Tag Archives: fantasy

Marks of Chaos: the missing pages of the lexicon

Posted by under fiction

I’ve got two stories for you.

Here’s the first one: about ten years ago I wrote two novels for the Black Library, Mark of Damnation and Mark of Heresy, set in the world of Warhammer. Mark of Damnation was conceived as a single-volume story, but once it was finished my editor convinced me that it could be expanded into a quartet. I wrote Mark of Heresy, decided there wasn’t a quartet there after all, and that was that.

The cover of Marks of ChaosA couple of years ago Black Library reissued the two books in a single volume, Marks of Chaos, which I urge the Warhammer fans among you to buy because I get royalties on it, which is nice. I’ve not actually seen a copy of Marks of Chaos because it’s a print-on-demand title and therefore not in bookshops or eligible for author’s copies or something. So when I read that the Black Library had included a couple of my short stories in the volume I assumed that someone there was familiar with the work I’d done on Warhammer FRP and had been a bit clever.

Marks of Chaos is the story of Karl Hoche, a man dragged from a successful career in the Empire’s army, first into the shadowy world of a secret division of the Reiksguard, and from there into the darker and nastier world of cults and mutation. Karl has a mentor, Gottfried Braubach, who has been around a lot longer than Karl. Specifically he’s eight years older, having first appeared in 1995, in the preface and afterword I’d written for the Warhammer FRP supplement Apocrypha Now, published through my old company Hogshead.

So I assumed the Black Library had unearthed and reprinted the two short, linked stories that introduced Braubach and his world, and I gave them a mental pat on the back for it. It wasn’t until Stuart Kerrigan reviewed Marks of Chaos last month that I learned I was wrong. Instead of the Apocrypha Now stories they’d included my two Palisades stories—which are superficially similar, but while the Marks books were inspired by the dark, labyrinthine espionage stories of John Le Carre and Len Deighton, the Palisades shorts were an ill-fated attempt to recreate a light-hearted 70s-style Brian Clements action-adventure TV series in the Warhammer world. It was initially entertaining but after two shorts the schtick had worn thin: I didn’t write any more of them, and nobody has ever asked me why I stopped.

I contacted the Black Library to let them know they owned the copyright on two short stories that haven’t been in print since 2002. To date the Black Library have not replied.

So that’s the first of the stories I promised you. Here’s the second:

Written to open and close an anthology of RPG articles, ‘Fire and Earth’ is a crumb that will barely touch the appetite of those who still hunger for the two unwritten books of the Marks of Chaos quartet. But it fills in some of the background to the series and introduces two characters who appear in the first book. And it may be seventeen years old but it’s held up pretty well.

Seventeen years. Time goes so fast. I should write more stories.

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’)

Hearthstoning the discussion

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

If you’ve been commenting to my last few blog posts on the World of Warcraft, or you have a scientific hypothesis of your own about the nature of Azeroth and how it came to be that way, or you have too much time on your hands and enjoy thinking about stuff that doesn’t make sense, then I have created a Google Group to act as a venue for the continuation of the valuable discussions begun here. It’s called Azeroth Science and I urge you to sign up to it.

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.)

n00b World Reorder, part 1

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

The text that made up my Interesting 08 talk ‘Brave n00b World’ was part of a much longer document that I’ve been working on for a while. I’m not sure it’s ready for primetime—I’m not sure it’s ready for anything—but to catch the tide of interest in the video, here’s the first part of it. This one repeats a lot of the material in the talk but bear with me: it gets better, and there’s a lot of new stuff still to come.

* * *

I have spent the last few months on sabbatical, visiting a persistent fantasy world known as ‘Of Warcraft’. During this time I have made some preliminary observations about the nature of the world, which I am going to publish here in a series of short papers. It is my hope that this work may lead to further examination of this curious habitat, and the foundation of the academic field of Azerothian Studies, with a nice chair and honorarium for myself, &tc. &tc.

