Thomas Björk
Grundare och ordförande av Game Makers Malmö.
Like a second skin – WTS 27:e dec 2015 – André Hertler
Evening everyone! As I’m sure everyone will agree, today was a thrill all the way through to the end. I was delighted to see people commitment to their parts in the game and as characters, if I may swear, holy shit, some players took on their roles like a second skin. I played the part of Vice President of the United States of America.
I’ve never experience anything like this before and it hard not to just continue to throw praise at GMM and Terry for making this possible.
About the game; being kept in the dark, keeping others in the dark (the press especially wink emoticon ) and struggle at every turn to achieve both my national and personal goals has never been so much fun.
I loved the part where the GNN became almost aggressive towards the US, putting us right there in the spot of everything and me and my President Max.K tried our best to both provide good answers as well as keeping public unrest at a minimum.(Talking about when we went public about the aliens)
And we tried our damndest from turn one to beam messages to the aliens, most came back a cryptic mess and almost always causing more confusion. As the americans we have had contact with aliens since the 1950’s, so we immediately tried to verify if these were the same aliens, no answer ever came from this. I wonder if it ended up somewhere else? Reason I say that is because I forgot to put USA as the sender!
Towards the end I was so tired and my back was in all kinds of pain. That when I got contacted by the aliens directly, them pleading to me to try and disarm the nations of the world or come with them to space, I did not know about the whole destroy the world. I knew I wanted to help(the game would be more fun that way), but when I told my team about it they called it ’Divide and conquer’ tactics and remained on the fence on things. So I began to write a new message when; I didn’t know it at the time; in the final seconds of the game I got called by the aliens again. The same message, the aliens pleading even more. This is when I told them that if they can overturn our current leader Mr. President Hallmark I would automatically succeed him as Vice President and grant their wish. Then came the alarm, the game was over, I walk shamefully back to my teammates, I tried to make them agree to the terms the aliens declared, but to no avail.
I still hold the note I began to write just before the second time the aliens called me. It reads.
”Help me! The President is mad, if you can remove him then you will have USA’s help in any endeavor! I’ll be waiting at the canadian border!”
Will I do this again? Hell yes, I might even be interested in being part of control, though work hinders me from traveling to far from the companies servers. So conventions outside Malmö is probably not something I can manage, but ask me anyway!
/ André Hertler