Ways in which Mousehunt has improved my life

For those of you who don't know, I have been playing the facebook game Mousehunt since July 2010. I have been mocked about this and have been asked why on earth I play it many times, as well as many people threatening to delete my account. So, I will now blog about the ways in which this game as benefited my life.

I started playing it because Jeremy and Firip kept going on about it and I saw it on Firip's laptop whenever we went to Yunbin's house for gatherings. I decided to give it a go I guess hahaha. I can't even remember who was playing at this time but a lot of them have since stopped and a lot have started. At first I was like wtf is this, it's so boring? But then the more I clicked the more I grew addicted to clicking, and then 12250 horn calls later... now we are here.

The game itself is uneventful. You are a mousehunter, and every 15 minutes you have to "sound the horn", ie. click the hunter's horn, to have a chance at encountering and catching a mouse. In addition, every hour the horn goes off on its own. Whether you will encounter a mouse depends on the cheese you have and whether you catch it depends on the base and nature of your mouse trap. There are hundreds of possible combinations of traps and as you move on the game and unlock new areas, you also unlock more and stronger mice as well as the ability to use and craft more powerful cheese, traps and bases as you gain experience points.

So, pretty straightforward right? And you're only on it really every 15 minutes, and all you do is click a button. Sooo many people are confused as to why I would play such a boring game. But you see, this is the beauty of mousehunt -- minimal energy and effort. I have an alarm plugin for it which means I am automatically reminded to sound the horn every 15 minutes. It doesn't interfere with whatever else I'm doing on the computer, and I just keep it as a single window open.

For such minimal effort, it has brought me pretty good return. The cheese and names of mice in the game is all very punny, after real life cheeses and mice. This has shockingly enough actually aided me in my life in de-ignorancing my knowledge of fancy cuisine:

1) I would have no idea what Havarti is, for instance, if not for mousehunt. At first it reminded me of Pavarti Patel from Harry Potter but now I know better :P Havarti was brought out at a dinner party with my dad's boss. I felt slightly more classy having at least heard of it before :) This also happened several times while I was in France.

2) The knowledge of what Gouda is helped me when I was watching She's the Man.

3) I now had a reason to choose between swiss, smoked and cheddar whenever I went to subway because I had a better idea of how they were in fact different and that cheese didn't all taste the same. I always choose swiss now btw, just because it's the most expensive of the three on mousehunt. That, and cheddar is too salty.

4) The knowledge of how cheese is made actually helped me in the secondary schools' chemistry quiz last year. One of the questions was a puzzle where chemicals and materials had to be joined to the product which they were used in the manufacture of. One of the materials was "whey". With my mousehunt knowledge I was able to connect it to "cheese" :) That's 1/3 of a point that helped us get third place in that competition :D

5) The pictoral representation of mozzarella which mousehunt provided helped me find it in the supermarket when my mum wanted to buy some to make pizza.

Those are just a few of the random bits of knowledge that a click every 15 minutes will grow for you without you realising :D And all knowledge turns out to be useful, even if it's about cheese haha.

However, I think most of all, the greatest lesson Mousehunt has taught me is the importance of perseverance. Having the patience to click every 15 minutes even when you're not catching the thing you want and having to start all over at the beginning of a region because you have recollect the materials for special cheese really tests that hahaha... (cough 19 misses on dragon mouse...)

But despite that, it made me realise that even if the chance of capturing something is 3%, if we try for long enough and click enough times, it will eventually happen. No matter how hard something seems to achieve, if we stick at it then numerically it's bound to happen sometime. After playing mousehunt, I perceive a 10% likelihood of something happening to be pretty good hahahaaha. Perhaps you could say that it's given me a warped perception of statistics, but I feel that it has definitely helped me be a lot more patient in other parts of my life. Not to rush, or to give up too easily. These are things that such a simple and menial game has taught me.

So, next time someone asks me why I still play mousehunt, I can just direct them to this blog. :) This has got to be the nerdiest blog I have ever written....