Parallel Existence
Categories: entries
This game Travian is unlike any game I’ve ever played. It’s an MMO. But unlike other games that rely on giving each player a fixed number of turns each day to limit what you can do—i.e. Archmage and KoL—in Travian, the limitation is time.
Everything in Travian takes time. Resources trickle in constantly throughout the day. Constructing buildings takes time. Training troops takes time. Attacking and trading resources takes time proportional to how far away the other person’s village is. As such, Travian never dominates your attention. It’s not a game that allows you to step out of the real world and into a fantasy world. It’s more of a game that runs parallel to real life.
That aspect of it has a weird effect on real life. When we first started, Janvi commented on how it made her more productive because of all the waiting. I won’t claim that Travian has made me more productive, but it has neatly partitioned my day. I’ll think “I need to finish this in half an hour so I can start a new raid” or “I’ll raid someone half an hour away, so I’ll have time to get lunch and go to the post office.” The best story so far was the time I was getting nervous while talking to my boss in his office because I knew I was about to get hit by an attack and I hadn’t yet moved my troops out of harm’s way.