Iestyn forwarded a link to the browser based community game, My Brute, last week but I only got round to signing up yesterday.

The premise is dull simple: enter your name and the game will randomly generate a 25 pixel high fighter for you. They’re given a random set of statistics, with attribute points spread across three areas: Strength, Speed and Agility.

Then you simply send your character off to battle in a virtual arena either against random strangers or other friends who have signed up.

The fights are scripted so you just sit back and watch what happens, the outcome presumably dictated by weighted dice rolls multiplied by luck. You earn one experience point for a loss and two for a win and, as your character goes up levels, he or she gets access to weapons such as clubs, knives and, um, kazoos or perhaps gains a pet to help out in scraps.

What makes a basic and uninspiring format compelling is the ability for your character to gain pupils. Send your character’s link around to friends and, if they join up, they will automatically join your dojo. This matters because whenever their character levels up you earn a slice of experience points too.

Essentially then, My Brute is a pyramid scheme for experience junkies and yet more proof of Kieron Gillen’s theory that sometimes just watching a number go up is enough for a player in a videogame.

Speaking of Gillen, I convinced him to give it a go yesterday. Having created the misleadingly hott girl avatar, ViolentTrevor, Gillen went on a pupil recruitment drive, posting a link to his Twitter and, then, to PC Gamer Online Rock, Paper, Shotgun, thus taking his pupil count to 700+ in a matter of hours.

So yeah, it’s time to mobilise the Chewing Pixels readership. There may not be as many of us, but by heck we’re a better breed of hobbyist videogamer: we are, after all, console gamers.

Join here and (as soon as I’m a high enough level to actually form a clan ) we’ll band together and bring down those terrain-loving PC elitists.

And yes, I realise that this is exactly the kind of “viral” nonsense that the developers are hoping might go on but, who cares: its neat and simple enough that maybe it deserves it.

That said, the fact I find its rudimentary and near exploitative systems interesting says bad things about what appeals to me as a player. Although, come to think of it, JRPGs have been doing that for years….