Tag Archives: geek culture

Every thing is a play thing: Toy Story and transmedia storytelling

Posted by under narrative

I’ve been enjoying the summer movie blockbusters, more or less, and have been struck by a couple that veer off in a decidedly metaphysical direction. And you won’t be surprised to hear that I’ve spent a while thinking about the last few scenes of one film in particular, which may rewrite or redefine the entire narrative you’ve just seen.

I’m talking, of course, about Toy Story 3.

The Toy Story trilogy is being hailed as one of the great film series of all time, on a par with the Godfather series or the original Star Wars movies. Both of those were weakest in their third acts, while Toy Story 3 is a masterpiece. But it’s also the one that pulls together a number of strings that have run through the three films, and threatens—right at its very end—to drag the whole edifice to the ground. And it’s all done with one line of dialogue, that almost everybody else seems to have missed.

Here we go, and beware massive spoilers on the starboard bow. We’re at the end of the film, the very end of the story. Andy is introducing the toys to Bonnie.

Andy: [opens box, and takes out Jessie] This is Jessie, the roughest, toughest cowgirl in the whole west. She loves critters, but none more than her best pal, Bullseye!

[pulls out Bullseye, and makes a whinnying sound]

Andy: Yee-haw!

How does he know their names?

These are two toys that were in Andy’s room when he returned from camp at the end of Toy Story 2, unmarked and without packaging. He has no way of knowing what they’re called—the product names they were originally marketed under. But he does.

Oh, you say, he could have asked. His mom could have remembered. He could have gone on the internet—in fact Toy Story 3 includes a knowing reference to it:

Hamm the Piggy Bank: C’mon. Let’s go see how much we’re going for on eBay.

but if Andy had checked the net, he’d have discovered that Jessie, Bullseye and Woody himself are very rare, very collectible, very valuable toys. That was the central plot-driver of Toy Story 2, and the theme of sentimental value versus financial value that underpins a lot of that film. In fact it’s fair to say that if anyone in the Toy Story world had been able to identify Jessie and Bulleye, they’d have known that these were no ordinary toys.

Yet Toy Story 3 opens with the toys about to be either thrown away, donated to charity or consigned to the attic. Nobody in Andy’s family has the slightest idea that these three toys have any value at all. They have no clue what the toys are, and they don’t care. Oh, perhaps there was an old book about ‘Woody’s Round-Up’ somewhere in Andy’s house? But in Toy Story 2 Woody has no idea of his past, of the TV show about him, of the existence of a single other artefact about the Round-Up Gang. If such a thing had existed to show Andy what Jessie’s and Bullseye’s names are, Woody would have known about it too. Andy’s mum? Too young.

There is only one other way for Andy to have learned Jessie and Bullseye’s names: for Woody to have told him. We see Woody write a note for Andy to find towards the end of Toy Story 3. This violates all kinds of unspoken rules about what toys can and can’t do; but then so does speaking to Sid in the original Toy Story. Nevertheless, it’s an enormous taboo. Would Woody really have taken such a drastic step just to point out a couple of names? Surely not.

There are only one conclusion we can draw. Andy cannot plausibly have discovered these names, and so this scene cannot have happened. It is an imagining. A figment. A dream.

That’s a pretty big thing to have to swallow in the brightly coloured child-friendly universe of the Toy Story films, but becomes a lot easier in the light of one other crucial point. Woody is the central character in the films. He is our viewpoint, our north star. We navigate the films by him, and see the world and its moral dilemmas through his eyes. And he is badly broken. He has persistent amnesia.

Who’s Woody’s owner? Andy. The energy behind all three films is Woody’s desire to get back to Andy, to do the best for Andy, to be Andy’s toy. That’s his whole identity: he is Andy’s toy. This is what makes the opening scenes of Toy Story 3 so heart-wrenching, as he finally comes to understand that the 17-year-old Andy, about to leave for college, has outgrown him and the other toys.

But Woody is at least fifty years old. ‘Woody’s Round-Up’, the TV series that spawned him, we know from Toy Story 2 ran from 1941–42 and 1946–57. If Andy was six in 1995, the year of the first movie, and had owned Woody from birth, that’s still a minimum of 32 years unaccounted for. What was Woody doing in that time? Where was he? Who did he belong to? Why doesn’t he remember? Why isn’t he troubled that he can’t?

Other toys remember. In Toy Story 2 we get Jessie’s memories of her previous owner Emily—Jessie is the same age as Woody—and in 3 we hear Chuckles’ tragic story of being loved and lost by Daisy. Having a new owner doesn’t erase the memory of the previous one: in Toy Story 3 Jessie can still remember Emily, though she is now Andy’s. But Woody doesn’t remember more than thirty years of his past.

