Convergence

"Dad, your warlock is walking around the city, and he sees a guy with a big exclamation point over his head. What do you do?"
"Well, what am I supposed to do?"
"You're supposed to click on him. He has a quest for you."
"OK, I click on him."
"He has a quest. There's this race of people, that used to be warlocks, only they got too much into demons and stuff, and it corrupted them. So now they're not just warlocks any more, they can be any class. And you have to go and kill their leader."

*

Wait ...WHAT??



Good question, and a LONG story.

If you know me you know I've always had a weakness for digital games. My first great addiction was Williams' Defender, but let's not forget the old Atari Asteroids, or Ultima on an Apple II, or even ... Zork. Over time the games got more sophisticated. My next great time sink was the Marathon series, programmed by University of Chicago students who later sold their game company, Bungie, to Microsoft. I played the Marathon DEMO on my wife's Mac IIsi for hours, despite the fact that lack of a floating-point chip on the 68030 processor therein caused me to play the game at postage stamp size and gruesomely low resolution. When I moved up to a PowerMac clone with real horsepower, the good times had arrived. I shudder to think how many hours I spent after work playing PvP (player-versus-player) Marathon II with my cohorts, our senior network administrator spouting streams of Belushiesque profanity as we blew each other to bits. Of course, Marathon II and Marathon Infinity were excellent as single-player games as well, not to mention Marathon:Evil, one of the best game mods ever. But I digress.

Then there was Quake! And Quake II! And a game based on the Quake engine, but far better than any Quake game, Half-Life. These were all games of the "first-person shooter" variety -- se the world through the eyes of a person with a vast assortment of weapons on their person and an endless supply of enemies.

Then there was an intriguing series of games from a company called Blizzard. These were not as addicting as the others I've mentioned, but I found them a nice, slower counterpoint. They had a series of games known as Warcraft: Orcs and Humans. Not everyone likes this game style: your goal was to build up resources over time, but more quickly than your enemies. You would begin by gathering basic raw materials and slowly build infrastructure. First your peons had to chop enough wood to build a lumber mill and blacksmith. Then you could produce finished wood and nails and build a barracks. Then your barracks could produce one soldier every four turns provided the peons kept it supplied with wood and water. Etc. So there was a bit of a simulation flavor to the game, like SimCity or any of its worthy successors, mixed in with combat.

I found the Warcraft games, entertaining, but not addicting. The long resource buildups got tedious after a while, and the games seemed to get quite difficult in their later stages. I played a fair amount of Warcraft III, and it was pleasant enough in its way. There was some notable new technology there, though. For example, a 3-D engine that you zoom through the world and view it from any angle. Hmm.

Blizzard had another line of games, called Diablo, that held my interest a bit better once I started playing them. Diablo is essentially digital D&D: fantasy environments, character classes, quests, treasure, hit points -- almost entirely running around killing monsters, but in a very visually pleasing way. I played a lot of Diablo II, and a bit of the expansion module.

Then came the Xbox era. Lots of Halo, an amazing game created by Bungie, intended as a successor to the Marathon series (though Marathon's gameplay remains superior in some ways). Many hours of amusement. And a few other XBox games such as Halo 2, Fable and Burnout. All fun, but nothing too addicting. A lot of the XBox games did have an online component where you could play with or against other people. One aspect of this was competition: play directly against other people. Sometimes this was entertaing, as when playing "house rules" PvP Halo against my extravagant friend Scott. (In house rules, you can only kill the other playing with a Jeep or a hand grenade, which makes it by turns challenging and hilarious). But when playing online against other players, all too often it was a case of entering a game populated by hyperactive teens who played all day and mowed one down in a second or two, along with heaps of abuse.

There was, though,another kind of online play. Let me lay out some terminology. Games or modes where you compete directly against other humans are often referred to as PvP (player versus player). Games where you compete against the game environment (exploring a virtual world, fighting monsters or aliens) are often called PvE (player versus environment). What I thought would be interesting, more interesting than PvP vs coke kiddies, was collaborative PvE -- team up with one or more of your friends, and explore a virtual world together. This would get you much closer to a D&D-like experience.

Halo, it turned out, did have a collaborative PvE mode. Scott and I explored much of the Halo universe together, teaming up against the vast array of horrid aliens. The experience, though, left something to be desired -- we had to share the same screen, split in two, with one of us above and the other below. It was easy to be distracted by what the other guy was seeing, and your view of the game was crammed oddly into half a screen. OK, but not ideal. And you had to be in the same room, on the same XBox. Long-distance gameplay was strictly PvP.

