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n00b World Reorder, part 4

Posted by under game design, geophysics, mmorpg, world of warcraft

(This is the fourth part of an ongoing series  of skientific infestigations into the physics, chemistry and biology of Azeroth, the world known as ‘of Warcraft’. This will probably be gibberish unless you have read part 1, part 2 and part 3 first.)

The ecology of Azeroth, part 2

The strangest aspect of the animal life (and some parts of the plant life) of Azeroth is its physical nature. This section is based on the following observable phenomena:

  • Fauna (and mobile flora) cannot pass through physical objects such as rocks, walls, etc.
  • Fauna (including members of the PC races) can pass through other creatures and certain plants as if they were not there.
  • Carried objects including weapons can pass through creatures without effect except during specific moments when the item’s carrier is in combat with the creature in question. These objects include a combatant’s native weapons such as fangs, claws or fists. Objects fired from a bow or gun can pass through a creature not in combat with the firer, to then strike and wound the intended combatant.
  • Spirit creatures including ghosts cannot pass through walls, rocks, etc. but can be hit with any weapon, and can carry solid objects including coins and cloth. In other words spirit creatures are as corporeal as any other creature on the World of Warcraft, except for their partial transparency (though they still cast shadows—see below). This is not true of the spirit-forms of the PC races, who cannot harm or be harmed in the time between the death of their corporeal body and their resurrection, but which are also blocked by physical objects.
  • All animate creatures can recover from life-threatening wounds to full health in minutes, and return to their regular activities as if nothing had happened.
  • All animate creatures including spirits cast a shadow that is not influenced by the position of the sun or moon, other light-sources or other observable phenomena. Instead it always lies at their feet, as if they were being illuminated by a single point-source a short distance above their centre of gravity.

Based on these observations, we might hypothesise that there are two forms of matter on Azeroth. The first is ‘physical matter’, comprising almost all inanimate objects from mountains to fenceposts, major plant-life, and weapons. It is non-reactive, cannot be destroyed, and is essentially inert. The second is ‘animate matter’: if something on Azeroth moves or can be moved then it is made of animate matter, and conversely if it is not made of animate matter then it cannot move. Thus all living creatures, ambulatory plants, small vegetation, some small objects, ghosts and other spirit-based beings are all comprised of animate matter. Animate matter has a much lower molecular density than inanimate matter, and so any two objects made of animate matter can occupy the same physical space or pass through each other without interference or displacement.

However, this theory requires too many special cases and exceptions to be plausible. For example, it does not explain how weapons normally can pass through living beings without harming them outside a combat situation, but immediately combat starts will cause injury and death. Nor does it explain the movement of large pieces of Goblin engineering seen in Gadgetzan and Everlook, or zeppelins and ships which all move but appear to be made of physical matter. Besides, it does not fit any known theory of the way that the universe works, and there is another hypothesis that does, for a certain select value of ‘theory’.

Azeroth is a world in which all living creatures repeatedly retread the same paths to perform a small set of the same actions, often fighting and killing (or being killed by) adversaries that they have killed (or been killed by) many times before. Some have a wider range of actions than others, but none are able to break free and do what we would think of as ‘normal’ actions, either for animals—eating, breeding, dying of old age—or for intelligent humanoids—having a meal with friends, spending time with family, finding a partner, raising children, or retiring. We do not know why the animals do this; but the intelligent humanoids do it because they believe there is some kind of goal they are heading for, some kind of nebulous reward: power, reknown, perhaps an escape of some kind, a need not to participate in these actions any more.

When one combines these observations with the above notes on the fluid nature of living beings on Azeroth (their abilities to pass through some solid objects, for example) it becomes clear that there are parallels for this kind of existence in our universe, though one not properly understood or even recognised by most scientists. Nonetheless, in most cultures this state of being would be called an ‘afterlife’, and the people inhabiting it ‘ghosts’, trapped in a purgatorial netherworld where they must endlessly repeat the same actions, even if those actions include repeatedly dying.

This hypothesis fits well with many of the observable phenomena on Azeroth. It explains, for example, how in combat a sword can clearly be seen to bisect an opponent’s torso without cutting them in half or even leaving a visible wound. The only plausible explanation is that these beings are trapped in a spirit-based half-life of performing actions and missions that have been done a million times before, endless repetitions of violence and endless, meaningless deaths. Some conventional theories of such things would classify this as “Hell”.

We cannot hypothesise why this should be, or if there is any way for the inhabitants of Azeroth to escape from their situation.

