Weird Human Tricks and the VHL

[KC15 340]

Humans are strange. There is no doubt about it.

 

I’ve been thinking lately about my part in just one of the many ways this species I belong to is an odd thing and I thought I’d put down some of my musings here for your amusement and amazement.

 

Humans create whole games out of nothing. They do this not for any particular survival advantage, but just for the shear fun of it all. Sports in some cases may have derived from something life-sustaining like hunting, but in the end, most of them are there just to pass the time, have fun, and test ourselves against one another.

 

Hockey is a good example. It was created on the 5^th day of creation by God in the beginning of all time, regardless of what people from Montréal would like to have you believe. We humans just made it up. We saw ice and said, “wonder how you could move around on that” and invented skates. Once those were on the scene, we wondered, “who is the fastest” and we began racing across the ponds. When that got a little boring we wondered, “what else can we do on these skates?” Until one day someone thought we might form teams and see if we could slap some piece of bark or something around with sticks and push it past another person defending a net we were aiming for.

 

But let’s bring it closer to us here in the VHL. The next step in the whole meta-game is when someone else decided to create yet another game on top of the game of hockey where we simulate the one game with another. And STHS is born. But it doesn’t stop there. STHS was not created for the VHL. It was meant to simulate NHL hockey or even fictional hockey leagues where people either playing solo or in online leagues could match wits as GMs.

 

But to get to the VHL, there is yet one more layer of meta. We take the STHS sim engine designed for something entirely different and decide to create human controlled single players that will gather in a large online community.  We use the attributes in STHS and devise all sorts of fun and frustrating ways to earn points to increase those STHS stats. And the VHL is born. Why? Just to have fun.

 

And yet it just continues on with the delightful absurdity of it all. To make such a league run requires an army of people willing to put in extra work beyond the tasks required to improve your player. It takes GMs to manage the teams and Boards of Governors to adjudicate and pass new rules that are made up out of the feverish minds of the citizens of the VHL. It takes updaters to do the fairly tedious work of verifying that the users have actually done what they said they did. It takes programmers to create the forum structure, the updating tool used by the general users, and the app used by some. It takes bankers to manage the whole donation system. And it takes many, many more who give up what can be precious free time in a busy life just to make this completely made up game on top of another game on top of another game to make this all so that Guy Lesieur can go from 85 Defense to 86 in any particular update and then see that 86 Defense take to the ice against someone else’s made up Defense number.

Yes, humans are odd little animals to go to all this work – just to have fun.

 

And I thank all of you in the community who make this absurd little pastime the absolute blast that it is.

 

Thank you!

[Cxsquared 455]

I'd watch this TED talk.

[Victor 10,525]

That's deep son.