Chore Wars went live this week. I had actually seen a comic strip on Penny Arcade where they featured the site. To give you an idea, here’s my character sheet.

Basically this is a database where you enter in the names of chores as adventures and then people connected to you (housemates, co-workers, minions) claim the rewards for completing these adventures. This takes what is obsessive/twinkish about Runescape/Guild Wars/Everquest/World of Warcraft by killing/random clicking on stuff and getting XP/treasure but now makes it actually worth something (ignoring gold farms and selling your Level 60 Mage/Shaman/Fanboy).

What also works about the set-up is that in the weekly update it ranks people based on XP, for a little competition. But more importantly it helps you open up dialogue about what people actually do to help out around the house.

I just kept going this morning. I wanted to test out the functions, like how combat worked, so I just kept cleaning. I started when I woke up but then stopped hours later when I noticed I had gone two hours past lunch.

The combat reminds me of the old text adventures where you just kept pressing on one button and hitting enter. You can skip the combat because it is just for looks. The combat really doesn’t affect the XP or anything, but is kinda fun seeing the goofy monster names that the adventure creator named. We’ll see how people fare against General Tso at the Cooking of the Dinner.

Kishi is already joining me in the fight against dirt. If you want to help us take on Lord Weed’s troops, just leave a comment and I can e-mail you the invite code.

I have yet to see what the benefit of going gold is, other than just you need to “go gold” whenever there’s free internet games (shyeah right).

The drawback: It’s in a different time zone, so it may show you as doing chores on different days than you actually did. I haven’t found where to change that in the settings yet. (Also, there’s a limited amount of character portraits, but how many people are joining your fight?)

The Haiku:

Chore Wars tracks my work

Whether it’s cleaning showers

or my plundering.

Totally different subject: I wish Wayne Brady was on better shows, since he is so funny. ‘Don’t Forget the Lyrics’ is fun. (It’s funny that NBC is copying the same format with ‘Singing Bee’ with Joey Fatone…just like ‘American Idol’ and then whatever NBC has.) A guy just won $350,000 singing CCR’s ‘Fortunate Son’.

Semi-related posts:

1. Chore Wars
2. Booyor the Shot Put Judge
3. Booyor Dance Party
4. Star Wars TV
5. New Clone Wars Show