BRAVE N00B WORLD
A PRELIMINARY SCIENTIFIC REPORT IN SEVERAL PARTS

Part 1:
The Physical World of Warcraft

The world of Warcraft, called Azeroth by those of its inhabitants who care about such things, is supposedly one of a handful of small spatial bodies in an area of space referred to as the Great Dark. It is comprised of three main landmasses: Kalimdor; the so-far-unexplored Northrend; and the Eastern Kingdoms. This consists of two continents, Lordaeron and Azeroth, the latter of which is made up of two countries: Khaz Modan and Azeroth. This confusing situation is analogous to the continent of America, which consists of the regions of South America, Central America and North America, the latter of which contains the country usually called America. One might think this indicates that there may be other interesting parallels between Azeroth and Earth. One would be mistaken.

Even though it has an advanced civilization capable of creating flying machines and an astonishingly advanced postal service—of which more later—Azeroth has no local system of measurement. The idea of lengths or distances are alien to its inhabitants, which makes them annoyingly bad at giving directions. Occasionally ‘yards’ are mentioned but nobody can ever point at an item or a distance in the world and say that it is N yards long; and there is no way of knowing if this ‘yard’ is equivalent in any way to the terrestrial yard.

Despite all this, it is still possible to determine the size of the World of Warcraft with a reasonable degree of accuracy.

The longest straight, flat line that an adult human can walk in Azeroth without being interrupted by obstacles, mobs or the Horde stretches from the eastern end of the north parapet of the bridge into Westfall, across Elwynn Forest to the southernmost of the Three Corners in Lakeshire. An adult human walking at a steady pace will cover this distance in 18 minutes and 15 seconds. Humans walk at an average speed of 5.6 kilometres (3.5 miles) per hour, and therefore this route is roughly 1.7 kms (1.05 miles) long.

Extrapolating this to the whole of the Eastern Kingdoms, and using the best maps available, the continent is 5.8 kms by 14.25 kms (3.6 x 8.85 miles) and Kalimdor is Kalimdor is 7.3 kms x 14.75 kms. Taken together, the two main continents have a combined area of approximately 113 square kilometres. In terrestrial terms that’s about the same size as the city of Newcastle, or the London Borough of Hillingdon.

And if we assume that the world-maps produced by Blizzard Entertainment show approximately the entire surface area of Azeroth then we can wrap it around an imaginary sphere and calculate the diameter of the hypothetical ‘planetoid’ of Azeroth at 12 kilometres.

To a subjective observer, gravity on Azeroth seems to be lower than on Earth. Once again it’s hard to given an exact measurement, but given the existence of giants (whose hipbones would shatter as soon as they took a step under terrestrial gravity), plus the fact that a typical adult human can make a standing jump approximately 90% of their height into the air, and most adult humanoids can not only survive a fall of over fifty metres but can land on their feet and walk away, it appears to be less than 1G. This is not quite as expected: though small celestial bodies typically have low gravity, for a planetoid of the size of Azeroth one would expect to see gravity of about 0.003 m/s² or, in the vernacular, buggerall.

We can calculate Azeroth’s gravity to a reasonable degree of precision. As noted, scales of measurement are rare on Azeroth but a chart on page 66 of one of the only authoritative works of Azerothian Studies to date (World of Warcraft Game Manual; Hutchens, Catalan et al, 2005) shows the heights of various humanoid races against a series of regular lines, allowing exact comparisons. Assuming that an average human on Azeroth is the same height as an average human on Earth, then a typical female Tauren is almost exactly two metres tall. We can therefore use a female Tauren—let’s call her Rula—as a measuring-stick to calculate the height of buildings, towers, cliffs and other tall things that can be fallen off.

According to the Rula scale, a drop from a measured point on the flight tower in Thunder Bluff is 33.5 metres. According to tests conducted by myself and members of my research group, the guild <unassigned variable>, it takes a given body—Rula—an average of 2.5 seconds to fall that distance. An equivalent fall under 1G would take 2.61 seconds. We will blame the difference on the approximate nature of the measuring processes and cheap stopwatches, and assume that Azeroth’s gravity is the same as Earth’s.

