Practicum Post 6: Editing Wikipedia - Miller

While reading through Travian's Wikipedia page in an effort to see where I could best contribute my experiences playing the game, I quickly found that the page lacked an overview on how difficult it was to advance and even continue playing in the early stages of the game. As I mentioned before, Travian forces players to put a large amount of time into strategizing where to allocate resources because your advancement within the game depends almost entirely on their production levels. Although its Wikipedia page briefly touched on the fact that resources are required to play, it did not mention the widespread frustration that players experience and the overall large real-time time requirement that it takes to continue playing and advance. Since I could not simply edit the page with my own thoughts and experiences, I found an article from the technology magazine Wired that highlights my claim (the entire article can be found here: http://www.wired.com/geekdad/2008/09/travian-a-brows). I added my contribution to the Gameplay: Overview section as it was the part of the page that best tied in with resources and advancement topics. Here was this section before my contribution was saved (pay close attention to the bottom of the second paragraph):

My exact contribution was: "Because advancement within the game relies heavily on these resource levels, the game has been criticized as slow and tedious in the early stages of play.^[11] It can take a large amount of real time play and a lot of waiting to increase resource levels to the amount needed to be an active player in the game."

Also, here is the edited version of the Wikipedia page with my contribution included (it is now the third-to-last and second-to-last sentences of the second paragraph):

Finally, here is the link to the (updated!) Wikipedia page on Travian: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travian#cite_note-10

Overall, I was pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to edit a Wikipedia page. I feel proud to have contributed my thoughts on a game that I have spent so much time this semester learning, and I hope this contribution encourages others to think more about this aspect of the game. I also hope that the game's developers see and use it as feedback when making improvements to the game for future players!