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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   3413 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for March 17, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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WoW Geoguessr videos are... wow.

There are 125 zones in WoW and 190 dungeons, and the base game sprawls ~80 square miles and the full game maybe 150 square miles now. Each zone has at least 60 unique identifiable “places”, possibly more, whether that be a random feature of the environment, a mob encampment, a random hut, an npc, etc. This includes major landmarks and the random “things to see” in-game. Longterm WoW players are able to determine the location of 7500 unique identifiable places covering 150 square miles down to the meter, often able to name the residing zone and town and what “happens” their ingame. Counting dungeons, that’s about 19,000 unique things they have pinned down on a map sprawling 150 square miles.

19,000 pieces of information navigable on a map.

And then you remember it’s a game, and the game is not even about this information. There’s also maybe 4000 cosmetic items, and players like Asmongold are likely to tell you the name and where to find them and what quest it involves. There are 30,000 quests, half of which these players could tell you about just by seeing the NPC. There are bosses and mob types, surely at least 500 unique ones which can be named. 9000 spells, and a given player will know 150 of them and what they do by their image and when to use them.

Then there are the random things: the potions and other consumables, the emote commands, what you do in a raid, the hundreds of different vendors, the hundreds of materials for building things. Not to mention the lore!

These longterm WoW players easily know 45,000 pieces of distinct information. It’s crazy when you add it all up like that.

Where Mankrik's wife? will still get a flinch from open-beta or early release players on the Horde side.

This isn't specific to MMOs, notably. Even ignoring the extreme outliers like those with encyclopedic knowledge of Mario 64 glitches, there's probably a pretty sizable subset of Zelda BOTW players who can recognize each of 120 shrines, 14 towers, 80ish quests, yada yada (though I don't think anyway cares about the 'golden seeds'). ARK pretty much requires you to memorize 100-150 creatures by aggressiveness (which isn't just a matter of 'fights me or not', but also what mounts it won't attack), taming approach, diet, and utility; 'note runs' involve optimizing some (usually 100ish) subset of 1000 explorer notes for rapid experience gain; certain resources have important-to-recognize locations dependent on a map, so on. They usually won't get as large a list, but that's mostly a limit of their content and scope. Fallout or The Elder Scrolls players can end up with bizarrely specialized knowledge.

Some of this reflects video games being able to centralize that knowledge. FFXIV has somewhere upward of 500+ gathering items available from probably upwards of 150+ 'locations', but these are all hugely identifiable locations, and even the most generic landscapes (probably Coethas Western Highlands, which was often bashed as a boring snowy plain) has a landmark in sight for each gathering location. And as the memory palace approach attests, the combination of repetition and spatial reasoning may improve recall. Of course, on the flip side, almost nothing in Morrowind was hugely identifiable and there's no reason to every return to most ruins and... there's someone out there that knows where the One Muffin is.

That said, I'd caution that there's a big space between "longterm X players" and most or even many longterm players. I haven't played WoW for a while, but back when I did play the notorious difficulty finding anything in Thunder Bluffs or the Undercity was pretty well-established. For FFXIV, the problem of 'I have no memory of this place' is pretty standard for raids or dungeon roulettes, of which there are far fewer and which players would often repeat day-after-day for months when they were first released. I always end up going to the wrong part of the Gold Saucer trying to find Wild Rose, despite having done so on a weekly basis for the better part of a year.

Genuinely, a similar thought in my youth is why I started to study history + geography as a hobby. I realized that given I had an interest in learning place names, cultures, the course of different wars, the lineage of different monarchs, etc, I really ought to put that drive towards things that actually existed.

This certainly hasn't stopped me from being a "lore nerd" for different games and series, but it at least keeps a little voice in my head to spend at least as much time on reading about actual nations as I do about fictional ones.

These longterm WoW players easily know 45,000 pieces of distinct information. It’s crazy when you add it all up like that.

And it is ever crazier when you grok that all this knowledge belongs to mega corporation that can alter or delete it by one click of some minimum wage employee, mega corporation that can easily decide the game is no longer profitable and shut it down.

Imagine - you dedicated days and weeks and months and years to exploring Black Troll Land and mastering the lore. Suddenly someone sees how extremely problematic it is, and deletes all racist content.

You are screwed.

Building your life and your identity on something so fragile is like living on a quicksand. Do not do it.

... to an extent, and indeed WoW already did so to a small extent once (Cataclysm rebuilt a lot of the early zones, albeit in most cases for the better). And there's certainly worse: Tabula Rasa got smashed by some back-office NCSoft smuckery (literally faking a resignation e-mail while the guy was in space), and attempts at a private server are... not great.

On the other hand, some leaks of City of Heroes lead to the game having a small but lively rogue server community.

On the gripping hand, "mega corporation that can alter or delete it by one click of some minimum wage employee" is a surprisingly wide net. Don't get me wrong -- I do much prefer the private server models of MineCraft or ARK, of ripping every eBook through Calibre rather than waiting for Amazon to revise or retract it, of running *nix for personal computers rather than letting Microsoft have all my data backed up on the Cloud, so on -- but I would caution doing this doesn't actually get you that much protection. If Microsoft decides to fuck over Minecraft's authentication model again, it doesn't get easier to legally play (including old versions!). Buying physical media doesn't mean it has what was written on the box. And going private for multiplayer just changes the threat model rather than eliminates it: my last big MineCraft server lasted about three months before player interest dropped too low to justify the maintainer keeping it alive; my last ARK one restarted just yesterday due to save file corruption and player interest in changing maps.

It’s interesting to think, “what’s the information most important to devote to memory”? Not for professional life, but for one’s life satisfaction.

It is amazing to me how good games are at teaching information.

WoW is an especially good example because the human memory works best with spatial representations of visual information. Memory competitors who try to remember as many numbers as possible will actually turn the numbers into People or Objects and place them around a pre-ordered spatial map, usually conjoined with a plot. The most playing cards memorized in an hour is 2000 or so, with every competitor using this technique.

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