Zero Points For Homeless Awareness Content

I've been involved sort of half-heartedly with a game that was promoted through Facebook a while back. It's called HoboWars. The game has an urban setting and members are hobos or homeless people who must navigate around a city to do such activities as panhandling outside of a store, attempting to go to school to get smarter (starting from grade 1??), and trying to avoid a thorough SH*T-kicking at the hands of other hobos.

I don't even have to ask how much creators of this game relied on the most general, obvious and dramatic stereotypes of hobos or homeless people, but a store which sells weapons to hobos in this game so they can beat each other or protect themselves from being beaten on is just a bit too much!

I know it is a game - and as I already said, I've been "INVOLVED" with playing this online RPG game for a while. Mostly, I log in and find out that dozens of players have attacked me while I have been logged out, and that the players with the highest scores have earned 5-digit money amounts in order to purchase weapons with which to beat me while I'm away lol

Naturally, the game strays quite far from real life situations. In which city that you know of are hobos able to come up with from $6, 000 to $13, 000 to purchase a long length of pipe for either protection or a weapon? lol

Some of the weapons cost 5-digit sums!

I continue to shake my head at the "storyline" here, though the game has some interesting features like many other RPGs online. If I can continue to barely stomach the graphics and tone of this game, and it's insinuations that hobos are stupid (in need of education, starting with grade 1) and horrendously violent (a weapon store?), then I am still interested to see what I find around town in this game - aside from other player/hobo interactions.

One part of the game that I do find interesting, and from where nobody inside the game seems to actively beat on me, is the section where I can wander around just looking for cans, bottles, dropped money, and odd items. I gather a lot of money sometimes during my wandering, and then I can take the money to my bank account.

Strangely enough - I am a hobo in the game - who has no less than a tidy sum of $11, 000 in my bank account most of the time!

I purchased a FORK - for PROTECTION and as a weapon - for a mere $6, 000 a couple of months ago...

I purchased a CUP - a styrofoam cup - to use defensively as a weapon a couple of months ago, too. I cannot remember how much I paid for the cup now but it was a 4-digit cost to me - you know, the kind of styrofoam cup that would be FREE to any hobo in real life? One that a hobo would get for free when getting a drink at the doctor's (even a free health clinic) office - and would also contain a drink of free water or juice?

Perhaps I just continue to play this game out of that same kind of human mind phenomenon which makes people stand and stare at serial killer photographs in newspapers after the serial killers are incarcerated for life........ there's no purpose in this - nobody will RUN INTO the serial killer again, but everyone gawks and stares...

Morbid curiosity!