Today we had the wonderful opportunity to visit the main headquarters for Wargaming. From this visit, I learned that the game development industry is much more collaborative across developing companies and publishers than I thought, and had a lot more components. They told us that they often call games that share a similar genre and field to theirs “peers.” They use peers to generate ideas and compare the performance of their games. For example, many games implemented a “battle pass” after the success of Fortnite with this concept. They don’t consider this an infringement or copying, instead it slowly developed into an industry standard. They use peer games as well to track their performance and see what other companies are doing better or worse to achieve user engagement. As far as components, I previously knew that games had artistic designers, game play designers, and programmers. One factor that we discussed that I didn’t consider is those whose job is to test the games and suggest improvements who work within the company in a process known as Beta Testing. I also found it interesting that entire games could be scrapped if they did not perform well at this step in the process. The work Wargaming does relates to the supply chain concepts we learned in their distribution process. Once they have a game finished, they publish it on their platform. They also work with other well known game distribution companies such as Steam, XBox, and mobile app stores to help their games reach a wider audience. In a traditional supply chain, this would be similar to products being shipped from a distribution center to different retailers to be sold.

During our visit to Kakopetria, our guide, Georgia, mentioned that many people who lived in that village worked locally in tourism or agriculture, or travelled to the city of Nicosia to work. Because of its location in the mountains and historic churches, Kakopetria is a common tourist site for both people living in Cyprus and those who are travelling from abroad, making tourism and restaurant work an important industry for those living in the village. We learned that the village is called Kakopetria because of a rock found in the center of the city, which couples used to walk around as part of a marriage ritual to bless their marriage. When one young couple was completing this task, the rock moved, killing them both. This is how the village adopted the name Kakopetria, meaning bad or evil rock. On our visit to the St. Nicholas of the Roof Church, we got to witness the preserved fresco art from the 11th, 14th, and 17th centuries. I learned that this art style is done by painting with dyes onto the wet concrete, creating bright paintings in the concrete that are easily preserved throughout the centuries. I found it interesting that despite being from different time periods, the paintings were made in the same style but with influences from the current ruling country, such as the appearance of crusaders in the artwork. The church had an addition built in the 14th century in which they added a second roof for protection and an extra room that would traditionally be used by women during worship. This double roof is why it’s called “of the Roof.”