I found myself escaping into Club Penguin for an inordinate amount of time over the last few days.  It’s the new game — Snow Card-Jitsu.   In the basic level, three penguins (yourself included) go for multiple rounds against up to four opponents per round.  Each penguin has different capabilities, and it takes teamwork to survive.

I found my niche as a “Snow” penguin, healing my team mates, hanging a little back from the action, making sure the more powerful penguins stayed healthy enough to battle the snowmen bad guys.

What made this game so compelling?  The teamwork. It reminded me of some of the better times in the office. Yeah, sometimes a penguin would disappear from the game or just stop moving for a while.  Could have been their choice, could have been gremlins in the game.  Sometimes my teammates (chosen at random) would make foolish decisions on the game board.

However, often enough, I’d get a couple of players who did things right most of the time, and we’d have a solid chance of making through all three rounds, and maybe even the final bonus round.  If the bad guys ganged up on someone, another team member would stop fighting for a turn, and revive their downed teammate. 

Life isn’t a penguin game.  It’s so much more complicated.  It can be tricky to work as a team with the many-dimensional beasties called humans.   But when the human game of life gets rough, it’s awfully nice to be able to retreat into the simple collaboration of a penguin game.

Thanks to the game developers at Disney, and my former colleagues now at Adobe, who made the happy hours of escape possible.