(To be concluded, eventually in part 5)

n00b World Reorder, part 3

Posted by under game design, geophysics, mmorpg, world of warcraft

(This entry is the third part of a continuing quasi-scientific investigation into the nature of Azeroth, the world better known as “of Warcraft”. Here we move on from geophysics to study the local ecology. Part 1 and Part 2 of the series are still online.)

The ecology of Azeroth is perplexing. In addition to the most populous group of what we call the ‘PC races’ (humans, night elves, dwarves, gnomes, draenai, orcs, trolls, tauren, blood elves) there are at least twenty other humanoid, sentient or semi-sentient races (goblins, yeti, quilboar, satyrs, gnolls, harpies, furbolg, murlocs, owlbeasts, various species of giants, centaurs, dryads, earthen, kobolds, nagas, troggs, tuskarr, ancients, pandaren, those ugly bastards from the Badlands, et al) all of which seem to have followed distinct evolutionary trees.

In addition there is a dazzling diversity of other large species: more than two hundred of them. This is an extraordinary number for an area as small as Azeroth, which as noted in Part 1 has a landmass of 113 square kilometres (the Galapagos Islands, which has a landmass of 7880 square kilometres, supports only 22 native species of reptiles, 29 species of birds and six species of mammals). Even odder is that almost all of the species that run wild in Azeroth display traits that mark them as natural predators, which is to say meat-eaters. This will be explored later.

Animals in Azeroth are fiercely territorial, and many never move more than twenty metres from where they spawned. Some will pursue a perceived predator (i.e. a member of the PC races) for some distance, but will return to their regular turf as soon as the interloper has been chased away.

Myopia appears to be endemic in almost all the species of Azeroth, as well as deafness and apathy. It is possible to shout, leap up and down, fire guns and even fight and kill a member of a species less than twenty metres in front of one of its fellows without the other reacting at all, or even appearing to notice, even when it walks over the corpse of its fellow a few seconds later.

It is unclear why the different species have evolved to fill certain ecological niches. There are large numbers of predators in a geographically small area empty of prey animals, herd animals that do not form herds, scavengers in areas empty of carrion, and so on. There is no sign of an orthodox food-chain: neither herbivores nor carnivores have ever been observed to eat anything. The predators and carnivores do not typically attack each other, or the large herbivores. The herbivores do not graze. Scavengers do not feed on corpses. Nothing ever drinks at streams, ponds or moonwells.

There are only three possible conclusions we can draw from this. Firstly, either the creatures of Azeroth with the exception of the PC races and their pets do not need to eat or drink (in fact the PC races and their pets do not need to eat and drink either, they only do so for recreation or to speed recovery from wounds). Secondly the creatures may be very shy and only eat when there are no observers around, but the lack of observers makes this impossible to verify (this paradoxical theory is known as Schrodinger’s Kitkat). Or thirdly, they are acquiring sustenance by another means.

This last option is more likely than it sounds at first. We have already observed in part 2 of this series that the atmosphere of Azeroth is thicker than our own, and seems to contain minute particles that obscure animals and objects from being seen at a distance. We propose that these particles are a variety of micro-organisms, types of airborne plankton that have evolved a symbiotic relationship with the rest of Azeroth’s animal (and plant and elemental and daemonic) life. This works as follows:

  1. Animals derive nutrition and hydration by inhaling the plankton in the air around them.
  2. When a host animal dies, the plankton strip its carcass in a matter of minutes, leaving nothing behind, not even the bones. The skins of creatures on Azeroth appear to act as a defence against the attacks of these plankton: when a carcass’s skin is removed the remaining flesh and bones disappear almost immediately—devoured with ferocious speed by the airborne plankton.

It would be easy to prove the theory by dissecting the corpse of almost any of these creatures, to observe whether its digestive system contains any solid food or has adapted to filter, process, digest and defend its innards from these micro-organisms. However, because of the very action of these micro-organisms on corpses, this has so far proved impossible. We remain optimistic.

This hypothesis also explains one of Azeroth’s more curious visual tricks: the way that creatures will fade into and out of view a short distance from the observer. If the airborne plankton are not uniformly spread through the atmosphere but congregate around their symbiotic companions, then they will hide the creature from sight until an observer is really quite close but, being microscopic, they are not detectable themselves. Creatures that can use a ‘stealth’ form do so by increasing the density of micro-organisms in the air around them, hiding themselves from view.

