Making Vocal A Tab...Better

What if we could find the most viewed (or the most liked) stories of all time, on this platform, in one location? Wouldn’t that be just swell? Why not?

Imagine, just for second, that we are sitting in one of the Vocal Conference Rooms, somewhere in New York City (I suspect), having a formal meeting, and we’re herein pushing forward a motion to create a simple ‘tab’ (preferably one that is next to the Latest Stories tab) on the main page of the Vocal website, so that anyone, and everyone (who has ever written on this medium) can easily find and access stories that have amassed views in the top 10 — or, perhaps even the top 20 — published to date. However, for all I know it might be a wee bit more complicated than that.

Yet, I'm sure the lot of you would be curious to know who has garnered thousands, if not tens of thousands, of views on this platform. Could we not include such a feature, merely for the sake of curiosity? I mean, these Top Views or Top Likes could always be reset each year (perhaps by having a ‘tab’ within a ‘tab’?), so that fresh articles appear at the top of the list for the respective year. At any rate, I believe there is a case for such a tab, and I’ll tell you why…

When I was in secondary school, one of my friends introduced me to an online game. And, I recently learned that it’s still running! — after all these years! (Currently, the game is on its 114th round.) If you haven't guessed, the online game is called... (drum roll)... Planetarion. The group of us (a small but legendary circle of friends) would spend countless hours with this game, even if it was just idling in a hidden tab on our computer screens, all whilst studying for exams (including diplomas I should add), though it may be frowned upon to admit — yet I don't regret it.

The main objective of this game was to attack the other planets outside your own galaxy and collect as many asteroids as one could muster, which would then raise one's score, respectively. Thus the highest score would win the round.

Within this game, one strategy involved building the correct class of ship to deploy to a different planet(s), where each planet represented a different real-life user from somewhere in the world, to acquire these highly sought-after asteroids (or just roids for short), which would then allow one to mine their own planet faster and generate resources at a quicker rate.

With the means (resources) to build ships and the plans to attack planets in other galaxies (to gain even more of these roids), the cycle would thus continue, until the end of the round, where a victor — which was the top scorer — was declared. And though I haven’t played the game since the initial rounds many years ago, I imagine it has evolved quite a bit since the dawn of it, when I should've otherwise been focusing more on diplomas (but then again, you wouldn't have this story, such is the life trade-off). Even so, with it being roughly 110 rounds since I was last on Planetarion, I distinctly recall one victor (as far back as round 3 or 4?) and the planet he ruled, which he had named: The Roman Empire.

You can probably tell, now, that his delusions of galactic supremacy are now merging with my own delusions as I take up the torch he unintentionally handed over, at the end of a Planetarion round, when I attacked his planet for fun (together with my friends — it was a team effort), and I was instantly obliterated. Perhaps Rand may have said it best when she stated, “What is man? He's just a collection of chemicals with delusions of grandeur.”