But the folks at Blizzard had not been idle. What next to do with the Warcraft franchise? The whole resource thing was getting old. But they had a fully worked-out (if somewhat hackneyed and cartoonish) fantasy world, and a usable 3-D engine. And computers were becoming more powerful, and broadband more prevalent ....

So, to make a long story short, Blizzard created a "massively multi-player, online role-playing game" (MMORPG), imaginatively dubbed it World of Warcraft, and the entire universe became massively addicted thereto. It was released in November 2004. I began playing it about 11 months later. According to the best data I can get, I have been logged into the game for a total of about 89 days in that time span -- over two thousand hours, something on the order of two hours every day. Hmm. What's so appealing? Is this thing better than D&D? Worse? Different?

All of the above, as it turns out.

*

World of Warcraft, or WoW for short, is a very simple game in some ways. It's a fantasy-oriented agem (I hesitate to call it an RPG), with conventions familar to anyone who's played an RPG.

First, create a character. Begin by choosing a "faction": Horde or Alliance. The Horde is comprised of Orcs, Trolls, Tauren, and the Undead. The Alliance is composed of Humans, Dwarves, Gnomes, and Night Elves. A lot rests on this choice: characters (and players) from one faction cannot communicate or collaborate with the other faction. That means that if you are Alliance, and your friend is Horde, you can't effectively adventure together, or even communicate in the game except via several workarounds.

So choose a faction, then a race (see above) and a class. Classes include RPG staples such as Warrior, Mage, Priest, Druid and Paladin, along with some less obvious ones such as the Rogue (combines features of thief and assassin), the Warlock (a spellcaster with particular affinity for demons), the Hunter (a sort of ranger-beastmaster with an affinity for ranged weapons, one of the game's most popular class choices) and the Shaman (somewhere between a Priest and a Druid). Not every race may play every class, so those two choices have some interactions that need to be thought out.

Next you can choose how you look, sort of. Those accustomed to the elaborate avatar customizations of games like Second Life will find the choices alarmingly slight: you can change your character's skin color, hair color, hair style, facial feature, and one or two other slightly race-dependent attributes like body piercings. But the number of really distinct combinations is not so high, and so one can often find several characters (I will fiercely resist the in-game convention of calling them "toons") with a very similar look.



One huge difference from traditional RPGs -- though we often speak of "rolling" a character in WoW, in fact a player has no control at all over a character's starting statistics. Those are absolutely determined by the combination of race and class. When you have a subscriber base numbered in the millions, game balance becomes paramount, and Blizzard needs to tune the game constantly to make sure no particular combination of abilities, circumstances, items, etc., conveys some overwhelming advantage. One way to attain this is to allow zero variability in underlying statistics, which is the path Blizzard chose.

*

Once you have your character, the game is extremely simple. Your goal is to go up levels and collect loot. That's it. As you progress through the game, you can visit ever more dangerous areas, and finally, if your skills and equipment are good enough, you can team up with others and challenge some of the most difficult encounters in the game.

But it all really comes to just two things: loot, and experience (or XP). If you like, you can subdivide loot into cash, and "gear". Gear is stuff you wear and carry -- generally magic items that enhance your base abilities in some way.

So how do you gain loot and XP? Just two ways. The simplest way is to go kill monsters. because, you see, monsters are everywhere in WoW. As soon as you leave a settled area, you can glimpse scads of them through the woods. Mostly they'll just mind their own business, but if you get too close, they will rush at you and attach you. Defeat them, and they drop loot, of a randomness alarming even by "bad rpg" standards: wild boars do generally drop tusks and short ribs, but also the occasional magic weapon.

Besides killing monsters, you can also complete quests. To get a quest, find an NPC with a big exclamation point above his/her/its head (see above). The NPC will give you a task to complete, and when you complete it, you return to said NPC to claim a reward, generally a mixture of cash, XP and gear.

So what do you do on quests, you might ask. Well, mostly .... kill monsters. I mean, there are other goals mixed in -- explore this or that zone or dungeon, pick up this item -- but to do any of those, you have to mow your way through every manner of wandering monster. The experience has often been likened to wood-chopping. Visually appealing, interactive wood-chopping, but wood-chopping nonetheless.

Many online RPGs share this trait, known also as "the grind." The rewards you get from the game have nothing to do with being "good at" the game. It actually is possible to be "good at" WoW, but this has no effect on how quickly you progress. Your progress and rewards are almost entirely proportional to just one thing -- the amount of physical time you spend playing the game.

There. I said it.

Now, wood-chopping or not, the game is immensely appealing on several levels. Compelling scenery:





Dark entrances:



Impressive beasts, especially the rideable variety:







And immense dungeons, of which more, no doubt, anon ...



