A game about greed
There is this game, slither.io. It is a really neat amusement (which btw also heats your linux device if you do not have a decent graphics driver) – and here's the trick how to be good at it.
So, this browser game is a bit like a multi-player snake. You start in a world where you are a small snake and there is food around and you can grow by eating. You can use your mouse to steer your snake. If you click the mouse button, your snake speeds up (you have to press and hold the mouse button). That costs you length, but if you do it well and you eat more than you lose length while speeding, everything is fine. You cannot die by this, as at some point, you simply stop speeding as you have no power left and you have to eat more to continue speeding. With your head you can cross your own body, so that's different from normal snake. What you cannot do – crossing other snakes. If you try to do that, your snake dies and turns into foo. Food gets also counted in points and the game shows a ranking who is #1 at the moment.
That's all to it.
So how can you grow fast? You could either try to eat a lot or (and here it comes) you trick other players (snakes) into running into your body by speeding before their head. The other snake then turns into food and you can eat it. Of course, longer snakes turn into more food than shorter ones.
If a snake dies and is at a certain size, all snakes (players) nearby try to get the biggest part of the cake by speeding to the new apprearing food. This often results in crashes – even more food!
The point is: How greedy are you? If you see a snake die and turn into food - you surely want to eat all the food. But you can only do that by speeding through the amount of food – increasing the likelihood of crashing into another snake and therefor turning into food yourself.
So here's the point how you can be really good at this game (I, myself, played it only about ten times before I got the longest snake with ~27k points) and I was able to hold this place for 10-15 minutes. How did I do that? By not beeing greedy – really, that's all to it! If you see another snake die, there's no problem with speeding to it and getting a huge amount of food out of it. But if you try to get as much as you can, you'll propably kill your snake.
tags: #social