I like phone games. I play them only on my phone, even when they offer laptop versions because my phone is in theory where the fun things happen, although that's also where I do all my social media, so that's not always what's happening on my phone. I am aware that since I constantly use the internet on my laptop, I am always about a click and a half away from a game, but this is knowledge I try to ignore.
I've begun playing these two hidden object games that are both from the same creators. As with other things, once I find a game I like, I often search for others like it. My attention span for games is sort of variable. I often love them a lot for a few days, drop down to a more reasonable amount of time, and then either complete them or fade out. Not all games offer end points.
At one point in these two hidden object games, I was offered the opportunity to join a club for more rewards. I don't do everything the games always suggest to garner rewards. I basically never go liek their social media, I will occasionally watch ads, I am a little variable. But joining a club in the game seemed harmless. So I searched for ones with easy breezy sounding names and joined one. And then I reached a similar point in the other game and did the same.
So, these two games are from the same creators, but there are some differences in operation. One has much more regular little sidequests, and club membership lets you share energy and other rewards, as well as getting you access to a weekly challenge. Basically, since I've joined the club I have so many coins I don't even know what to spend them on, and our team wins the weekly challenge really regularly. I was welcomed on entry, and told that they liked to chat, liked to friend each other on Facebook, and liked to have each team member maintain a certain level of points each week, but if I had a week where something took me away and I let people know, that was fine.
I confess at the start that seemed like a lot of data, but it was clear, and so far they have been fine with my regular but comparatively minimal contributions. (Many of them appear to be insomniacs who play through the night. I am a person who likes to have play breaks during the day, but does not play too late because I ended up dreaming the game.)
The other group no one said anything. Or at least not at first. Now the other game the weekly challenges for teams have varied, and do not always require team participation. You can share gifts that convert to energy or clues, and so we were doing that.
And then we got a new person who was very chatty. Not excessively so, but when there had been almost no chat before, there was now daily chat, so it was a shift. And it was almost entirely this one person trying to encourage us to move up the leaderboard, play the challenge, rah, rah, rah! They started remarking that we had more players who hadn't played that week at all, than we did who were actively playing. We made it past one leaderboard challenge, and the rest, we did okay but often got beat out by teams with more active players, or more willingness to spend money on extra energy.
And so finally that person announced they were off to form their own team with celar requirements and leadership roles, and they left. Several other players left with them. We had a few new people join, ask a question and when it didn't immediately get answered they left too. (In fairness, people are in all different time zones, but hey.)
I kept playing. I was playing a lot and noticed one week I was the only one who participated in the special challenge. I started checking the stats of other players to see if I was the only one still playing. One player who had been active seemed to have stopped. One other player was still making progress. And that seemed to be it, out of eight theoretical people.
I was trying to decide if I cared. There were a couple of bonus things that you can't really ever do without others, but beyond that, it wasn't holding me back from playing the game. And then one day I got a game alert. Usually they tell me my energy has renewed. This one said I was President.
I immediately logged back in to the game because how could that be right? But as I poked around I was not listed as president, and it appeared that I could not eject people from our club and I also could just reassign the presidency.
I have not yet done anything with this new power. But I might.
