The Queue: Penguins and other joyful animals

Mitch and I had a great time streaming the cute little game of Penguin Colony last night, in which you are a penguin sliding around a serene antarctic landscape, and also some other things happen. I won’t bore you with the details, but I do have penguins on the brain today.

But we can talk about more than penguins. We can even talk about more animals than penguins, so we should get started on that. This is the Queue, our daily Q&A column where I do my best to answer whatever questions you throw at me.

My favorite animal, the hippo, is vastly underrepresented in the gaming space. I have been following Baby Pygmy Hippo Zoo for years with nothing to show for it. Pygmy hippos, especially when they’re babies, can be pretty adorable, and if you pay attention to Moo Deng, also pretty troublesome. But they’re hardly the only hippos out there.

A full-sized hippopotamus is a chubby round blob that spends its days lazing around, chomping on veggies and watermelon. But how would a hippo fit into a video game? A zoo game, with habitat design, maybe? We must look deeper at the hippo to understand their role.

Jenny Lawson talks about them in her newest book, saying “Hippos look like enormous, goofy water babies who like long soaks, but really they’re murder potatoes who kill over five hundred people a year; they’re literally deadlier than lions. And hippos are vegetarians, so they’re not even doing it to eat you. They just want to kill you for fun. (I assume.)”

I don’t think it’s for fun, exactly. Hippos just don’t let anyone mess with them. If you’re playing two bosses enter, it’s always the hippo who’s going to leave. They’d rather be relaxing, but if a lion or a crocodile gets in their face? The hippo is going to make sure they leave, and they aren’t going to be nice about it.

Maybe a hippo game is essentially a walking simulator (except as a hippo) traveling along someplace pleasant. Like an art museum or a garden full of tulips. And when someone bothers them, they get destroyed. and when someone gives them a watermelon, there are little hearts over the hippo’s head as it devours this sweet bounty gifted by its new friend. Maybe at some point the cops are called, and man, this hippo just wants to have a nice stroll through the garden and everyone is getting on its case. Rude.

I’m not sure how gameplay goes beyond that, but there’s a definite juxtaposition of soft and sweet with the murder machines that hippos are capable of being.

It’s perfect. Let’s start prototyping immediately.

I’m happy with vanilla and buttercream, as everyone should be.

This is an interesting point, though I think Blizzard rarely uses the unreliable narrator trope itself, but instead has a tendency to retcon or change story directions or add big chunks of lore that change our perspective on what’s happening. Sometimes there is a character who is intentionally lying or misleading others. None of that is necessarily indicative of an unreliable narrator, and the fact that World of Warcraft has no single narrator or point of view character makes it very hard to push an unreliable narrator story; there are too many perspectives and we are never stuck with a single person’s distorted view of the world that informs the whole story: WoW doesn’t have a narrator, so it’s hard to have an unreliable narrator. Instead, it has a lot of characters, some of whom are more trustworthy than others.

And unreliable narrators, when actually used as a story device, can be a lot of fun, so blaming a story that doesn’t go as you expect on an unreliable narrator is really doing a disservice to actual unreliable narrators.

Here’s an example of Blizzard using the unreliable narrator trope really well: Flynn Fairwind narrating the Battle for Dazar’alor raid, in his characteristic style. It’s an exaggerated version of the truth, and I think the narration really makes this raid one of the best storytelling Warcraft has done. Similarly, there’s fan-favorite quest The Day that Deathwing Came, which is interesting precisely because it is a wildly exaggerated story of Deathwing’s attack and vanquishing.

In books, one of my favorite series is The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells. It’s in first person, narrated by the titular Murderbot, and Murderbot is not a reliable narrator. It’s not because it’s lying, but because it has a unique perspective on the world and itself, and everything in the books is presented from that perspective. The perspective makes the story more interesting than a simple factual recounting of what may have happened, and that’s what makes an unreliable narrator story so great. It’s about perspective.

There is an interesting comparison to note here, in that the TV series for Murderbot is different from the books, which fans have mixed feelings about, but which I feel is entirely because Murderbot is an unreliable narrator, and to make a TV show the perspective had to be broadened to include other characters. Warcraft simply doesn’t have the kind of myopic view to create a problem like this in the first place.

The main narrative of World of Warcraft doesn’t have a perspective, just dozens of characters doing their own things, with their own personalities and desires, clashing or cooperating as the situation suits. A character who lies is just a character who lies. A retcon is just a retcon. It’s not always an unreliable narrator to blame; sometimes it’s just the sort of disjointed storytelling that a 22 year old video game has by its very nature, because it’s been building this jenga tower of a story for 22 years. No reason to poison a perfectly fun narrative technique because of it.

Let’s do a Q&A speedrun, with bonus bulleted list:

• Midnight has a lot of rare cosmetics that you can only get by fishing them up (or buying them for outrageous prices on the auction house). You will sometimes fish up treasure chests that can include an egg that hatches into a void drake mount (also can randomly drop while fishing in Voidstorm), the Bubbling Snapling pet, and a number of cosmetic weapon transmogs.
• I like Collegiate Calamity, the delve in Silvermoon City. First it’s just very easy to get to, but also the school setting gives it a lot of potential story hooks. It’s not too long and it’s not too short and it doesn’t require a ton of ambling around to get where you’re going. (My least favorite is The Grudge Pit, which is just one big room where you keep getting swarmed.)
• I like Plunderstorm and Abyss Anglers to a point… and it doesn’t take me too long to get to that point. Plunderstorm I find mostly frustrating, but it’s fun to play a bit. Abyss Anglers I actually think is a fun little challenge, but the lack of real rewards means I don’t feel compelled to keep playing.
• The fun little things can be fun little unpopular things, which means they get neglected so that Blizzard can make time to work on more popular features. So went Archeology, Pet Battles, Decor Duels, the Dance Studio, etc.
• Blizzard hasn’t said anything, but I’m going to guess based off requirements for LFR for March on Quel’danas. I know it’s a little arbitrary, but that’s what we’ve got. Quel’danas has an ilevel 230 requirement to enter, and drops ilevel 240 and 243 loot on LFR. A similar 230 suggestion for the next level of content seems feasible, and isn’t too hard to get even for solo players right now.
• Blizzard game trivia is not really my thing, so probably not.

Whew! We’ve just gotten in our minimum requirement for bulleted lists for the day.

That’s all for now, so take care of yourselves, because we’re nearly to another weekend! I’ll see you in the comments section.