imagine how he would feel if I did that to him.  Then we got separate memory cards and there wasn’t any more of that kind of trouble between us until his card filled up and he started using mine.

  He’s a Leo, born in the Chinese year of the Cock — the world is his, entitlement is a given.  There is no doubt that we love each other, but his lifetime has involved many challenges for me in trying to set limits to his trespassing on my territory, taking advantage.  We have talked it out many times in regards to numerous things, and as he matured he became less obnoxious and more considerate… until recently.

  I might have probably invited this.  I started leaving one particular online game, the Facebook app, Barn Buddy, open when I had an impending harvest at the time he took over the computer and I went to bed.  He would reap my crops for me when they popped.  At best, it was a hit-or-miss operation.  He gets caught up in his own games and chat rooms and forgets to check my stuff.  That’s okay.  It’s no big deal, only a game, after all.  On that level, this other stuff isn’t a big deal either, except that I’m wondering if it indicates some covert hostility.  Maybe I’m being paranoid, but I’m not sure.  Here’s what happened:

  My Barn Buddy farm has expanded as far as it can, and I have it set up in six rows of different crops that take different times to mature, with a seventh crop in the seed bag to replace the next one that completes its life cycle.  Then I buy seed of the one just reaped, to fill the next space, etc.  My pretty rotating crops are chosen for both aesthetics and their high value in game gold.  I got up one morning recently and found that he had replaced 2 rows during the night, replacing my pretty and pricey crops with TURNIPS, the ugliest, lowest value crop available.

  It wasn’t exactly an out-of-the blue surprise.  He told me days before that he had been head-tripping about filling my farm with turnips.  I expressed my horror and disapproval of the scheme, and he assured me it was just a head trip.  THEN HE DID IT!  The next night after that, as I slept, he went a step further and FED MY DOG!

  That dog is something the developers came up with early on, for their own benefit.  There are only 2 ways for a player to acquire a guard dog:  refer ten new players, or buy the dog with game credits which must be bought with real money or earned by completing offers, etc., like Xanga credits.  The dog was touted as a guard to keep other players from stealing one’s crops and adding bugs and weeds to the farm.  In play, it didn’t quite work out that way.  The dog is only a minor deterrent to thieves.  A bite costs a few bits of game gold, a cost far outweighed by the value of the stolen produce.

  Bugs and weeds, on the other hand, benefit the person on the receiving end, as one gets experience points to level up by spraying the weeds and bugs.  Almost nobody is going to brave a dog bite to do a friend the favor of scattering weeds and bugs, just as almost no one is going to let a dog bite deter him from stealing crops.  Most of us who got dogs early in the game disable him by letting his food dish go empty.  We have pacts, explicit or implied, to leave our farms open to each other so we can help each other level up.  By feeding my dog, Doug slowed my progress up the levels and probably offended some of my buddies.

  He said that the turnips were a joke and the dog food an honest mistake.  I just don’t know.  On the one hand, I’m inclined to dismiss it as only a game, but there’s this paranoid inner voice that warns me there’s something deeper going on between the Kid and me.  I just don’t know.  He’s got me wondering what’s next — and wondering if THAT is what he wanted to do all along. 
  

  • 9:33 pm
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