I definitely found our site visit to Wargaming today the most interesting so far as I do generally enjoy to play games when I have free time and it was really cool to see what a gaming company is like and what specific things they do. Wargaming is mainly known for its three war games World of Tanks, World of Warships, and World of Warplanes. They also made the decision to make these games free to play which recently, many games have decided to do. I learned that the most important thing when having a free to play game is player retention and keeping players playing the game and enjoying it. Alexander explained many ways they do this with things such as endless content by releasing updates monthly or having in game events and sometimes collaborations with well known celebrities or creators. He also stressed the importance of cross platform gameplay and progression between consoles which is also highly important for a successful game. Another thing I learned about the gaming industry is there are actually a lot of roles that go into a gaming company. You have the game developers but then you also have creative directors that actually come up with ideas in the game to keep players engaged. There are also jobs like the marketing team to help market the game to consumers and also game testers to test new updates and these testers can even be very experienced players. Wargaming is similar to a supply chain in concept but the difference is they use digital distribution for their games. This is still the same concept of creating the game, storing it digitally, and distributing it to consumers among different digital platforms such as Steam, the Microsoft Store, or the App Store. I also learned that these platforms take 30% of the Wargaming’s revenue which is not something that I knew gaming platforms did.

Today we also visited the Kakopetria village and St. Nicholas of the Roof Church which were both very interesting and beautiful. At the village, our tour guide, Georgia, told us that Kakopetria means evil rock in greek and it was named this because the rock apparently fell and crushed a young couple at their wedding which is a story that gets passed down there. Also, the village itself I observed was very hilly and there was also a lot of cats and ducks around which is something I wasn’t used to although we have been seeing a lot of cats around Cyprus in general. In the St. Nicholas church, it was very beautiful and one thing we were shown inside the church was on the inner walls, there were deceptions of many famous Christian events in history such as the birth of Jesus, the crucifixion of Jesus, and the resurrection of Jesus. I thought it was very interesting that you could look at all of them and it tells a story of some of the most important events in Christian history. It was also interesting when Georgia explained that wax offerings such as a baby or a heart are offered to the church for people to wish for things like good health or a newborn son.