Tag Archives: game design

Drop Present

Posted by under game design

Almost a year ago I was part of the team that ran BoardGameCamp in London. My contribution to the day was organising a game-design competition sponsored by Cadbury the chocolate people and co-arranged with the good folks at PHD Media.

The prize was to have your game-design printed on the back of the 2011 Santa Selection Box, a boxed set of favourite Cadbury products that’s released every year in time for Christmas. Cadbury puts out about six million of these boxes. Yes, six million. For comparison, the original Halo has sold about 6.4 million.

The winner was Present Drop, a clever tile-placing game for 2-4 players with some nice Eurogame overtones, simple enough for kids to understand but with enough strategy to be interesting for real games-players too. It was designed by Matt Green and Kevan Davis. You know Kevan. He did Urban Dead and Chore Wars.

A year on, and the selection box with the game on it is in UK shops. At Tesco it costs £1.50, which gets you about £3-worth of chocolate, a spiffy game and a donation to the Make-A-Wish Foundation as well. Which is, you have to admit, a heck of a deal.

So show Kevan and Matt (and Cadbury and Make-A-Wish) some support and pick one up when you’re doing the shopping. Or pick up several and give them to your friends. I’m your friend, aren’t I?

(More about Present Drop here.)

I made a game for GameCamp with Lego

Posted by under game design

So we did another GameCamp. Number four in an ongoing series of games-based unconferences, the third with the current management team, and twice the size of the previous one. It feels like an age ago now but in fact it was only a month. It went really well—we relocated to the roomier and more central spaces of London South Bank University, and a quick google will bring up many happy reports and postmortems. We are chuffed.

There will be another GameCamp in the autumn but that’s not what I wanted to write about. It’s a mini-tradition that we give away neat freebies to everyone who comes to GameCamp: for GameCamp 3 (‘BoardGameCamp’) it was a pair of dice custom-engraved with the unconference’s logo and motif. And we had to find a way to top that.

What I did was… You’ve seen the Lego collectible minifigs, right? Sixteen to a series, but you don’t know which figure you’re getting till you open the pack. And very cool offbeat non-standard figures too—zombies, clowns, Mexican wrestlers, aliens, sports stars and even a dude in a gorilla suit. They are excellent.

So I went into a toy-shop and bought three hundred of them, at which point my inner eight-year-old fell over and died of joy. When I was eight I knew that grown-ups secretly did stuff like this. Now I had proved myself right. Both of me wins.

Then I designed a little game to play with the minifigs. How little? Small enough to fit on a sticky label on the front of the pack. Three rules, each one line long. And because we wanted to give people an excuse to mix and talk to strangers, it’s a social game—and because we wanted people to keep playing it, there was a prize at the end.

Here are the rules:

  1. Make deals with other players to swap a piece of your minifig for a piece of theirs.
  2. With each player, you can EITHER swap one piece OR exchange your entire minifig.
  3. The player whose minifig looks most like them at the end of the day wins a prize.

We did get some spectacularly clever and accurate entries. A couple of people threatened to wrap themselves in loo-paper to resemble their mummy minifigs, but nobody went through with it—I’d said to the committee that if anyone painted their face yellow they were getting an instant win from me, but nobody did that either. I didn’t get the name of the eventual winner but she’d come in full fantasy LARP gear complete with swords, and her minifig was spot on. Somewhere there’s a photograph but I don’t have it.

The game fulfilled its objectives brilliantly: it was an ice-breaker and conversation-starter, and people broke out of their usual groups to approach strangers on the pretext of swapping pieces, but it wasn’t so absorbing that it detracted from the main business of the day. Plus we got to be the unconference that gave away free Lego.

The only downside, really, is that we’re going to have to come up with something better for GameCamp 5.

Hide & Seek & Aliens Among Us

Posted by under game design, street games

The third Hide & Seek Weekender is kicking off in a couple of days, and should be fantastic. Three more days of brilliant, gorgeous and eccentric social, street and pervasive games, in and around the South Bank. I’ve been privy to a lot of the plans and preparations—Spaaace has been sharing office-space with Hide & Seek for a couple of months, which is a truly sweet deal—and there are some very cool things coming up. Head over to the Weekender’s own website for a glimpse of what’s coming up, and if you’re anywhere near the National Theatre in London on Friday, Saturday or Sunday then you’d be a fool not to drop in.

Of special interest to traditional gamers is an event I’m running on Friday night: ALIENS AMONG US. This is a post-Werewolf/Mafia game, which is to say a social game for a large group in which a minority of the group are intent on killing everyone, and the rest of the group has to work out who they are and kill them first. The difference between Werewolf/Mafia and Aliens Among Us is that in Aliens Among Us everyone has big guns.