It’s not as if this is hidden away. Toy Story 3 has a whole subplot about how easy it is for toys to have their pasts and memories erased. Admittedly it involves Buzz Lightyear, not Woody, but it says to us: how fickle are toys’ minds, how simply they can be changed. And it asks the unspoken question: if Buzz’s mind can be reset so easily, without him remembering anything about what happened, who else is missing a chunk of their lives? Buzz forgets he was ever Spanish, but still responds to Spanish dance music. What forgotten history is Woody responding to? Even in the first film he’s not the Woody of ‘Woody’s Round-Up’, he’s harder, less naive, more prone to harsh emotions like jealousy. What—who—shaped him that way?

So Woody’s mind is damaged, his history missing. Once again Pixar throws us a hint: his TV series was missing its last episode; just as his life is missing its first. Both stories are incomplete. So can we believe this convenient happy ending that Pixar serves up, or are there indications that this may be as much of a dream as the ending of Inception—

(yes it’s a dream, of course it’s a dream, but it’s Cobb’s dream so the top will fall. The clues are there.)

I don’t know. I have no grand theory, no explanation. Given that Toy Story 3 is part of the Pixar universe, with subtle cross-over elements to their other films in the background, then there may be hints elsewhere, a treasure-hunt through Ratatouille, Up and Monsters Inc. I have an unpolished idea that everything we see after the pit sequence is not real, or that Woody is either playing or daydreaming—we know toys do both—and therefore has escaped, like Cobb and Sam Lowry before him, into an internal world where he cannot be restrained. Maybe.

And there’s something going on with Woody’s repeated exclamation that “There’s a snake in my boot!” There can’t be; Woody’s boots don’t come off. But there is a recurring motif on Woody’s boot—Andy’s handwritten name. Come on. You’re telling me that’s not deliberate, that Andy’s not the snake?

So here’s the real theme of the Toy Story trilogy: who was Woody’s true owner?

…okay, enough. That was fun but let’s step away from the continuity. I’ve got two serious points.

Firstly, the Toy Story films are three fantastic movies. However they are not a great trilogy. With the exception of a glorious deus-ex-machina at the end of TS3 that’s prefigured in the first movie, there’s very little that links the three together in terms of plot or development or themes. The Godfather this ain’t.

The Toy Story trilogy has plot holes thirty years wide, which nobody notices—partly because Pixar has done an excellent job of drawing attention away from them, and partly because it’s a cartoon for kids and we have been taught not to look for narrative sophistication or consistency in things that we are told are for children. What else is traditionally seen as a children’s medium? Games. Exactly. Does story in game suck? Yes, it still does. Gosh, I wonder why.

The second point: Inception is designed as a movie that is left for the audience to untangle on its own, over a nice glass of wine after it’s left the cinema. Christopher Nolan deliberately cheats us of an easy conclusion by cutting the final shot instead of letting the camera run: he makes us do the work. (Compare and contrast to the final shot of Tarkovsky’s Stalker, which doesn’t cut away but has similar whoah-shit implications.) The film demands that we discuss and play with its elements to understand what we’ve just seen. And with the growth of trans-media narrative forms, where it’s up to the viewer to track down the different pieces of the story across different mediums and knit them together for themselves—and if you thought that trying to watch something like Heroes or Defying Gravity with the BBC’s bizarre PVR-defeating scheduling was hard then oh man—this is going to become a lot more common.

The thing is, when you lay out a story like a jigsaw and expect someone else to put it together, you’re making it easy for them to spot the holes in it. Even without that, audiences are becoming more media-literate and more playful, more willing to explore and interact with narratives. Ten years ago they’d have accepted a film as a flat piece of passive storytelling: now they want to play with it. You can blame merchandising, blame tie-in video games, blame fanfic, blame cosplay—and then you’re an idiot, because you shouldn’t be blaming these things, you should be embracing them. These people love what you’ve created so much that they want to be involved with it.

For ages (since 1994, actually) I’ve been trying to explain to people the difference between passive and interactive narrative. And if you encourage people to interact with narratives, they’re not going to stop with the bits of your story you’re happy for them to tweak. Fans have been doing it since the 60s. But today geek culture is mainstream. Comicon gets reported on the evening news. We’re all fans now.

If you’re in the business of telling stories, you have to accept that what you do, no matter how hard you try to lock it down and control it, what you produce is now an interactive medium.

And if that scares you, I’ve got an answer. You may not like it.

It’s the name of this blog.

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.)

