Over the last several months my husband and I have discovered the joy that is Smurf’s Village…for those of you who don’t have an ipod, it is an app for the ipod touch or iphone. In this game you build a Smurf village because the old one was invaded by Gargamel…and if you didn’t understand any of that, then look up Smurfs on Netflix and become educated to Pop Culture. Anyway, you build a new village…and in order to do this you have to grow crops to earn money and experience to build more mushroom houses and get more smurfs and farming land to grow more crops and get more money. This has been going on for months now, as growing crops and building houses takes time…REAL time! To grow a watermelon for example, takes 12 hours…a good thing to plant while you sleep at night. You can speed these things up using smurf-berries, but those cost REAL money.
Recently they did an update of this app and added a rather disconcerting feature; night-time. In other words it keeps the lighting in the village like it is outside…according to the clock on your device. So now when I have them plant golden corn at 11pm before I go to sleep, it is dark in the village. My husband had to turn that feature off on his app as he was having great difficulty planting crops at night and making those poor smurfs work. The other night as I was lying in bed playing this game, I thought to myself that the smurfs need a labor union…cause really what we are making them do is wrong somehow!
I think that the United Brotherhood of Worker Smurfs is a fitting name for the union…because Papa Smurf never has to work, and neither does Smurfette, Grouchy, Clumsy, Marco, or Alchemist smurf. The only smurfs who have to work their butts off day and night are smurfs who have no name. Which, in considering it, are what labor unions do…give each worker a name and voice. These poor smurfs get no breaks, no lunches, and no over-time! I have never seen workers more in need of a union to scream at their employers for them.
This is not unheard of in video games; if you haven’t played Theme Park then you could experience this union aspect of a game. If you play in sim mode then you have the pleasure of negotiating with a workers union…which is actually kind of funny the way it works. There are these 2 hands that stretch across the screen and you gradually have to get them to meet in the middle…these are negotiations. I am thinking this would be an interesting aspect to add to Smurf’s Village, only I wonder if there would have to be a union rep smurf that would come in to negotiate with Papa Smurf…and what would they make him look like? I know!...Hoffa Smurf…or Teamster Smurf!
I think that I may just turn to my husband’s philosophy; if it isn’t dark in Smurf’s Village, then I won’t feel guilty for making them work for 24 hours straight. How I wish I could do that in real life…change the settings so that I don’t feel guilty about things…wouldn’t that be convenient for us? I think the world would love to be able to turn off the “God feature”, then they could do whatever they want and not be responsible for it…and there would be no religious factions reminding them that they really are responsible for their actions. Oh to live in the video game world and be able to turn off anything and everything that we don’t like…but alas we live in this world where reality rears its ugly head reminding us of the world we really live in. May we come to be grateful for that, may we come to at least find joy in the good times, and may we come to learn from the hard times. As that is really what life is about, doing the best we can with the cards that we are dealt, and trust me when I say that our cards don’t come with a settings menu!
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