This means, if Azeroth really is a spherical planetoid with a diameter of 12 kms, that the planet must have an average density of roughly 5850 grammes per cubic centimetre. That makes its average density more than 500 times greater than lead. (I am indebted to Dave Morris for his assistance with these calculations.)

The extreme density of Azeroth would explain why it is impossible to pick up many objects from the ground, including ones that you have just dropped. As soon as a discarded object hits the earth we theorize that it picks up a thin coating of superheavy dirt, making it impossible to lift. Living creatures avoid the effects of this dirt sticking to their extremities by having evolved frictionless pads on the soles of their feet. This observable phenomenon, endemic to Azeroth, is known to virtual-world scientists and animators as “foot slide”.

Rare soils that do not possess this extreme density (pieces of coal, elemental earth, Un’goro soil) are prized by the locals and can fetch high prices at the auction houses. In addition, pressure within the superheavy crust of the planetoid causes deposits of comparatively lighter elements like copper, tin, iron, gold and mithril to be extruded through fissures in the surface, where they form regenerating nodes that can be mined. It also explains why, though many locals are seen toiling at rock-faces with picks and shovels, they never seem to get anywhere, and why there are never any root vegetables for sale.

More interestingly, the existence of such a small, dense planet has implications for the relativistic flow of local spacetime. Einstein’s theory of general relativity states that time runs at different speeds under different gravitational strengths, and the Pound-Rebka experiment has proved that clocks at high altitudes run slightly faster than those at low altitudes. On a small body with a very high density these effects will be much more noticeable over comparatively short distances. We believe that these effects of time-dilation and compression can explain the well-known Azeroth temporal phenomenon of ‘lag’, although we are trying to form a theoretical model to show how zeppelins can cross an ocean in the time it takes to draw a line across a map.

However, all this assumes that Azeroth is a standard astronomical body, and it isn’t. Despite the existence of in-world globes depicting its surface as a sphere, and that anyone standing at the Black Temple in Outland can see a small round planet in the sky that appears to be Azeroth, the world of Warcraft is in fact flat. There is no visible curvature of the world, which is unusual given its small size. Stars do not move across the night sky, indicating that Azeroth is static in relation to the rest of its universe. What’s more, dawn happens simultaneously wherever the observer is in the world, and sunset works the same way. Ergo it’s flat, albeit populated by a number of misguided “round-earthers”. Berks.

Conclusive proof on the matter comes from the research of the Canadian Dr T Paypayaso (I’m assuming from the quality of his research that he has a PhD, plus frankly they’re easier to get hold of than parking tickets these days), who has demonstrated by swimming to its edge and jumping around like a prat that Azeroth is (a) flat, (b) finite and (c) rectangular.

I will examine the implications of this extraordinary discovery in my next post in this series. Meanwhile I need your essays, a thousand words on “How can Azeroth be said to have a food chain when nothing ever eats anything else?” on my desk by Thursday.

(You can find part 2 of this essay here.)

Brave n00b World

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

Roo Reynolds, the man behind Lego is Full of Win, not only videoed my presentation ‘Brave n00b World’ at Interesting 08 but has Done Computers to it and made it available on the internest. Lo!

I was originally going to call it ‘The World of the World of Warcraft’, but the Onion beat me to publication of that particular joke by about eight days. And as I said before, there’s a lot more where this came from.

(Edit: to take advantage of the number of hits this entry is getting, the WoW guild whose credit you can’t quite see  at the end is <unassigned variable>, and we’re a Horde guild on the European server Nordrassil. We are a friends guild, meaning you have to know one of the members in real life before you can join, but we are recruiting. If you know me or someone who recently received one of these postcards or someone who’s done some of this cross-stitching—you may gather that we don’t take this entirely seriously—then drop me a line.)

The Song Remains The Same

Posted by under Uncategorized

It’s taken me a while but I finally tore myself away from WoW to start playing Eternal Sonata (Bandai/Namco, Xbox 360) today. I have been looking forward to this. It’s a JRPG set in the dreams of Frédéric Chopin as he lies dying of tuberculosis in Paris in 1849. And that is the kind of idea for an RPG that gets me really excited.