How Interesting

Posted by under conference, world of warcraft

Saturday was the day of Interesting 08, the second unconference organised by Russell Davies (no T on this boy) at Conway Hall in London. Thirty speakers gave talks on subjects close to their hearts, the only common linking theme that the topics were—and the speakers should be—interesting. Possibly it was the best not-a-conference conference I’ve ever been to.

I presented a very cut-down version of my current paper (a geophysical survey of the World of Warcraft, which will be appearing here in the near future) and was gratified to get laughs in places I wasn’t expecting laughs. I was kind of surprised that, at a conference that was inherently playful, I was the only person talking explicitly about games. The closest were Roo Reynolds who spoke about Lego, and Collyn Ahart Chipperfield who talked about spaces for the fantastic.

What do I mean when I say the conference was “playful”? Several things.

It wasn’t serious. ‘Serious’ is not the opposite of ‘playful’, as anyone who’s ever played Diplomacy will tell you, but an absence of seriousness can certainly help create a playful atmosphere. The hall was decorated with bunting, the catering was biscuits, cupcakes and apples, and the event kicked off with a singalong version of ‘The Final Countdown’. From the get-go you knew this was going to be infotainment in its purest form.

Almost all the talks were short. I asked for ten minutes and got five. The weakest presentations were (with one exception) the ones that noticeably overran their slots. It encourages focus and attention to core points.

It was a lucky dip. When a speaker stepped on stage, you had no idea what they were going to talk about. Topics included what spooks horses, toilets, the history of vacuum cleaners, zoetrope animation without the slits, the role of booze in the development of society, guerilla geography, favourite words, beating insomnia with bad audiobooks, odd communities on Flickr, and much more. The guy who designed the ineffably cool new UK coinage spoke; so did the guy who did the remix of Radiohead’s ‘Nude’ using obsolete computer hardware.

Nobody was trying to impress you or sell you anything. It was about the joy of enthusiasm and communicating that joy.

And perhaps most importantly, even though almost all the speakers used PowerPoint or similar, everyone presented their material differently. Roo, who kicked off, showed 30 slides in three minutes—you can see it here but he’s cheated slightly by re-synching the sound with the slides. On the day the slides appeared automatically and he had to speed up or slow down what he was saying to match each image on screen. (He alludes to this at one point on the soundtrack.) It didn’t make his presentation more smooth but it made it more exciting, more of a competition, Roo against machine.

All the PowerPoint presentations were in a style that, if brought to a regular meeting or conference, you’d be asked to leave. Lots of full-screen pictures with no captions. Cartoons. Elegant graphs, often with slightly irreverent captions. A good number of images from classic SF movies. Nothing that was there just for teh funneh, but plenty that was meant to amuse as well as inform.

For the audience, barring the ‘Final Countdown’ singalong and one item that called for volunteers, it was also entirely passive. You listened or you didn’t listen, you enjoyed or you didn’t enjoy. You were not called to interact, but you felt involved. Playful, yes, but elements of direct or indirect play would almost certainly have spoiled the experience.

How does that work, then?

There’s a theory that says visualising walking, step by step, burns almost as many calories as actually walking. I can’t find any links to it and have no idea if it’s true, so take it for now as a metaphor. Everybody at Interesting 08 was thinking of what they could talk about at Interesting 09. It was the number one topic of overheard conversations. Even though non-speakers couldn’t play this time, their head full of thoughts about being up on the stage made the experience of watching others speak vicarious.

Secondly, because the talks were short and had to pack a lot into their time, they tended to be strong on wide-ranging high-points. Finding links between the different talks became a game, whether conscious or unconscious, and as the day went on the links coalesced into a web that felt like a tent covering all of us, the same way that a really good multi-stranded novel pulls all its threads and characters together. No coincidence that the bunting criss-crossing the hall looked like a net. It was an enormously unifying and satisfying feeling: not playful in a conventional sense, but playing with ideas is still play, and Interesting 08 was packed with ideas.

Links to the Interesting talks will be up on the Guardian website soon. Meanwhile, kudos to the organisers, congratulations to the speakers, and thanks to everyone who laughed at my jokes.

Current fun

Posted by under Uncategorized

In certain circles there’s been a lot of excitement about the Current Cost, a meter that clamps to your mains electricity cable and measures how much power your household is using, comparing usage over time with numbers and little graphs. Evidence shows that having a device like this can save you 15% on your electricity bills. Plus it’s, you know, data.

What sets the Current Cost apart from its competition is the fact that on its underside is what looks like an RJ-45 port. This is entirely undocumented—neither the manual nor the website acknowledge that it exists—but geeks being geeks, there has been a flurry of enthusiasm and people bodging together cables to get the data off the machine and onto PCs and the web.

