I spent 1,961 hours playing a video game.

Ark: Survival Evolved will always have a special place in my heart because it was the first game I played that was cooperatively online. It was also a game that a friend of mine introduced to me back in 2015 while we were in college. So I started playing the game with their dinosaur ranch and it came across to me as complex but simple to understand.

During those times, I was able to figure out the map where the map would only develop whenever the player or myself as the player would go different directions of the map. But, you didn't have a way to get back home unless you knew the map or you knew your surroundings. So you had to learn landmarks and you had to learn different ways to figure out where you were going. It wasn't until later that they added map markers and then during the final game development they added a marker where the game would track where you are on the map.

But I was in those early development stages for the game and it was a lot of fun with a lot of experiments. We were having a lot of fun with the developers and the thing that sticks out to me is that they tried this winter wonderland and your character (as it says it's a survival game) and your character would need different resources for different climates of the map.

So my character and the dinosaur ranch was in the swamp where it was really hot, so I needed to get to water a lot of times. This was a danger in and of itself to get to the swamp with a lot of predators. But with the winter wonderland you needed to keep yourself warm or else you can go into hypothermia. And so, I was able to make fur clothes because they had the wolves and other mammals where you can get fur to make the different armor pieces so you can stay warm instead of having to travel to the other side of the map where the ice glaciers and the world's winter all the time.

There was a Santa Claus that instead of having flying reindeer he had the flying ancestors of the reindeer. It also wasn't Santa Claus - it was Raptor Claws. One thing that was really fun about that, it really bonded me with other players of the map and the Dino ranch was very successful in helping out other new players and helping out seasoned players as well.

I was doing things that the seasoned players wouldn't want to do such as breed lower level dinosaurs or mammals especially mammoths and wolves. I love my mammoths and I love my wolves so it was a grand old time. The reason why I only have 1,961 hours of play time is because the last time I played was in October of 2020. It wasn't because of the pandemic, it wasn't because of other things going on in my life, but the developers of Ark Survival Evolved decided to get rid of some of the servers that weren't as active. Unfortunately, my server, 337, which was a PVE server, got erased and I was able to save some of my animals.

I tried to rebuild on another server where my friends were playing, but it was different. It was a different game, it was a different atmosphere, and there was a completely different map on top of that. So it was just very difficult for me to play by myself when I didn't have an established base with tall walls and regular base defenses against the wild dinosaurs. The dinosaurs were becoming more vicious and things were becoming more complicated so over time, I just decided to lose interest and go about playing other games but this game still has a very special place in my heart.

I look forward to being able to play either a full-fledged sequel or just get together with friends on a private server and just have fun with the game again because I really miss my dinosaur ranch and helping out the new players.