Say what you will about Evony. Decry its cleavage-heavy, ubquitous online advertising campaign. Call its gameplay derivative and weak. Whatever. The game may have saved a man's life.
Robert “Bob” Chambers was chilling at his home in Spokane, WA, playing some Evony on FaceBook, when smoke filled the room. A toaster was on fire. Because Chambers is disabled with muscular dystropy, he couldn't throw a towel over the appliance, nor call for help. So he turned to Evony.
“Help me,” he recalled typing on an Evony message board, using his specialized computer mouse and on-screen keyboard. “My house is on fire and I can’t get out.”
He gave out his address, and players in Indiana and Texas called the fire department. Heroic Spokane firefighters soon carried him to safety.
“I hated this game because he doesn’t pay attention to me or anything else in the house,” The man's wife told The Spokesman-Review. “Now I’ve got to bite my tongue because it saved his life quite possibly.”
Okay, you could argue that a stuck piece of toast probably wouldn't have actually filled the house with enough smoke to kill anyone, but shhhhhh. Who knows what would have happened if it hadn't been for the wonder of Evony and Facebook? Plus, how awesome is it that technology has opened the world to people who, in ages past would have been shut out from most forms of communication?