I mean that in all honesty. When I play a game I want to see things I’ve never seen before. Admittedly my usual taste in music is for stuff that sounds like a 70s analog synthesizer being fed through a wood-chipper covered in beeswax, while someone uses a sledgehammer to beat out the baseline on the Forth Bridge and someone else fires off the James Soane Collection of Badboy Kickdrums in the background. But Chopin’s dying dreams filtered through a Japanese sensibility, and interactive, from the same house that brought us Katamari and Xenosaga? Oooooo in approving and anticipatory tones.

Things begin quite promisingly. The first (game-engine-based) cutscene is beautifully animated and intriguing. The next one is also beautifully animated, is too long, and has voiceover that clanks more than Marley’s chains. The third one is about the same. But there’s a sense of atmosphere building, themes and mood, and a couple of (clanky) musical metaphors that bode well.

And finally the game itself begins, and I find myself escorting a young girl called Polka along a sun-dappled woodland path. It is very pretty. What’s that curious object sparkling over there? Why, it’s a save-point—how quaint! I am feeling quietly excited about the potential of the coming experience.

Suddenly Polka collides with something that looks like the mutant offspring of a leek and a pumpkin, and can’t proceed until she’s battered it to death with her umbrella, to the swelling sounds of a musical score that is almost completely unlike Chopin.

Then there are more leek-pumpkins. And a chest that someone’s left in a clearing, perhaps in tribute to the thousands of old-school RPGs with chests containing health-ups left in unlikely locations. And then more leek-pumpkins.

Ah well.

Shatner plays Horde!

Posted by under mmorpg, world of warcraft

These two Blizzard commercials are all over the blogosphere and, no doubt, US TV channels as well. They’re your basic celebrity endorsement.

SFX: OMG OMG here comes the n00bs endless September all over again.

No, I don’t think so. Are these commercials to bring new people to World of Warcraft, or to get existing players to hang around? My money’s on the latter. Me and my Tauren are chuffed as heck that William Shatner plays a bull shammy, or at least claims he does in an amusing 30-second film, and we are pretty sure that he could not only kick Mr T’s arse but snog his tiger as well. And get XP for it.

Considering the embarrassment that many previous games commercials have been (Magic the Gathering anyone?)… nice job, Blizzard.

Rough Trade

Posted by under game design

You’re alone in a foreign country, on a mission of international security. Your police escort has been killed, and you’re in the middle of nowhere, armed only with a pistol and a few rounds of ammunition, most of which you’ve already had to use on malevolent locals. You’ve been captured and injected, you’re alone, no backup is coming, and the background music is really beginning to creep you out. And then, behind a building, you meet a cloaked figure.

“Got a selection of good things on sale, stranger,” he says, “heh heh heh,” and every shred of suspension of disbelief that Resident Evil 4 had built up flies up and away, disappearing like a startled crow.

There aren’t many games that handle traders and merchants well, but RE4 handles them astonishingly badly. For a start, what the hell are itinerant salespeople doing in a survival-horror game? Obviously, yes, there’s a market for high-powered weaponry in a section of Spanish countryside populated by zombies, but the risk-to-reward ratio has got to be higher than opening up a boutique by Seven Sisters tube. Plus, if you did decide to earn your living by selling weapons to passing US Secret Service agents (“enough weapons to start a small war” as the game says at one point), you would stock some ammunition as well. Mr “Heh heh heh” has apparently forgotten that. Or maybe it’s his way of making sure that you don’t buy a nice new gun and a clip of ammo, and then blow his fool head off with it and nick his stuff, T-800 style.

Of course, of course, that last point is for game balance: survival-horror is nothing without ammo shortages. But then why bother with power-up weapons at all? Make the player fight through the whole game with a small selection of guns, none appreciably better than another? I mean, if it’s good enough for the Master Chief…

But I’m digressing. The moment the merchant appears Resident Evil 4 stops being about surviving mad zombie attacks and saving the president’s magic football, and becomes about exploring the environment to find enough cash and things to sell in order to buy better kit. In other words, the presence of the merchant fundamentally changes the game. I’ll go further: it ruins the game.

