First-Person Shouter

There are literally dozens of websites on the Internet, and if you’ve been to any of them you’ve probably seen an advertisement for Evony. The ads for the World’s Best Web Game (according to Evony) started out innocently enough, featuring a warrior holding a sword, but have rapidly progressed from something promising a medieval adventure game to, well, tits.

Being a fan of both video games and tits, and wanting to contribute to the downfall of the American economy, I decide, as some of the Evony ads suggest, to play discretely at work. The first thing I notice upon logging in is a distinct lack of tits on display, along with a distinct lack of places to display them. Even if there were boobs in this game, where would they go? There are no women on the screen. There aren’t even any flabby, overweight men. There’s just an empty little town.

As a semi-professional internet humorsmith, I decide I’ll be the first to wryly point out the lack of tits the ads seemed to promise. As I prepare to type my witty and original observation into the chat window, I notice that roughly three out of every four messages are noting the same thing.

Along with people complaining about the dearth of breasts, there are a lot of questions being asked. “How do I get lumber?” “How do I attack a city?” “Are there any sexy ladies in here?” No one is answering any of these questions, and I eventually discover why: you can only chat for free for a little while before Evony starts charging you money for it, to the tune of three cents per line. People just arriving, like me, have loads of questions on how to play, but if you’ve been around long enough to know the answers, your free chat time has already expired. It’s a great system of confusion and annoyance that I’m sure will lead to a healthy gaming community.

Despite the lack of breasts and a comprehensive tutorial, I set about building up my little town. I build cottages to increase my population, build sawmills and farms to harvest resources, and though I’ve got a full week to play before other players can attack me, I decide to start recruiting soldiers to protect my city, which I’ve named– and remember, I’m a semi-professional internet humorsmith — “Bonerville.” To recruit soldiers, I need a barracks, but to build a barracks, I need lumber that I’ve already spent on the sawmills, farms, and cottages.

I notice a nearby forest that, were I to own it, would increase my lumber production by 23%. To claim the forest, however, I need soldiers, for which I need a barracks, for which I need lumber, for which I need the forest, for which I need soldiers. It’s a Gordian Knot of resource management which I solve by dismantling my lumbermills for spare lumber, a daring strategy that I’m sure the supposedly large-breasted inhabitants of Bonerville will applaud.

My barracks built, I recruit 6 warriors and prepare to conquer the forest. Only I can’t, because I’m told I need a “hero” to lead my merry band of lumber plunderers. In order to acquire a hero, I need feasting hall for my hero to feast in, and in order to build a feasting hall I need to build an inn for my hero to watch free HBO in before he heads out to feast. In order to build an inn, I need upgrade my cottages, which, of course, means I need lumber. Naturally, my lumber production has plummeted since I cleverly destroyed most of my lumbermills, so once again, I’m at an impasse. It’s at this point I notice I’ve been playing Evony for about three hours and everyone I work with has gone home for the day.

Back at the office the next morning, I turn off my phone and I log back in to Evony. I’ve managed to acquire some lumber during the night, and, having built an inn and feasthall, I attract my first hero, who I decide to appoint Mayor of Bonerville. He seems like a trusty fellow, despite looking like a guy who got kicked out of the Jedi Academy for fondling the Younglings.

With my mayor in place, it’s time for the task at hand: acquiring the nearby forest to boost lumber production. I recruit a second hero to lead my warriors to the forest, where they are unceremoniously slaughtered. My first battle in Evony, and I somehow lost it to trees. I’m not sure how this happened — could be my men were chewed up by hostile squirrels or crushed by especially heavy acorns — but my loss of prestige is, I feel, well deserved. I decide to send some scouts out to take a look at this deadly forest, but before I can recruit scouts, I need to research information gathering, for which I need an academy, for which I need an upgrade to my town hall, for which I need – well, I’ll spare you the rest of the details.

I should mention that along with wanting to charge you for typing lines in chat, Evony wants to charge you for a few other things to enhance your game, and those few things fall into the category of “everything else.” You can build your structures for free, but upgrading them generally takes long minutes. Recruiting soldiers and scouts, researching technologies, these all take real minutes of real time, and speeding up construction or research can be accomplished with a number of items, all of which cost real money. On the other hand, you can just wait it out and log into the game obsessively to see how things are coming along, or sit there staring impatiently, as I’m sure some pathetic people such as myself do. I can’t help it, nor understand it. My desire to see breasts has somehow led to an obsession with acquiring lumber, and my goal of making fun of a crummy webgame has led to me playing an awful lot of it.

Work is very busy the next day, so unfortunately I’m only able to play Evony for five or six hours. By the end of the day, I have five scouts, and I dispatch them to the forest to gather intel. They are attacked by something — woodpeckers, perhaps — but escape with their lives. I figure if five scouts can handle themselves against whatever danger the trees present, fifty warriors should be able to conquer the forest. I figure wrong: once again, each and every one of them is killed. I surely don’t envy the Mayor of Bonerville: he’s got a tough press conference to look forward to. “Does anyone have any questions not related to the repeated wholesale slaughter of our army by a bunch of trees?”

I log in later, at home this time. Yes, yes, I’ve got roughly sixty games on my Steam account but I’m playing Evony instead. Do you think I’m happy about it? Do you? I decide I need a new target, as the Forest of Certain And Humiliating Death is proving too costly. There are some grasslands to the east – surely even I can triumph against grass. I realize I won’t get any precious lumber out of attacking grass, but this isn’t about resource management anymore, this is about proving to myself and my citizens that I can beat the shit out of nature. I take no chances, sending a compliment of two-hundred warriors to the grasslands, and, astoundingly, I win. My first victory. I can happily report to my citizens that Bonerville don’t take no guff from turf.

(As it turns out, both the forest and grasslands were infested with enemy soldiers, a fact I discover when reading through the battle reports later.  So, at the very least, I wasn’t getting slaughtered by woodland creatures.)

I keep building my town up. I’ve got workshops for making weapons, stables for horses, a beacon tower for, uh, beaconing, I guess… best of all, a couple warehouses for storing all my precious lumber, which is now in the hundreds of thousands. Bonerville is becoming a force to reckon with, and I’d proudly declare this to my coworkers if I could see them over the tower of uncompleted paperwork in my inbox.

I log back in the next morning, realizing seven days have passed and my noob protection has expired. Bonerville is now vulnerable to attack from other players. Well, no matter, I can spend the day shoring up my defenses and plotting my strategies and oh crap I’ve already been scouted, attacked, and plundered about 17 times by other players. Where the heck was my massive army? Oh, right, I left them standing proudly on the field of conquered grass. Whoops.

Oh, well. Somehow the idea of being repeatedly invaded by people with nothing better to do than play Evony has convinced me I should find something better to do than play Evony. I’m more than a little embarrassed that I actually got into this game, which I only played because I want to make jokes about tits, for an entire week.

At least I never paid for it, despite the temptations of speeding up my construction or chatting with other players. I never spent a penny. Well, except for the fact that I enjoyed the resource management and empire building aspects of Evony so much I went home and bought Civ IV, so that’s twenty bucks I wouldn’t have otherwise spent. Plus, I’m pretty sure I’ll have to work late for a month catching up on all the work I’ve missed while playing. But apart from time, productivity, money, and self-respect, playing Evony didn’t cost me a thing.