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Doping on Dopewars | 3.4.01
After I watched the movie Traffic, I wanted to become a drug lord. Well, not really, but I thought it was amusing how selling drugs could instanteously bring in profits. I find the actual use of drugs to be absurd and not worth the baggage it brings in exchange for momentary pleasure. However, I find drugs to be very merchant-friendly. Once you get a "consumer" to purchase and use the product, you are most likely guaranteed many more purchases from this customer. It's sort of like a corrupt mechanic who fixes your car but doesn't completely solve the problem so you would have to come back for another fix and pay more. But with drugs, the process continues until the customer is forcefully put into rehab or unfortunately becomes deceased. I borrowed my friend's TI-89 calculator one day for a test and on it I found Dopewars. I had heard of the game before, except it was called Drugwars for the TI-85. Anyway, I gave the game a try and as soon as I had the game figured out, I became hooked like a heroin addict. The game is fairly simple. You start out with $2000 in cash and in thirty-one days' time, you must buy and sell for as much profit as possible. The drugs you may deal include ludes, speed, weed, acid, and the two gems, heroin and coke. The game comes down to how many times you can buy heroin and coke for cheap and sell them in a city with a huge heroin demand or a coke bust. Though the game was a bunch of numbers, I found it to be quite amusing. The first weekend I had my friend's calculator, I must've played that game in pathetic amounts. I remember going to the bathroom with it and playing the game (sorry Nigi, but I played before I wiped). The funny thing for me was that I wasn't the only Dopewars addict. I wanted the game on my own calculator, but I ended up putting the game in another friend's calculator by accident. My friend Welton found the game on his calculator and before long, he was a Dopewars junkie, too. I also learned that Samir was a Dopewars player and a good one at that. He told me about his conquests and also some pointers. He told me that if I wanted to "cheat," I should take out multiple $5,000 loans and start the game off with a big load of heroin. He told me that his personal best with cheating was $211 million. I ended up breaking his record with $252 million, but he had another record that still seems impossible to even fathom: $344 million without cheating. With that as the magic number, Welton and I spend each calculus class pounding away at our calculators. We play a game in which we record the total amount of money we make playing Dopewars for that period and find out the average per game. It helps to pass the time by very quickly and I guess it's somewhat math-related. Drugs are bad and there is no doubt about it. Drug dealing is bad and nobody should contaminate society with such dangerous substances. Living a month of a drug dealer's life and making tons of virtual cash is harmless and that's why we choose to play Dopewars. |
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