AAU is not my game. Well, okay, this iteration of it is, but I didn’t come up with the core idea. The game was originally devised by Erick Wujcik, sometime in the early 1980s—which makes it extraordinarily early for a game of this type, predating Mafia/Werewolf by five years. The thing is, he never published it. In fact, as far as I can tell and I’ve asked a bunch of people, he never even wrote it down as a playtest set of rules. He did, however, play it with many groups at conventions and gatherings around the world, and he would describe it enthusiastically to fellow games designers, such as myself. I only heard the description once. Once was enough to know it was genius.

In the James Wallis 12″ dance-remix it goes like this:

  1. Earth has been invaded by aliens. Lots of them. The human-to-alien ratio is about 10:1. Aliens and humans look identical, and can only be differentiated after they are dead.
  2. Aliens want to kill all the humans. As a result the humans want to kill all the aliens.
  3. You are a member of the Ultimate Defence Force (because the Penultimate Defence Force didn’t really work out.) You are tasked with seeking out and destroying all aliens. Some collateral damage is inevitable, of course, and is expected.
  4. The UDF has itself been infiltrated by aliens. Some say it’s been heavily infiltrated—so heavily that the ratio of humans and aliens in its ranks is more like 5:1
  5. Humans get 5 points for killing an alien, minus 1 for every human they kill. Aliens get 1 point per human they kill, minus 5 if they kill an alien.
  6. The number of points your character has when they die (and they will die) is the number of points you have to generate your next character.

Erick ran the game as a conventional post-Gygax/Arneson RPG, with GM and players. I’m not doing that: I’m going to brief the players and let them get on with it, intervening only to deliver updates on the situation. I’ve also wonked the character-generation bit for a more general audience. In my version you don’t buy attributes or skills; you buy the two things that really matter in a game like this: (a) your rank in the UDF, from boy scout to general; and (b) your weaponry, from pointy stick to portable 22-kiloton warhead.

Erick Wujcik, as some as you know, is someone with whom I had a troubled history. He started off as my mentor in the industry, stalled my career for three years and ended up shoving an enormous blade into my back. He died of pancreatic cancer in 2008. The thing is, whatever he was like as a person or a business associate, there’s no question that he was a brilliant games designer. Also there’s no copyright in game concepts, and I firmly believe that Aliens Among Us is too good an idea to let die with its creator.

So there’s this playtest at the Weekender, and if it comes together then I’ve been talking to an American games designer about various possibilities, and—well, if that comes together too then it will do so with a rightness and a pleasingness that I think will satisfy anyone who knew Erick or his work.

I’ll keep you posted.

Carry on Camping

Posted by under conference, game design

Two years ago the Guardian hosted a most unusual one-day conference, Gamecamp, in east London. It was an exceptional day—I wrote about it here—with a lot of brilliant and fascinating people bringing together some very different experiences and expertise about games and gaming. There was also a pre-release copy of Rock Band, which was good, and a lack of beer, which wasn’t.

Gamecamp 2 has been formally announced for 8th May 2010, and as with the last event the tickets are free but limited. This time it isn’t being organised by the Guardian, it’s being organised by… well, me. As part of a team featuring the absurdly talented Katy Lindemann, Mark Simpkins, Rachel Clarke, Rain Ashford and Phillip Trippenbach, I hasten to add.

Gamecamp is organised on the *camp model, meaning it won’t have keynotes or invited speakers. But it has an exceptional venue (eBay/Paypal’s wonderful UK headquarters on the banks of the Thames in Richmond), a couple of great sponsors, and some confirmed attendee names that have already caused broad smiles and a spontaneous outbreak of OMG OMGs among the committee.

If you want to attend then the first tranche of tickets will be released at noon on Friday 12th March. There are only 150 tickets total. They will go very quickly.

For more information see the Gamecamp website; for the breakingest news follow Gamecamp on Twitter.

(We are still looking for sponsors. If you’re in a position to offer us some funds to cover the cost of, say, lunch and thereby earning the love and admiration of an important sector of the British games community then please drop me or anyone else on the committee a line.)

Caillois completeness

Posted by under game design

One of the things about the world of computers that won’t go away is that there are two kinds of computers, and the kind you like sucks. Apparently. Whether it was big iron versus terminals, or minis versus micros, or Spectrums versus Commodore 64s, or the Atari ST versus the Amiga, or PCs versus Macs, or machines that run your particular favoured brew of Linux and everything else, this is a debate that will never end. It will only grow more tedious.

