I’ve gone and joined another social website. Despite the website where I intend to keep posting my personal stories every day, Twitter where my flippant or insubstantial thoughts go, I’ve also joined Facebook. This is the social network of the foreigners I know in Korea. When I say, “Get on Twitter”, they think I’m an ecentric, but the fact that I wasn’t on Facebook pushed me into “leper” like status. After two weeks of debating the pros or cons of yet another social network exposure on my social life, I’ve decided to dip my toes into Facebook.
At the moment, I’ve kept it “Actual Friends Only”. If I don’t find myself comfortable at the idea of visiting your house, or sending you an email about something we share mutually in common, I’m not adding you to my friends list. This means I run with a tight knit crew of people.
In fact, my crew of friends is much tighter than my brothers, who I accidentally invited to Facebook. My brother, who only bought a computer a month ago, signed up and had 55 friends on Facebook in two hours! He might be the key demographic for this sort of social network, but that’s ridiculous. Even if I put EVERY foreigner I knew, met, or ever talked to in Korea, I wouldn’t have that many people on my list. I’ve got about a dozen people I could add, but haven’t, but I’d never reach a social network that big. It is simply impossible for me to ever out socialize my brother. It’s not a competition, but seriously, it’ll never happen.
The current thing that gets me to check Facebook at the moment is rip off of Progressquest. One of my friends found a multiplayer, semi-cooperative version of Progressquest with a Dungeons and Dragons skin on it. You pick characters and equipt them. Then you click a button to put them on an adventure. The game plays in the background while you work. Then, after a certain period of time it reports a success or a failure. The time alerts you to when you will reach the next milestone in your adventure, when you level up, when you get an item. All you control is where your adventurer goes, what they wear, and when they drink their potions. Even that can be automated somewhat.
You’ll get an update on your status that reads something like this:
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Three bugbears chased Smee Butterpants across a rope bridge, hurling javelins (and insults) as they ran!
Smee Butterpants made an Armor Class check with a difficulty of 26 . . . and rolled 32
Smee Butterpants dodged the javelins (and ignored the name calling) and deftly cut the rope bridge behind him, sending the bugbears down into the rushing river below. He then noticed a partially concealed cave containing the treasures the bugbears had been guarding.
Smee Butterpants received 55 XP and 9 gold.
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Here you see my Dwarven Warlock, Smee Butterpants, succeeding in his task. I did nothing to make this possible except to send him to his doom. My friends that play this game can buff me, which is a clever mechanism to keep players nagging other people playing. I can also buff my friends so they get bonuses.
Now, each adventure takes a certain about of time, and if I get injured, I can choose to recover my HP by waiting before I undertake them. This means I can start the game in the morning, then go to lunch if I take a beating, and return to full health if I wanted to continue later in the day. The more time spent playing is more time spent leveling…etc. It’s got all the issues of a grind encapsulated in Progressquest, except it’s socialized and more hands on. It’s a total and utter waste of time, but I played it at work all day because it’s no more involved than a click every thirty minutes at most.
Anyway, other than playing around with pictures and digging up a few old friends I’ve lost touch with, I haven’t gotten to deeply involved with Facebook yet. It might stick around for a while, but I’m not giving up the blog.
