I studied abroad and have been lucky enough to travel internationally on a few occasions, but the biggest rift in culture I've personally experienced happened in a video game (Thread).

I've played Ark: Survival Evolved in long spurts off and on since the day it came out for pre-release in 2015, and it remains my favorite sandbox game I've ever played.

Ark has an international player base, and has an especially strong following in the UK, so it's fairly common to encounter British accents when bounding about the landscapes of The Island, Ragnarok, and the like.

On a PvE (no player-to-player combat) server, a friend and I had started a new game from scratch. We've never gone to war with anyone in any game we've ever started, and prefer to keep to ourselves and not cause trouble.

However, official servers tend to mostly be populated by a gaggle of smaller tribes and one or two "alpha tribes" that are made of a dozen or more players that work around the clock to gather resources and stockpile high-level creatures.

Their bases take up huge swaths of land and their huge collections of creatures bog down the game significantly whenever you fly over, but they're largely not terribly intrusive and generally leave you to your business on PvE servers....unless they don't.

One very annoying thing they will do to claim extra land is to "pillar spam," which is essentially to build lots of small structures all over the place and take advantage of the game's no-build radius to keep other players' bases far away from your own.

My friend and I had found ourselves a spot on a beach in a great location. There were a handful of pillars nearby belonging to a nearby tribe, but our section of the beach hadn't been claimed, so we just went about our business.

After a little while, we noticed that sometimes our structures would have some damage when we logged in. The only way that can happen when the entire tribe is offline is if another player baits wild creatures into attacking your base, meaning that someone was trying to evict us.

With the only pillars nearby belonging to a single tribe, we naturally determined them to be the culprits in a sort of land-seeking conquest. We confronted one of their members to ask why they were doing such.

He explained that we had built our base on a section of beach that they meant to pillar off, but apparently had forgot to. Me not having any patience for people being excessively greedy for space on a *video game*, I responded in my typically snarky manner.

I said to their tribe representative, who sported a thick British accent,"I know I haven't played for a couple months, but I must have missed the DLC that added property rights to this game."

This person did *not* think my sarcasm was funny. It was in that moment that I realized/remembered that American and British sarcasm are quite different.

Long story short, his alpha tribe obliterated our base and we left the server.

The lesson to be learned here is that if someone with the capability to blow up your house is angry with you, it is *not* advisable to be excessively sarcastic with them.