One evening while ‘who friend’ing, as I often do, I paused in response to one of my friend’s titles referring to an alleged clan practice of skank for rank recruitment. I couldn’t help but wonder, should we be concerned by this? My first step was to refer to my trusted and preferred online dictionary site, dictionary.reference.com, where I was able to identify this definition, as well as a couple others, for the term my friend had chosen. I didn’t bother asking him to clarify which one he meant - everyone knows that there are no real female mudders, slovenly or otherwise.
The second part of my investigation consisted of evaluating current and past clan activity statistics from both my own sources, and trusted resources such as Light’s PowerRankings. At the time of this article, the clans showing the largest increase in member count over the past three weeks include Daoine, Retribution, and Vanir. This doesn't necessarily mean the most new recruits, as I suppose it is possible a clan could have recruited more people, and simply be showing as less because they outcasted as many or more, but being that the Fae do seem to be a dancing type of folk in general, I can easily see how a talented skanker could, in fact, be beneficial to their kind, although I don’t quite understand how this could improve ranks, since dancing and mudding are difficult to do simultaneously. Perhaps with voice activated software, all clans could find additional potential in their best skankers, and continue to see their PowerRanking scores drop.
It’s important to remember, though, that the size of the clan doesn’t necessarily reflect its true strength in either the PowerRankings or its overall skanktitude. Light doesn’t include inactive players in their consideration, but I think that the health benefits and enjoyment skanking can offer will likely extend well beyond our characters and into our real, personal lives. It does seem logical that healthy, happy players could be less likely to have downtime due to illness or depression, and perhaps in this way, individual skankiness can help build a stronger clan.
The remaining questions I seek to answer are these: How can we be sure players everywhere are actually skanking? Is it possible to acquire video footage to ensure they aren’t, in facting, dancing the tango, or perhaps the Carlton? Is skanking more beneficial than these or other activities? Is there a version of DDR that supports skank training?
