— read write play

Zombies have infested World of Warcraft:

As part of the lead-up next month’s Wrath of the Lich King expansion, Blizzard unleashed a new plague across Azeroth last night. Strange crates have been showing up in port towns, glowing green and inflicting anyone who touches them with ZOMBIE MADNESS! Actually it’s a disease that last 10 minutes, after which you become a zombie, maintaining full control of your character, complete with special zombie powers.

None of the above was forewarned in-game: the first thing I knew was an unexpected swarm of undead biting my ankles, followed by a glowing green disease, followed by sudden death at the hands of the local guards when I staggered into town looking for help.

The most interesting thing about the undead plague so far has been the impact on gameplay – more specifically, on ad-hoc group play. Playing as a zombie by yourself tends to be a fairly short-lived experience: enter any settlement and the guards rush to kill you.

But, as films have taught us, a pack of infectious zombies is another matter. So players have started to mob together, attacking towns and major cities as groups. More importantly, zombies are a trans-factional group. In other words, it doesn’t matter if you were a member of the Horde or the Alliance – separated by an in-game language barrier – because we’re all (un)dead now.

It looks as though Blizzard have learnt from their earlier accidental experience with plague simulation, when a design glitch allowed an in-game disease (or debuff) to escape a controlled encounter and spread amongst the general population (where researchers from Princeton University studied it as an example of pandemic disease.)

The dynamic here is a little different. Unlike the outbreak of Corrupted Blood, the zombie plague can be cured by a number of in-game player-characters, such as priests or shaman: contracting the disease doesn’t mean you end up as one of the undead if you can get treatment shortly after infection. In contrast, Corrupted Blood was designed to be contracted only by high level characters, and killed lower level characters so quickly that it was extremely difficult to treat.

And so now we have a pandemic simulator which includes the possibility of medical treatment, but with a game dynamic where being diseased and ending up as part of the transnational undead might actually be fun. It’ll be interesting to see how it plays out this weekend when the population of WoW reaches its weekly peak. I’m thinking about re-rolling as a healing character and heading out to join the in-game equivalent of the Red Cross.

A post from Lyn Gardner on the Guardian theatre blog that might be useful to my current 1st year students:

Walk into the Royal Court upstairs to see Leo Butler’s Faces in the Crowd and you are in for a bit of a surprise. Back in the 1980s I recall the upstairs space being used with real imagination for the promenade premiere of Jim Cartwright’s Road, long before promenade performances were fashionable in British theatre.

In recent years we’ve become quite used to seeing the Court’s upstairs space configured in many ways or simply used as a bare space, and now it sometimes feels slightly disappointing when you walk through the door to be confronted by rows of seats. But William Fricker and Rae Smith’s design is something else. It turns the acting area into a sunken bear pit and places the audience around the edges looking down from a height as if observing dangerous animals in a zoo. It’s brilliant, but for a play about debts (monetary and emotional) I did wonder how much the whole shebang cost.

It is a hugely effective device that creates a feeling of being a voyeur as you peer down, but is the design of the play more interesting than the play itself? Is it genuinely in service of the play or there to disguise the play’s deficiencies – or make it seem more than it is?

And there’s that recurring question: how do the specific decisions you make in staging service the play? How do they relate to what you want that performance to achieve?

If you like, it’s part of an exercise in broader consciousness raising: realising that conventions of performance are not accidental or incidental, but choices to be made rather than default positions to be assumed.