(These are all shots of my various characters, by the way, all them in real-game situations.)

*

I need to close this post. I began writing it two weeks ago. The punch line is simple. A couple of months ago I decided it was time to let the kids play some "real" computer games. Nothing heinous like Doom III, just some lightweight XBox fare. I reasoned that they were already seeing games at friends' houses, and they might as well learn more from a "safe" source. (Future posts will challenge the notion that I am a "safe" games mentor). All I showed them at first were games like Burnout (a car racing and crashing game) and Star Wars:Clone Wars (a low-violence spaceship shooting game). E. also got a bit into Morrowind, an XBox RPG. But he was so immersed in the game and so attached to his character that when a monster first killed him it was traumatic (much as it was when a monster first defeated him in D&D). He decided that Morrowind "gives me too much adrenaline," and limited himself to exploring roads and cities.

But then came Sunday 6/15/08. We were scheduled to go on a Cub Scout canoe trip. E. joined the Scouts this year because it looked fun and he had friends doing it. We've done a variety of the activities, but he didn't really latch onto it except as a monthly social event. This canoe trip, on the nearby Brandywine River, seemed like a good way to wrap up.

That is, until the large trip organizer with the torn-off sleeves and vaguely Deliverance air warned us that the river was running fast and that we needed to look sharp or we'd be flipping over in eight to ten feet of fast water on the bends. Hmm.

So it was rough. I hadn't canoed in a while, and E in the front, not at all. We grounded out often, spun out, ran ashore. I ran us straight into thickets, where E gamely took the branches in the face and fell backwards into the canoe to avoid tipping out the side. By the break he had had enough, like one other young man, and demanded we get off the river and drag the canoe back somehow. It didn't help that he knew that there was a dam near the end, where we had to look sharp and scoot to a portage point to avoid going over the dam. At the opening Q&A he had asked if there was a cage or net or something to keep people from going over. "No there is not," said Gruff Rental Man. So apparently the spectre of the Dam was making it all much worse.

Finally, after much cajoling, and assurances that it was dead easy to avoid the dam, we got back in the water. E was a trouper, toughed it out the rest of the way, did not fret much and made the very best of it. It turned out we did indeed have to look sharp at the dam. There was little warning, and we had to scoot out around some branches, turn broadside to the current only 15-20 feet from the dam and shoot to the portage point. On the other hand the dam was only 4-5 feet tall, not the terrifying drop E had been expecting. One canoe looked it over and decided to just go straight over the dam. He was happily flabbergasted at how small it was.

But still, he returned home a tired and drained kid, somewhat unhappy and discouraged. So I made the executive decision. World of Warcraft is full of sights that are supremely exciting to a fantasy-mind kid.

So I showed him the game.

Whatever happened to Thorgun?

What indeed.

We left Thorgun a long way back, didn't we. Back here. Last we heard of him he and his uncle K were in Kingsport in the midst of a store-bought module. But, uh, that was a YEAR ago. So maybe there's something to all these folks telling me I ought to post more often.

Thorgun's had an interesting story. I'm going to do my best to get caught up.

We played the module for a while, despite having started in the wrong place and getting everything out of order. Kingsholm, it turned out, had issues. Straneg digging sounds from the graveyard, and now one of the graveyard sentinels had disappeared! But, problem: due to GM slackitude, our heroes had come down through the graveyard. Rather than appear as potential saviors, these two half-orcs seemed like the likely source of whatever mischief was brewing. Somehow, I don't recall how, they talked their way out of getting thrown in the stocks, and further managed to persuade the mayor to let them investigate the graveyard. Here, both E and his dad soon faced some interesting choices.

In E's case this came when they were attacked by wolves in the graveyard. Uncle K soon fell, badly wounded. After some deliberation, E dragged his uncle into a bush and guarded him, as best I recall, though at first he had it in mind to run away. First encounter with the idea that such games can present us with "real" choices.

My "real" choice came a bit later, when I discovered the tomb up the hill (into which our heroes had found their way) contained the beaten corpses of humans who had been killed by the marauders who were in fact digging for magic items deeper within the tomb. This was definitely fodder for older kids, and I edited swiftly on the fly. They fought some zombies, then some skeletons, perhaps needing to take another break as uncle K again went down for the count. Eventually they reached a locked door with, I believe, a large Beholder image on it. And there, they stopped.

They didn't really stop. But E. decided he'd had enough of store-bought adventures. As he put it, what was the point of just COPYING what someone else had already written? I tried to explain how modules worked, but in one way he had a point. He wanted adventures that were just for him. Who wouldn't?

