Sometimes, just sometimes, a game comes along that inspires prose. For me, I have found one such game.

The author Philip Pullman once stated that “After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.” Nothing has driven this home to me like my time in Ark: Survival Evolved, where the point is to find nourishment, shelter, and companionship. Now that my tribe and I have those things, I find the time to reflect on what has happened.

Now understand, my step-kids have tried desperately to get me into Minecraft. However, the retro graphics, ease of building and griefing, and the community as a whole in many cases, made ‘playing with them’ less about teamwork and more like just being there. Then we got shown Ark…

The graphics have been awesome. From the ground foliage to the rocks and all the way to the stubble on the male survivor’s face, everything in this game is visually amazing. On lower settings, the game loses its detail, but you still get the vibe of the world your survivor finds himself or herself in. Near the top end graphics-wise, though, the game just POPS. The animal hides, the cracks in wooden floorboards—the whole nine. The only issue is finding a closed thatch door in a thatch wall…

The next amazing thing is the sheer lack of tutorial level, and I hope that never changes. You create a survivor and are randomly spawned into the world with a loincloth and a strange chip in your arm. Beyond that, if you are going it solo then you are on your own. I started by doing what I always do in Minecraft: I went and started punching trees. Some wood, some thatch, and a luckily-scrounged stone while trying to stave off hunger by finding berries, and then my inventory let me make a stone pick, the start of an amazing crafting journey. Figuring out that the pick harvests more of one material than the other, while the hatchet harvests more of the other material was stressful, but it was a little personal point of pride that I figured it out without running to a wiki. Currently, despite my stone HQ, huge spike wall, forge/smithy shelter and being the chieftain of a tribe larger than any other tribe on the server, my biggest stress is trying to get the tribal garden growing. I’ve finally figured out what I need to do, but its getting these dumb plants to grow that is the stressful part. Thankfully, a member of my tribe has taken up the cooking and gardening duties for the tribe, so I’ll learn from them once they’ve nailed it down reliably. Which leads me to another selling point…

The goals for most major projects nearly DEMAND work from your tribe, Ark’s version of guilds. The HQ has taken a major effort, but our biggest achievement is the spike wall. Without it, dinos (carnivores and herbivores) can just wander into town, and one stray dilophosaurus (aka “Dilo,” brutally aka “Dildo”) could severely wreck our day. Tons of resources, dozens of island days of harvesting and supply drops, and all the while working to keep yourself fed and watered. Those early days of trying to eke out the wood and stone to keep your tools functional begin to pale in comparison once your tech begins to require metal, and specifically metal ingots.

Finally, unless you are specifically on a PvE Ark, you have to do all of this, ALONE, on a server where the most dangerous predator isn’t the T-Rex, but the other players taking advantage of the persistent world and the fact that when you log off, your body and supplies are still at the mercy of other players.

Is it soloable? Sure! But will it be fun for you alone? I’d dare say not.

From the moment we found “our server” and started building in what we now call “Fish Camp” (the original location of our city Southtown,) our stories started. Our first thatch HQ, the work of trying to build something lasting. At some point, my step-son and I decided to call ourselves “Southtown,” mainly due to us being in the South of the Ark while others were scattered to the East and North. Then our stories changed from tales of victory to tales of bitterness, as a wrong hatchet swing caused a mated pair of Triceratops to wreck all of our work and drive us from our home. We randomly spawned further down the beach and, lesson learned, we turned to building what is now the city of Southtown.

Our lesson was that we expanded too quickly; we were playing Minecraft in Ark instead of playing Ark in Ark. We now stand tall and have started training dinos for the good of the tribe, but those early lessons—and the early stories they spring from—have been passed down to our newer tribemates in the last few days. More than anything, looking at newer tribe members and saving them from our own stupid mistakes will really shape the destiny of Southtown. The developers have promised a storyline and what not. But really, if I were to beat the game today, what would endure would be the stories. Heigar’s Sarco fight on the beach of Southtown was scary and epic. The day Krys trained our first Parasaur, or when Xander and I trained our first stegosaurus and ransacked the entire jungle for any narcoberries to keep the stego sedated. But more personally, the time my stepson Krys and I fought off a pack of Dilos, barely alive at the end, for just a bit of wood and stone…

Because really, those are the stories that matter most.