About Birthdays

Since I have a birthday coming up, it had me thinking about how The Tribe did not deal with birthdays or any kind of rite-of-passage milestones in the lives of our favorite characters.

Oh sure, the writers showed us the consequences of unprotected sex in the number of characters who had babies or came close to having them. (Mostly those consequences seemed to be all on the female ... strange ...)

Anyway, I was thinking more about traditions & life passages. Like birthdays. Or like major holidays. I don't know ... it used to be a big deal to turn 16 & get your driver's license. Or turn 18 & vote. Or turn 21 & buy a beer. The closest we came wasn't too bad -- watching Cloe go through her early-teenage bad-girl stage with Ved. It was such a tantalizing tidbit tho' & there wasn't enough of it!

Yeah, ok, we can all probably understand WHY The Tribe writers went the way they did. Keep the story focused on the action/situation. Move forward not backward. And the main character was always The Virus.

I'm glad we haven't totally ignored life-milestones in our game. KTDA has tipped the hat to birthdays, to love & loss, to Christmas & kinda sorta to Thanksgiving/harvest festivals. Our game has a lot of great action, but we also take the time to develop characters & take their backstories into account. Since you can't visually "see" our characters, that development does give them more life than just 2-dimensional playing.

I'm glad. I like our characters.

-Chyna

photo source: copyright Cloud-9 "The Tribe"