Tag Archives: humour

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.

Tache Gordon

Posted by under Uncategorized

I’m growing a tache. For charity.

September is the month of TACHEBACK, a sponsored grow-a-moustache event organised by Everyman to raise money to fight male cancers. And for the first time since an ill-advised beard in my early 20s, I’m going hirsute to help.

This, of course, means I need your sponsorship. You can follow my progress (today: stubbly) and pledge me some funds by visiting my Tacheback page: www.tacheback.com/James Wallis

I’m not a great fan of moustaches, to be honest. They itch, and the scraggly ends get in your mouth. But this month marks the first anniversary of my father’s death from cancer, and suffering the indignity of some uncomfortable face-fungus is the least I can do to mark the occasion and do some good at the same time.

And if you’re sufficiently manly, it’s not too late to join in.

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.

Release the Baron!

Posted by under magnum opus press, munchausen

Update on the new edition of The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen, which is to be released in September:

The first thousand copies of the book will be of the deluxe-format Gentleman’s Edition (black leather-effect cover with gold embossing), suitable for reading, prominent display in your library, and hurling at inattentive pot-boys. The remainder of the print run will be of the Wives’ and Servants’ Edition, having a plain white cover with simple black lettering designed to not over-stimulate the excitable temperaments of domestics and the lower social orders.

There will also be a PDF edition, available exclusively from e23 (a division of Steve Jackson Games) from August 1st. Though ideas for the title of this edition have been plentiful, none has yet hit the mark. Suggestions are welcomed, good ones doubly so, and the best shall receive a copy of the PDF in gratitude.

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.)

A Whiner Is You

Posted by under Uncategorized

Just to assure you I’m still alive…

Apparently there are only three countries in the world that haven’t officially adopted the metric system: Liberia; Myanmar; and the United States of America. How richly ironic is it that the USA’s way of measuring things is what they call the English system, and the rest of the world calls the Imperial system? (And they can’t even get that right: there are 20 fluid ounces in a pint, not 16. Please, these things are called ‘standards’ for a reason.)

In other news: Space Giraffe is a huge disappointment, and I will deliver some thoughts on Bioshock as soon as Play.com bothers to get my copy to me. In the meanwhile, please stop talking about Psychonauts like it was the second coming of Infocom. It really wasn’t that good. Before telling me I’m wrong, please grasp that there is an important difference between ‘fun’ and ‘funny’: they may overlap but they are not the same thing. Psychonauts may have been funny—in parts—but my lord it was an awful grind to play.