Today we headed back to the capital city of Cyprus to visit the company headquarters of Wargaming.  Wargaming is best known for its legendary war games consisting of: World of Tanks, World of Warplanes, and World of Warships.  As we arrived, we were immediately given a tour of the building which consisted of a gym for employees as well as a sauna and some massage rooms.  Our tour guide then explained they had all these amenities as they want a solidified connection between work and life and described it as “Work Life Harmony”.  Next on the tour, we got to see some of the offices and were taken to one of the top-floor balconies and got an amazing view of Nicosia.  As we kept touring it came very apparent that the major goal of wargaming was to make their employees enjoy their job and not look at it as just work.   After this, we headed to a futuristic conference room where we were given our presentation.  Wargaming was founded in 1998 but surprisingly did not release a game until 2010.  This is the release of their most popular and famous game “World of Tanks”.  The company also talked about the advantages of releasing all of its content digitally as well as being a free-to-play title.  Releasing their content digitally allowed for much faster patches and updates in case of a game-breaking bug or glitch.  While this is a big positive, they also explained how selling a game on a digital platform like Steam loses them a little bit of revenue as the digital platform takes a cut of the sale.  Wargaming was also built on the value of free-to-play which allows the user to play the game at no cost and then later the user can interact with microtransactions which usually offer cosmetic skins and different designs than the base game.  The company was also very big into historical accuracy and even devoted a whole team to travel to museums to make sure that the historical look of the game was right.

After wargaming, we headed back to The University of Nicosia where we took two classes at.  The first class was a class in which we had to calculate the total CO2 emissions from our group traveling to Cyprus from Pitt.  In the second class, we did a bunch of team building exercises ranging from building a spaghetti tower, creating a story off of looking at images, and ranking items 1-15 for most important in surviving in the desert.  These exercises were meant to emphasize working as a team to find a solution to a problem that we faced.  After our classes, we were taken on a tour of Old Nicosia where we walked close to the border between the Turkish and Greek sides before heading back to the hotel for the night.