we’re all undead now

October 24th, 2008 • research, scenes from the web

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.

Loud, shrill and unvaried

September 16th, 2008 • research, scenes from the web

Via googlechat:

Sent at 11:59 AM on Tuesday

Me: Am reading a voice coaching book from the 60s: “carry a diary with you, and make memoranda of any high, tense, belligerent or nagging voices you may hear.”

Martin: what on earth for?

Me: It’s to correct “stridency” in your speech: voices which are “loud, shrill and unvaried”

Martin: what’s wrong with a screechy voice?

Me: I think it’s the idea that having an uncontrollably screechy voice might interfere with getting cast, rather than screechy = bad

Martin: but Iaeem goeeeng for mr scrEEeEch eeieen the nEEeeew ScreeEEchEEEe film!

Me: I weeeeiiish you the beeeiist of luiiiiccck.

Martin: thaieenk yeee kiiiieend siiir!

Me: sqrueeee!

Sent at 12:07 PM on Tuesday

Digital me

August 24th, 2008 • scenes from the web

My public online presence in August 2008:

delicious links

flickr feed

twitter updates

readwriteplay.co.uk (this site right here)

I also maintain and contribute to pennydreadfuls.co.uk and aeneasfaversham.blogspot.com.
Twitter is a lot less useful since they’ve turned off the UK phone updates, but the surplus of free wifi in the city keeps it working. Not sure how long it’ll last, though.

Circa 1983

August 18th, 2008 • scenes from the web

I’ve updated my flickr stream with pictures from the Edinburgh Scavenger Hunt from the weekend - a great day, though team Wedding Disco didn’t quite win - and some photos from the photo-shoot for Sketchatron: Unwieldy, a huge sketch comedy showcase featuring the best acts at the Pleasance on Thursday night. The shoot was early on Sunday morning, and fuelled by bacon.

Finally, here’s me, at some point in the early 80s, experimenting with a rug-based glamrock look.

you killed facebook

August 11th, 2008 • scenes from the web

The arrival of the London theatre and comedy scene to Edinburgh has pretty much broken facebook - only the brave or foolhardy sign in to brave the onslaught of e-fliers, invitations and group invites to plays, comedies, launches and 2-for-1 promos for plays by friends of friends of friends.

At the best of times, the ease of inviting just about everyone you know to anything at all means that facebook’s social network has had a fairly large noise-to-signal ratio: right now, it’s all noise. Even with free WiFi access across many (if not most of) the venues across the city, I’ve spoken to several people who’ve abandoned the site entirely until the end of the festival - falling back on older, more reliable (face to face) networks to rediscover their personal signal.  Few, though, have ever mentioned a cull of the friends of friends of friends that produced the avalanche of largely unwanted content in the first place.

the other, other festival

July 28th, 2008 • research, scenes from the web

There don’t seem to be any day-passes so I think I’ll be giving the Edinburgh Interactive Festival a miss, but it’s not as though I have much free time this August. “Consumer tickets” are available on the day or from branches of Gamestation, but it’s not clear how much they cost or what you’ll get access to. (It’s also not really online booking if that page directs you to a pdf which you have to print, fill by hand and then post or fax back. Snark.)

Alex Fleetwood - of last month’s Hide and Seek festival - is on a panel on the future of alternative reality games which I’d like to have heard, but I’m hoping I might bump into him via Andy Field at the Forest Fringe anyway. You can download the advertising-rich programme for the Edinburgh Interactive Festival here.