So, like Ferdinand the Bull, he and Uncle K made their slow peasant way back to their ancestral pastures (along the Dark Highway, of course) -- back to Bladesbat Cave to sit, just quietly, and smell the Grick. And plot their next move.

Champions

If you've played RPGs, you may have played the game Champions at some point. This was (is, actually) an RPG with some interesting twists. For one thing, you built your character based on a pool of points that was not generated by dice rolls. Among the things I recall fondly was that you had to specify both specific advantages (Bruce Wayne very wealthy ...) and disadvantages (Rhas al Ghul is sworn to kill him; he has a milk allergy; etc.) In some cases, again as far as I recall, you could boost your advantages if you took corresponding disadvantages, though the GM couldn't let this get out of hand (he lives in a space fortress in geosynchronous orbit, with enough firepower to destroy the moon, but an entire ancient civilization under the Antarctic ice cap has sworn to destroy him).

Well, anyway, the only point is, I kind of liked Champions.

Since he discovered D&D, E has had the habit of making "a D&D" of anything interesting. For a while this year he went through a Spider-Man phase. So he wanted to do some superhero role-playing. He invented a blob-like character called Rashanga. Here, as best I can reconstruct my transcription of a month or so ago, is he account of his origins.

Saturn -- part asteroid -- hit the Moon -- astronauts come, found smooth black rock -- they put the black stuff in a warm container, and the alien formed. At first he was just blobby stuff that moved all around, he wasn't in the shape of a humanoid. He was born from the warmth, he scared the astronauts at first, he gummed them up, because he was just born. He made them crash into the Hudson River. At first he just tried to climb onto something, and control its mind, but it was an astronaut.

He sees New York as his territory -- when he fights villains, he's really just defending itself from its territory. He can turn his goo into human form. He stays in human form -- only one human knows his secret, a scientist, Doctor Kafka. Only this guy knows his weakness -- infared heat (sic).

He can divide -- keeps the same mind. Even into hundreds! Well, he's never divided into more than six. It's stressful to divide into hundreds.

He has sense glands behind his eyes. When it goes off it shows off a big vantage point of the city, and his eyes glow white. He sees all the normal people as orange and the bad guys as green. He glow purple (?) Shows the most dangerous bad guy first ...

So there. Like reconstructing a Spanish ship's log. But this old manuscript suggests my son is more inventive than I am. :-)

Sixty-Seventh Grandfather

"Dad, my guy is a dragon rider, because his sixty-seventh grandfather was a dragon rider."
"Sixty-seventh! That's quite a long way back."
"Yes"
"Let's figure out how long ago that would have been!" (Parents of school-age kids mysteriously think everything is a math problem).We do some figuring ... "Hmm, probably about 1600-1800 years ago."
"Yes, that is a very long time."
"And I wonder HOW MANY sixty-seventh grandfathers a person has. You know how you have 2 grandfathers, and four great-grandfathers? How many sixty-seventh grandfathers do you think you have?"
"I don't know. A hundred?"
(More figuring).
"Nope. Over a billion." (Actually the answer seems to be in the quintillions).

So that got me thinking. Clearly a person can't have that many ancestors. I don't know much about population, but it got me to thinking. Take a smaller number of generations -- say 14. This would take us back to the late 16th century, Elizabethan era. A person still has about 32,000 ancestors at that generation. Well, that's believable. And any individual one of those, assuming each generation doubles, has about 32,000 descendants in the modern day.

That's all believable. But clearly, if you go back far enough, the number of a person's ancestors at some point is about equal to the size of the entire human race. And from there of course, assuming each generation is smaller than the one after it, the pool of ancestors shrinks and shrinks. That point seems, from my superficial reading (Wikipedia of course, I mean, what ELSE, it's 2008 and ... well yeah) seems to be called the identical ancestors point, and be located some where between 5,000 and 15,000 years ago. This seems to be different from the most recent common ancestor, a single ancestor shared by all living humans, who may have lived as little as 2,00o to 5,000 years ago.

Of course, the blindingly simpler lesson from all this, but something one still tends to forget, is that all people alive do share a common ancestor, and hence are all related. The smaller the subgroup, the more recent the common ancestor. Whichever subgroup you look at it, the CA falls within approximately historical times. Who knows, for my background, the CA might be lurking no more than a millennium back.

So it's obvious, as I say, but still forgotten, that the person I argued with yesterday, the blogger whose photo I clicked past because I didn't like his color scheme, the President, the cable guy and I, are probably all descended from some Basque shepherd around 811 A.D. Or, if any of those folks are, say, of African or Chinese descent, then some Egyptian boater, or the mayor of Mohenjo-Daro.