The presence of ‘wind’ in only a few of Azeroth’s regions can also be explained by the airborne plankton theory. Wind seems endemic to desert regions (Tanaris, Badlands, Silithus), and obscures vision by whipping dust into the air. However, as we have seen in part 1, the dust of Azeroth is far too heavy to be lifted into the air by air currents. Therefore we theorise that the deserts are the breeding-grounds of the aeroplankton, and what appears to be a duststorm is in fact the local microfauna in a frenzy of activity. This may be a mating-frenzy. As with so much, Azeroth lacks the proper tools for an in-depth analysis, it is difficult to bring samples away from the world, and besides amoeba-porn isn’t really our thing.

It is notable that one group of creatures are not subject to the effects of these micro-organisms on their corpses. When a member of that subgroup of intelligent humanoids we call the ‘PC races’ dies their corpse will remain whole for hours and sometimes days, and after the flesh has been removed then the skeleton stays whole and visible for some time. Apart from PCs, the only species whose bones are ever exposed to the air without immediately disintegrating are those of huge and possibly long-extinct beasts whose remains can be found in Tanaris, Desolace, Un’Goro and other areas. One can hypothesise, therefore, that the PC races are not originally native to Azeroth, but are recent arrivals whose bodies are not properly attuned to the local ecology. This explains a number of things, including the way the rest of Azeroth’s ecosystem regards them.

I said above that the creatures of Azeroth are almost never seen to attack each other. However, there is one group of species that the majority of creatures will attack on sight: members of the PC races. The reason for this intense (and, it must be said, usually mutual) bloodlust is not clear, but is clearly more important to them than any other normal biological urge including self-preservation. Apart from this, Azeroth is a haven of interspecies harmony and tranquility.

The creatures of Azeroth do not follow any recognised behaviour in matters of mating and reproduction, and in fact in most species there is no clear difference between males and females. Mating is never observed. While some species nest and produce eggs, and a few of them even hatch, these are rarely the same species in which young are observed in the wild.

Instead, the creatures of Azeroth have a bizarre way of—one cannot call it ‘reproducing’, but it’s the closest thing they have. When a member of a species dies (for which read ‘is killed’, as this is the only way that 99% of Azerothian creatures can die: members of the PC races can also die by falling long distances or drowning, and there is a kodo graveyard in Desolace though no kodo has ever been seen to die there of natural causes), a few minutes later an almost identical creature at an identical level of maturity appears, phoenix-like, in almost the same spot.

This bizarre occurrence can be explained by an observable process when a member of the PC races dies. At this point their spirit reappears at the nearest graveyard, and must journey back to where their corpse lies before it can resurrect itself. It seems reasonable to assume the same process happens every time one of the non-PC creatures dies: their spirit is transported to a graveyard and must travel back to where it died before it ‘re-spawns’. By this time, of course, the local airborne micro-plankton has already dealt with its corpse. The process by which it acquires an entirely new body in a matter of seconds is not clear at this time.

So far we have explained a number of the strange individual behaviours of Azerothian fauna, but have failed to tie those explanations together into an overall theory of life on Azeroth. We do have such a theory, but it is so startling in its nature that it deserves a part of its own.

(Click here to read part 4 of ‘n00b World Reorder’)

n00b World Reorder, part 2

Posted by under fiction, game design, geophysics, mmorpg, Uncategorized, world of warcraft

(This is a continuation of the essay started here and synopsised on video here.)

I note that my previous post has sparked some academic debate in certain circles relating to the validity of my research techniques and data. Therefore before we embark into a new area of discussion, I must address some of the comments addressed to my previous data. Specifically these relate to two areas: (1) is Azeroth, the World of Warcraft, spherical or flat? And (2) if it’s spherical, how can we accurately gauge how large a sphere it is?

To address point (2) first: there are two existing illustrations of Azeroth as a sphere: the globes that can be seen at various locations in the World of Warcraft, including in Dire Maul and Moonglade:

and the view of a planet assumed to be Azeroth that can be seen from Shadowmoon Valley in Outland:

...or is it?

Both give an equivalent view of Azeroth-as-sphere: the known continents occupy a roughly 180-degree arc of the surface, with the remaining area (in the Moonglade globe) filled with ocean and occasional small islands. That is the premise that underlay my initial observations and measurements.

But all this is moot. Other empirical evidence demonstrates clearly that the world of Azeroth is flat, the maps and globes are wrong, and the view from Shadowmoon Valley is an optical illusion. To illustrate this, here is a picture of a troll standing on a thin pathway that divides the Great Sea from the edge of the world. If the existing maps of the World of Warcraft are to be believed, this should be somewhere off the eastern coast of Dustswallow Marsh, between Kalimdor and the Eastern Kingdoms, and well south of the Maelstrom.

Since no sphere can have an edge with an apparently bottomless drop, this means the World of Warcraft is fucking flat, all right?

