Virtual Villagers: Hope for the Future

(The puzzle board, containing icons of each of the puzzles that must be solved in the game.)

To read the entire sorry tale of my experiment with the PC game, 'Virtual Villagers', you need to begin at the earliest post on the topic. The situation, briefly, was as follows:

In an attempt to prolong my 'trial period' as well as erroneously believing that I could sleep while the villagers worked, I left the game on all night and slept through their gradual starvation... If I had been awake, I would have been aware of the moment when they gained enough 'tech points' to buy Farming experience and ran out of berries to forage. Instead, they kept gaining points while continuing to forge until the berry bush had been picked clean.

In other words, they were extremely well-educated as well as having completed a wonderful project providing them with a lagoon in which to bathe. They failed to find another source of food, however, starving one by one, collapsing in the centre of the Village where celebrations ordinarily are held.

The only survivors were a mother with infant and a young male. The woman was almost dead, and yet she continued to nurse the baby. The young male was extremely weak.

I bought the Farming advancement instantly and set him to the task of planting crops. I crossed my fingers and prayed that the mother would survive. She survived (barely) and the child became a toddler. The child was a boy, however, necessitating another breeding attempt.

The woman was 39 at this point, and possessed only an eighth of her former strength. It was very cruel, but I had to force the two adults to breed. It took some determination on my part, but at length she produced a baby.

She now was 40 years old. If the child proved to be male, my village would not survive...

I am glad to announce that she produced a girl. In the illustrious tradition of the ancient Egyptians, I will start a new dynasty with the two children. I doubt my adult female will produce any more children. In any case, I feel she has done her duty to the village of Isola. She now is 41 years old.

Life in Death: Virtual Villagers

This photo depicts a civilisation at its nadir.

Despite the very poor quality of the photograph, the bizarre juxtaposition of the mother with her baby in her arms surrounded by the decomposing corpses of her fellow villagers had to be captured somehow. Despite the fact that 'tech points' had been used to boost the level of Spirituality in this small village, evidently the surviving male is not advanced enough yet to bury the dead. The mother holding the child obviously cannot volunteer for cemetary detail at this point. When I placed the male next to one of his dead comrades, he only knew how to 'embrace' it, the initial act in the sequence of breeding. That was disconcerting, to say the least!

The photograph in the next post of the villagers disporting themselves in the sparkling lagoon is NOT from my game, alas. In my game, the villagers succeeded in clearing the blockage from the lagoon before they died, but did not survive long enough to enjoy the benefits of their labours.

As I was sleeping at the point when they amassed enough tech points to allow the purchase of Farming Experience that would take them beyond the foraging stage, they continued to pick berries until the bushes were bare... then slowly starved to death as their 'Goddess' slumbered fitfully.