There’s no official software for this. We know the device spits out an XML packet every six seconds, and people have been grabbing that and feeding it into Google Charts or homebrew solutions. The Current Cost website gives a demo of an interesting-looking app which is apparently under development but not released yet. And it’s only a matter of time before people start aggregating their data using a service like AMEE, and then things get interesting.

The chief stumbling block till now has been the lack of a cable to physically get data from CC to PC. People have created their own—apparently it’s TTL to RS232,3.3V, running at 2400 baud—but I bring the glad tidings that you can put down your crimpers and Maplin catalogue because Current Cost sell data-cables to those in the know. Send a cheque or purchase order for £11.12 per cable (£7.95 + VAT and shipping) to:
Current Cost Ltd (attn: Steve Allen)
1 The Mews
Wharf Street
Godalming
Surrey GU7 1NN

And in the UK you can buy Current Cost from here, £28 plus shipping.

Not strictly games-related business, I know, but if we can turn data-gathering of this kind into a game-like behaviour, with status rewards for greatest improvement and so on, then energy-conscious behaviour ceases being a worthy chore and becomes something that you want to do. People used to game Last FM in the early days when it was still Audioscrobbler, running multiple simultaneous iterations of Winamp and iTunes to push their ‘tracks played’ total higher than anyone else’s, just to have the biggest number on the site. Pointless but fun.

If you engineer the same behaviour but use it to gather data that has a purpose, does it make it any less fun?

My guy, Gax

Posted by under game design

Some years ago, someone—it could have been Andrew Rilstone but I’m honestly not sure—commented that he wished Gary Gygax would hurry up and die, so people would stop talking about what he was doing now (which at the time was Dangerous Journeys, a tedious rules-heavy fantasy RPG at a time when the market was making it clear it wasn’t interested in such things, and dreadful fantasy novels) and remember him for the good stuff he did.

Gary Gygax created modern gaming. You cannot move these days for games with class-and-level systems: even modern FPS games like Call Of Duty 4 are grabbing RPG elements and building them in as an integral gameplay. The class-and-level system dates explicitly to Gygax’s work, and specifically to the first edition of Dungeons & Dragons in 1974.

(Yes, I know Dave Arneson deserves co-credit for the creation of D&D. But Dave Arneson didn’t write Chainmail, which D&D’s rules drew on heavily, and he also didn’t die today.)

By today’s standards, after thirty-five years of refinement and polish, the original edition of D&D looks incredibly clunky. But if you look beyond its unclear rules, its incompleteness and its tendency to assume existing knowledge on the part of the reader, what’s astonishing is how much of the game is right. It wasn’t the concept of roleplay in D&D that birthed the genre, it was the way the rules encapsulated the core ideas behind it—not, to the chagrin of many of us who considered ourselves on the cutting edge, ways to encourage players to inhabit their fictional avatars more fully, but ways to keep players playing and interested in progressing in the game.

And that same energy went on to power Mines of Moria, and Ultima, and the Final Fantasy series, and countless other tabletop and CRPGs, and is making Blizzard a billion dollars a year through World of Warcraft. It taps into something very primal at the heart of the gaming impulse and wraps it in a covering that has been nicked, borrowed and retrod so many times since that it pretty much defines what we think of as ‘fantasy’ today. Not that Gygax didn’t nick most of that himself, but at least he acknowledged his sources. Pretty much everything in World of Warcraft that isn’t straight out of Warhammer is straight out of D&D.

Now, at last, we can forget all the crap he did later. Even if he only had one moment of genius, it’s such a moment of such genius that it instantly elevates him into the very highest echelons of game-design greatness. His work built not one but two industries—how quickly would computer games have moved out of the arcade without the likes of Colossal Cave?—a genre, and a language of shared experience in fantastic worlds shared by hundreds of millions of people.

And if anyone disagrees, I will fight them. Roll for initiative.

I must have some booze. I demand to have some booze.

Posted by under Uncategorized

A quick note—I am not dead, merely busy—to notify you that the final London Gamer Geeks meeting of 2007 is tomorrow night, Wednesday 28th November, at our usual venue downstairs at the College Arms on Store Street, from 6.30pm onwards. Special events this time include:

SWAPSIES! Bring games you’ve finished to swap with others! See if we can hear the CEX staff gnashing their teeth all the way from the other side of Goodge Street. (Boardgames and cardgames included.)

GAME OF THE YEAR! It’s been an extraordinary year for games. What do you think is the Game of the Year? Testify and vote!

LIVE BLOG! Prepare a 90-second presentation on something that’s been on your mind about games lately. See how many people ‘digg’ you.

NO QUIZ! By special arrangement, there will be no quiz this time.

BRING A FRIEND. If you have any.

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.