The thing is, there really is an important line that divides computers, or at last computing machines, into two types. There are machines that are Turing-complete, and there are machines that are Turing-incomplete. A Turing-complete machine is one that given enough time can perform the same tasks as any other computing machine, and in the early development of computers this concept was a big deal.

You’ll be glad to hear that’s pretty much all I have to say on the subject of Turing-completeness: if you want to know more, let the Wikipedia entry confuse you. (If you have to ask who Turing was then you’re reading the wrong blog, though I can brighten your day with the trivia snippet that the great man was on intimate terms with my former public-school housemaster, which implies that Turing was either desperate or had appalling taste.)

I’m not here to talk about the finer points of Turing completeness. But the concept provides a useful benchmark for all of computing: does a new principle or new design live up to a certain, almost abstract gold standard? And that set me wondering: does a similar standard exist for games? Should it? Would this be helpful? Where would you start?

And is this important? Yes, yes it is, and particularly right now. We’re seeing a lot of ideas that originated in games appearing in the wider media, like achievement-point systems. These aren’t games, they’re game-like activities. They push many of the same pleasure-centres in the brain that games do but they’re not games, not in the classical sense. Is Mafia Wars (Zynga, more than 70 million players at last count) a game? You can’t win, you can’t lose, you just allocate some resources and spend some money each turn and watch the numbers go up, and feel the tiny dopamine hits. Fun, arguably. A game? Well….

Let’s go back to the beginning. Not the beginning of games, of course—in human development the invention of board-games pre-dates written language. And not the beginning of video games: that’d be like trying to create a standard for all music based on the work of Michael Jackson.

No, I’m talking about the beginning of games criticism. I’m talking about Roger Caillois. Roger Caillois (1913–1978), French philosopher and writer. His 1958 work Les Jeux et Les Hommes, known in English as Man, Play and Games, is probably the first serious examination of games qua games. Sure, Johann Huizinga’s Homo Ludens was more than two decades earlier but Huizinga was a sociologist and Homo Ludens is more about the phenomenon of play: why we play, not what or how we play. Caillois was, in a gloriously French way, a freelance intellectual, a free-thinker who hung out with the likes of George Bataille—another link between games-design and the Surrealists and Dadaists—and Borges. In short: Huizinga, fuddy-duddy university professor. Caillois, one of us.

Once you get past the faux-sepia and oddly homoerotic cover of the current English-language edition, Man, Play and Games is a helter-skelter ride through games and play across history, culture and species, stopping to examine fighting wrens, superstitious Parisians, children breaking things for fun, viewing the face of a god, and ants taking drugs. It is awesome; worth the price of admission just for the Chinese word wan, which means ‘the act of indefinitely caressing a piece of jade while polishing it in order to savour its smoothness’.

Caillois’s book does a number of interesting things. Primarily he breaks the make-up of games down into four primary constituent parts, like the Greek elements, and as a nod he gave three of them Greek names. All games, he said, are composed of these four parts in different proportions:

  • Competition (agôn)
  • Chance (alea)
  • Mimicry (mimicry), role-play or let’s pretend
  • Vertigo (ilinx), the sense of losing yourself in immersion, to provoke a controlled amount of a normally scary emotion—what Caillois calls ‘voluptuous panic’. If you’re shaking your head, two words for you: zombie games.

If that sound a bit primitive, remember two important things. First of all, Caillois was breaking new ground. Nobody had done this kind of academic analysis of games before, so he was starting from first principles. Secondly, this was 1958. The very first video game may have existed on an oscilloscope screen in a laboratory in 1947, but it would be another thirteen years before anyone thought about trying to create the things commercially.

It’s not the agôn/alea stuff that I’m talking about here. That stuff’s great, I teach it to my students, but it’s the first chapter of Man, Play and Games I want to bring to your attention. Caillois actually set out a list of six criteria for what a game had to be, do or contain, in order to be considered a game. Fifty years on it’s aged remarkably well. And while it lacks the conciseness of Turing’s definition of whether a computer is Turing-complete or not, it does a significant job of punching a fence across the territory and saying, “This. Here. Everything on this side is ours.”

So I propose a new standard for games or things that call themselves games. It’s not about quality or playability or the standard of their graphics. If there’s something that bugs you about a new design or principle or way of doing things then ask yourself: is this game Caillois-complete? Because if it’s not, the chances are that it’s not actually a game. It may be a software toy, not that there’s anything wrong with that. It may be an interactive exercise dressed up in the tropes of games. But just as a computing device that isn’t Turing-complete isn’t what we would understand as a computer, a game that isn’t Caillois-complete is lacking some part of the essential DNA that makes it a true game.