The pathway at the edge of the world shown above does not run around the entire perimeter of the world or even around Kalimdor, or we could have used the walking-measure described in part 1 to work out the size of the rectangle around the continent. But from visual observation, we have to report that Azeroth seems to exist on the end of a very tall pillar; possibly two or even three very tall pillars, one for each continent. In other words, please disregard pretty much everything I wrote in Part 1 because it’s balls.

We can make no firm statements about the length or breadth of the World of Warcraft, or its density, which leaves too many variables unknown to calculate the height of these pillars. We are not sure why the sea doesn’t fall through the side of the pillar, since it does not seem to be solid. We are also not sure what the bottom of the pillar is resting on, but it may well be a turtle. This is all so improbable that you should ignore the last three sentences of this paragraph, including this one.

However, we still have to accept that Azeroth (a) is flat, (b) is quite small, and (c) does not rotate relative to the stars around it. Point (d) is that its sun and moon behave in a manner that makes no gravitational sense. Azeroth has a single sun that rises in the north-west and sets some hours later, also in the north-west. Shadows cast by it point persistently south-east, though this does not seem to affect vegetation that grows in this perpetual shade. Azeroth also has a single moon, which also rises in the north-west and sets in the north-west. If it has phases and eclipses then none have been reported.

It is hard to explain this movement of Azeroth’s celestial bodies unless we assume that they are acting under the influence of gravity itself—rising above the horizon, reaching a zenith, and falling back below the horizon, where something reverses their momentum and propels them back upwards, once every day. Our personal theory is that beneath the level of the horizon is a very large giant juggling very slowly, but we have no hard evidence to support this.

(The cosmic physicist Doctor Myles Corcoran suggests that Azeroth could be an Alderson Disk, a large or infinite plane with holes of sufficient size through which the sun and moon oscillate back and forth endlessly. This implies two things: that at some point the plane of Azeroth, if such it is, loses its atmosphere and becomes frictionless vacuum; and the deity, intelligent designer(s), Old Gods, Titans or whatever other beings may have been involved in the creation of Azeroth are massive SF geeks. Frankly we prefer our theory with the giant.)

Despite the comparatively low surface gravity, it is clear that the atmosphere of Azeroth is much thicker than Earth’s. Without this density of gas the various giant insects and spiders would not be able to breathe, and the dragons, wyverns, hippogriffs, other large flying creatures and surprisingly small zeppelins would never get airborne, let alone carry large passengers. The ratio of gases in the atmosphere is unclear: the same flame that can set a massive stone creature or water elemental ablaze in an instant is unable to make the slightest impact on a tree, wooden building or field of dry grass. Ordinary fires will also burn underwater, which implies something very interesting but I’m not sure what.

The apparent density of the atmosphere also explains one of Azeroth’s more puzzling features: the fact that it is difficult to see clearly for more than a few hundred metres in any direction. While visibility over short distances is clear, large objects such as buildings and geographical features are either indistinct or completely invisible at distances of more than a few hundred metres. At closer range objects, mostly other living beings, come into sharper relief as the viewer approaches in a manner that suggests that either every inhabitant of Azeroth is strongly myopic, or there is something in the air that causes this effect. I will return to this subject in the third part of this paper, on the ecology of Azeroth.

Meanwhile my esteemed colleague Professor Sulka Haro of the University of Habbo has observed that the majority of the zones of Azeroth have no wind. In fact only one zone experiences wind, the desert region Tanaris, and that only sporadically, which may be due to factors other than climate. This must indicate, he hypothesises, that there is absolute thermic entropy in Azeroth. This is supported by the fact the lava one sees coming out of the volcanoes is so that characters can could safely walk on it (though this may be an artefact of the frictionless pads on their feet—see above). It may also go some way to explain how zones of intense volcanic activity can sit a few hundred metres from zones of perpetual snow without the former turning the latter to slush.

(Prof. Haro expands his thesis to cover insect life—”I haven’t seen any pollinators around, yet people are able to farm. The Azerothians crop must hence all be self-pollinating. But how is this, with no wind? Most baffling”—and the small animal life—“I’ve also come to the conclusion that the Azerothian rabbits are either herbivores that reproduce by seeds, or are parasites” but here we begin to impinge on the subject of the third part of this paper, the ecology of Azeroth, and we should hold back to let your minds digest the meat of this instalment, in much the way that the stomachs of WoW’s wildlife don’t.)

I am disappointed at the small number of essays I have received so far. More application and less fieldwork, class!

(Part 3 of the ‘n00b World Reorder’ series is now online here.)