Tower of Babel, indeed ...

I put this proposition to my kids. E was pleased at the idea that all the kids in the world were his cousins. R thought it about in bed, and asked in alarm "Even people I don't LIKE?"

***

The original statement from E about "my guy" (a frequent phrase, meaning one of his characters in one of the various imaginary universes, all generally referred to as "D&Ds"), had to do with his guy's propensity for dragon-riding. This in turn comes from our having seen the movie Eragon, and subsequently to explore the book. I wish I could say this has been a thrilling exploration of a gem of young adult fantasy. I'd really like that to be so. But so far, it hasn't been.

I'm on delicate ground here. The Eragon series are written by Christopher Paolini, who was fifteen when he began writing the first one, and is about twenty-five as he finishes the third, all best-sellers I believe. Some of you know that I've worked at writing for a long time, and have a raggedy novel and lots of odd short stories scattered back over the years, none of them published. I've often been dismissive of authors, especially genre authors in areas like fantasy who succumb to the conventions of their "area" rather than rising above it. It's particularly tempting, and easy-seeming, to snipe jealously at someone who published his first book in his teens, and has continued from success to success. Anyone's writing will be youthful at sixteen or seventeen, and those determined to find fault could easily do so.

I've tried not to approach the books in that spirit. I got over my jealousy of published authors a long time ago. Finishing a book and getting it published is not primarily a matter of talent. Talent is essential if the book is to be a GOOD book, but as Molly Hunter has put it, talent is not enough. Her point was about the personal qualities of the author, but as much as the various traits she explores in her book on the subject, finishing and publishing a book requires sheer, raw tenacity. Christopher Paolini, and the others whose books fill the shelves at Barnes & Noble, clearly had that tenacity -- so my hat, with all sincerity, is off to him. Well done, man! Lots of people want to write books. Fewer succeed, and fewer still in a way that hits thousands of people. My book publishing has all been in the technical space, and I know a little of what it's like to have people you've never met tell you that they have your book and that it made a difference for them.

So when I approach these books now, it's not with the vague bitterness of the disappointed author, but as a concerned parent. Eragon is one example of something I'm seeing, but I'll point to another, that I've mentioned before: Emily Rodda's Deltora series. E brought one of these books home in first grade. Now, a couple years later, we're going through a whole Deltora renaissance.

I find the Deltora books honestly very hard to take. They're the exact opposite of the Droon series, that I've mentioned here before. Droon is very self-consciously goofy, extremely light-hearted bubble-gum fare that is at worst inoffensive, and has some pretty clever bits in it from time to time. Reading Droon to the kids can be boring, but it doesn't make me hurt. Deltora is different.

What's striking in Deltora is the humorless, ugly nature of everything in the stories. Everything is flat and sharp-edged. The names are short and unlovely, many of them one-syllable: the capital city is Del , for example, while much of the country is drained by the filthy River Tor. Monsters have names like Ols, and The Glus. Pirates are named Nak and Milne. The only smiles for anything, in seven books, are "grim" or "tight" ones. Combat and violence, when they occur, are pointlessly graphic, occasionally gruesome:

"Envy, Greed, Hate and Pride turned on him in a frenzy, their jaws frothing, their terrible teeth ripping and tearing at him, shredding his robe to ribbons, slicing into the shriveled gray flesh beneath."

That probably would have been fine up through "tearing at him." What follows adds needless specificity. I could add examples.

Eragon suffers from this as well. In one of the more strained-feeling plot devices, Eragon's dragon, upon hearing of the dark servants in the vicinity, goes half-mad and carries Eragon away into the mountains, where she insists on remaining for a day despite his pleas, long enough for the bad guys to come kill his uncle. He is so unused to riding her that the insides of his legs are rubbed raw. We are made to participate in this injury with Passion-of-the-Christ-like detail: the insides of his pants are "dark with blood", his legs are scabbed over, the wounds are "opening up again." -- none of which advance plot or character at all.

I don't know what to make of this. In the case of Eragon, perhaps just a beginning author learning what to include and what to leave out. With Deltora, the ugliness and infelicity are so pervasive and consistent that they seem deliberate.

Surely people who are writing for our children ought to be able to do better.

Then there's this.

"Out of the wreck rose the Black Rider, tall and threatening, towering above her. With a cry of hatred that stung the very ears like venom he let fall his mace. Her shield was shivered in many pieces, and her arm was broken; she stumbled to her knees. He bent over her like a cloud, and his eyes glittered; he raised his mace to kill."

Too much to ask? Perhaps, I don't know. Sometimes an unfair test is still the right one.