BY HUNTER ROBERSON, Freshman
While playing “The Game” as many students might say, you eat a virus and get split. You start to panic and see a bigger person coming.
You run and end up running right into the path of another person, who is just big enough to eat you. It’s game over.
Your statistics for that round show up, you see you did a very good job, eaten around 15,000 food and lasted for a good eight minutes.
How to Play
“The Game” is called Agar.io, many students play it when they have the time at school and often have a lot of fun.
“It’s very addicting and fun,” Geography teacher Richard Dyer said.
In the game Argar.io a player starts off as a very small cell and have to eat these little small peices of “food” to gain in size.
Once big enough, the player can start eating people. The player can go around looking for people smaller than themselves, all the while having to look out for people bigger than them.
“The game is very organic in the fact that there are no set rules and you have to figure it out by yourselves,” Dyer said.
You have two options to get players. The player can press the w key to eject mass and slow down players or split the viruses in two to split up another player.
The second option is to press the space key to split yourself in two to get another player who might be too fast for you.
But as the player goes around looking for other players they have to watch out for viruses that splits them, but once you are split you can eat the viruses.
At the end of every round you play or once you die you get a load out of your statistics for that round.
It shows you a small graph of your mass over time, your highest point of mass, the cells you ate, or other players, the time you lasted and whether or not you made it onto the leaderboard.
The goal of the game is to get to the top of the leader board, which can be quite hard.
Statistics
Agar.io is estimated to be worth around $322,000. This is simply from the ads on the login screen according to webvaluecheck.com.
The site itself gets around 4 million visitors daily, 120 million visitors monthly, and 1.4 billion visitors yearly.
Agar.io is most popular in the United States of America but has servers all over the world so you can play wherever you want.
It is mostly played by children who want a game they can be competitive at while having fun.
What teachers have to say
Agar.io is a very fun and interesting game, but it’s educational value can be questioned.
“I think it might teach students some strategy in the fact that you have to avoid players and eat them,” art teacher Gina Taylor said.
Dyer also gave some insight on the educational value of Agar.io and said that it teaches critical thinking skills as well because you watch other players and learn from their mistakes.
On the other hand some teachers might think otherwise.
“It teaches absolutely nothing,” English teacher Candace Rowland said.
Some teachers have never even heard of the game Agar.io.
“I’m too old to know about that game,” Government teacher Patrick Kelly commented.
Many teachers do not have any experience with Agar.io and do not wish to have any experience with it ever.
Other teachers and students both like and enjoy playing it.
“A student showed it to me and I went home and played it and got hooked,” Dyer said.
Agar.io is a very fun game for kids to play and teaches them how to stratigize and critical thinking skills.
It has even hooked some grown ups into its grasp, so go on and play the “Game”.