That doesn’t mean it’s bad, or it’s broken, or we should turn our noses up at it. It’s just Caillois-incomplete. And when we think about games, that’s a useful critical tool to have. What does Caillois say a game should be? He gives six points, which I’ve retyped here with his short descriptions of each one. (This is the last two pages of the first chapter of Man, Play and Games, pages 9-10 in the University of Illinois edition—one hell of a way to start a book): A Caillois-complete game is one that’s:

  • Free: “in which playing is not obligatory; if it were, it would at once lose its attractive and joyous quality as diversion.”
  • Separate: “circumscribed within limits of space and time, defined and fixed in advance.”
  • Uncertain: “the course of which cannot be determined, nor the result attained beforehand; and some latitude for innovations being left to the player’s initiative.”
  • Unproductive: “creating neither goods, nor weath, nor new elements of any kind; and,except for the exchange of property among the players, ending in a situation identical to that prevailing at the beginning of the game.”
  • Governed by Rules: “under conventions that suspend ordinary laws and for the moment establish new legislation, which alone counts.”
  • Make-Believe: “accompanied by a special awareness of a second reality, or of a free unreality, as against real life.”

I’ll break these down and talk about what each of them mean in the twenty-first century in my next post.

(And this is a link to somewhere you can buy Man, Play and Games. Not an Amazon link because, as many people have described over the last couple of weeks, Amazon right now is being a playground bully. Try the Book Depository instead. Excellent prices, free shipping anywhere, not a playground bully, and a refreshing focus on, you know, books.)

Join me in Beds

Posted by under game design

Another brief update—hold onto your swearing, I’m preparing a good, fruity rant about the deficiencies of Fallout 3 (if the avatar has a frigging torch then surely it would be a good idea to tell the player instead of letting them run around in the frigging dark? Also, I have had it with games that play in accelerated real-time. I know your programmers put a lot of time into those dynamic shadows and lighting effects but every couple of hours I do not want night to fall so I can spend my time playing in the frigging dark, finding that the trader I want to talk to has shut up for the night. This is not realistic and it doesn’t enhance immersion. It feels hokey and is frustrating as hell. Stop it.)

Meanwhile, I’m going to be giving the latest iteration of my designing-games workshop on Friday 27th February, this time at ‘Workshop on games and simulations for PDP and employability‘, an all-day event at at the University of Bedfordshire, and if you thought that PDP was a family of 1970s minicomputers that ran Spacewar then you’re not alone. No, it’s ‘Personal Development Planning’. Essentially this will be about designing games and game-like experiences to help people improve their real-world decision-making, with an emphasis on the professional. I’ll be sharing the platform with the excellent Ruth Lawton and Ron Manton.

For some time I’ve been trying to interest a publisher in a book about using the skills one develops playing tabletop and video games, and applying them in the workplace to improve your performance and get yourself promoted. I firmly believe it would be a monster hit. Whether this session will overlap significantly with that… well, you’ll have to come along and find out. £85 to get in. Bargain.

Also, I’m a special guest at the games convention Conpulsion in Edinburgh, 28/29th March, along with Jon Hodgson and Andy Hepworth, both of whom have worked on the new edition of Dragon Warriors, and Gregor Hutton who I rate as the best RPG designer in the UK today. It should be a fun weekend. Expect much signing.

Back to frenzied work on sekrit things I still can’t tell you about.

Munchausen by proxy server

Posted by under game design, magnum opus press

The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen (the Difference Engine no.3 edition) is now available for download exclusively from e23, the digital warehouse of Steve Jackson Games. This is the revised and expanded facsimile version of the game that I’ve been blathering about for the last two years, and which is finally seeing the light of day two hundred years after its original printing was entirely destroyed before a single copy could be sold.

For those who don’t know or who haven’t been paying attention, The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen is a role-playing game. In it you play the roles of a group of drunken eighteenth-century nobles after a very good dinner, trying to out-boast each other with stories of their astounding adventures. Steve Jackson says, “The original edition of The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen was unique and marvellous. This new edition is even better. If you are a clever person with clever friends, you will enjoy reading and playing it. Let’s not consider the alternative.” John Kovalic calls it “utter brilliance in RPG form” and even though I failed to convince Gary Gygax that it really was an RPG and not some newfangled story-whatnot, he did say that “the premise of the Munchausen game is very clever, and the system is likewise”.

If you are not yet convinced, a PDF of the first eight pages of the game is downloadable from the Magnum Opus Press website. If you are, then the Baron Munchausen download page of e23 is here.

I am very interested to learn what you think of it.

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.