Off the top of my head, I can think of three better ways to handle the character’s progression up the equipment tree:

  • Solve puzzles. Work out how to open a locked gun cabinet, for example. There are plenty of puzzly puzzles in RE4. It would make a lot more sense to have them protecting something of immediate game-value like a weapon, instead of a gem that needs to be fitted to another item and then sold to the merchant to buy that weapon.
  • Equipment drops. The character is in radio contact with base. They are in a position to send reinforcements and air-drop stuff. Instead they mostly supply obvious answers to your character’s asinine questions, and occasionally email you files telling you how to kick things.
  • Give it to enemies. Put a sniper at the top of the church tower. The player could dodge the sniper-fire and avoid the encounter, but if they choose they can climb the tower and kill the undead sod. If they do, they get its rifle.

(This last one gets more on my nerves every time it crops up. If I kill an enemy that’s been attacking me with item A, I want to be able to pick up item A and use it. I do not want it to disappear, or to lie on the ground but not let me grab it, or be mysteriously replaced by another item, usually a health potion that the enemy could have used to stay alive but didn’t. Please. How hard is this, really?)

Games in general have never handled the matter of traders convincingly. Many adventures for tabletop D&D featured poor farming communities in the deepest countryside that somehow supported not only a large tavern but also at least one shop filled with weapons, armour and adventuring supplies. Games like Moria and Angband continued that tradition (Angband starts in a town of eight buildings: three magic shops, two adventurer supply shops, a weaponsmith, an armourer, and your house). Now the twin principles that (a) there must be traders and (b) what they sell must be geared exclusively to the character’s needs (and (c) that they must also be willing to buy any old tat you want to sell them) are so thoroughly set into most games that experienced gamers don’t think twice about it and new players wander around thinking how completely unlike a real, believable town this is.

The Final Fantasy series is a good example of what I call the three-shop town rule (weaponsmith; armourer; magic and provisions), and usually there’s an inn as well for the supply of rumours and bedspace. Final Fantasy has never been about realism—the word ‘fantasy’ in the title is a bit of a give-away—but realism and believability are two different things. And if you don’t believe in a game-world on some level then basically you’re just twiddling your fingers.

I’m not saying, obviously, that every community in every game needs a corner shop, general hardware store, laundrette and Chinese take-away. On the other hand, shops in games shouldn’t just be places to buy and sell goods. Build them into the back story. Build their owners into the story. Ask yourself why they’re there in the first place. Some games do already. Other games just include traders because other games of the same genre include traders. The designers of the latter games need punching.

I will say, as kind of a footnote, that Fable gets it sort-of right. Although most of its towns do only have adventurer-centric shops they also have a feel of bustle and community, you can buy and sell trivialities. But you can also encounter merchants on the road and (this is cunning, so pay attention) they’re almost inevitably either selling hairstyles or tattoos. So if you kill them or if they die while in your company, you shouldn’t be disappointed when their wares aren’t scattered on the ground. That, I thought, showed intelligence and a degree of wit.

Though, on the other hand, an early mission in Fable involves escorting two merchants to Darkwood Camp. Darkwood is full of bandits and werewolves, not a regular trade route in a world that has teleport-gates, and yet when you finally reach it Darkwood Camp turns out to be a three-shop trading village… dependent for its market, one expects, on adventurers lured there by merchants hiring them as escorts. That was the moment I realised that Fable wasn’t a fable, it wasn’t even a good story, it was the usual fantasy hotch-potch nonsense written by someone who Hadn’t Thought It Through, and my heart sank another little bit. Not as far as it sank at the words “Got a selection of good things on sale, stranger”, though. Because there is only one instance where it’s permissible to mix shopping and zombie-horror, and that’s Dawn of the Dead.

I may at some point write up my theory that Fable is Moria with nicer graphics, and Fable 2—in which, as previously noted, you have a dog—will therefore be Nethack with nicer graphics. The theory is mostly balls but it generally gets a laugh and starts a decent pub-debate, and therefore serves its purpose.