Even though I haven’t found many sources yet to confirm this, it looks like World of Warcraft now has to deal with a disease spreading to other players’ characters, and bearing the charming name of “Corrupted Blood”. Here’s what pigz at Shacknews has to say about it:

Blizzard adds in a new instance, Zul’Gurub. Inside is the god of blood, Hakkar. Well, when you fight him he has a debuff called Corrputed Blood. It does like 250-350 damage to palyers and affects nearby players. The amazing thing is SOME PLAYERS have brought this disease (and it is a disease) back to the towns, outside of the instance. It starts spreading amongst the genral population including npcs, who can out generate the damage. Some servers have gotten so bad that you can’t go into the major cities without getting the plague (and anyone less than like level 50 nearly immediately die). GM’s even tried quarantining players in certain areas, but the players kept escaping the quarentine and infect other players.

As a person who’ve dabbled in MMORPGs for a few years, although I’ve never played WoW, I find this quite fascinating. Is this an intended feature that’s working too well, or a serious coding bug, if there’s ever any difference between the two, in this case? We’ve all heard of viruses that spread from computer to computer through the internet, and of course of biological viruses, but this is a premiere to me; I don’t think that any online game has seen such collateral damage occur, and while it can sure be fascinating from a purely roleplaying point of view, it also has the potential to be a serious bother to players.

I now wonder how Blizzard will handle the matter, yet above all, I wonder how this could happen. What piece of code was needed for the Corrupted Blood to become so virulent? How come that such an event could occur in what’s supposed to be a completely human-controlled environment? Somehow, I can’t prevent but thinking that this is a perfect example of chaos in motion. It’s so similar to real life that it’s almost frightening.

(Link found through Clickable Culture)

Y Tags: disease | mmorpg | virus | world of warcraft | wow

Triggered by the tidying of a still unexplored room in our house and finding some old “classic” French books, I remembered a belief I had when I was younger. Although I can’t exactly recall why I had it, I suspect it had to do a lot with studying a certain amount of said classic books at school.

It could be summarized as follows: “description is better than dialogue”.

That’s it, I thought that the longer and the more detailed descriptions were, the better the book would be, too. Dialogue? Some puny thing, used only to provide some relief to the eyes among heavy blocks of text. In fact, I’m more and more certain that our teachers had told us at some point that dialogue was “easy”, and that it denoted a lack of talent in writing.

Tell you what, twelve years later, I’m not convinced of this anymore, at least not when it comes to fiction works, and frankly, where else would dialogue wield so much importance anyway?

Yesterday, I caught this article about Angela Merkel’s childless status in the online edition of The Independant. The elections are drawing to a close, since it’s for this week-end, and it looks like once everything is said, people will once again resort to sex slur to strike at their opponents. Even though I don’t agree with many of Merkel’s points, I don’t think she deserves such a low blow—and coming from another woman, nonetheless. (As a sidenote, I’m aware that it’s just another of the usual pre-elections blows, specially coming from the opposition; I just find it extremely low, and of very bad taste.)

Then it hit me—seriously, can women in politics ever stand a chance? Will there be a day when such attacks stop? Why is it that women get this kind of arguments shoved at them, while they wield so much less importance in the case of male politicians? Why does this matter of sex always come back, as if it was more important than criticizing their programs instead (which are the things that should be discussed first and foremost, in my opinion)? Sure, every celebrity gets her deal of flak; once your name is known, even the most insignificant of yours action can become matter to discussion and mud-throwing. But this?

Today, this particular question came to mind again (I had already wondered about it when I was reading “No Plot? No Problem!”, a few weeks ago): does anyone use the second-person point of view? I mean, for real? Or is this just a joke? Come to think of it, if I hadn’t remembered these well-known “choose your own adventure” books, I would indeed have be tempted to think no writer in his right mind would ever use that.

However, this very morning, as I was broswing through old archives (not mine, fortunately), I realized that some people use, or has used it. In technical documents nonetheless. Oh, the horror.

It’s not about addressing the reader, no: it’s clearly a second-person point of view, and the result is very awkward sentences sounding much like “you see a window in which you click…”. I’m not kidding, and it’s a good thing that I’m decent at writing English, else our current manuals would be really icky.

Someone please tell me that it’s not the way technical writers are supposed to work in English…

Y Tags: documents | writing

I know, I know, I should stop thinking so much… I simply happen to very often ponder writing matters, these days. This time, I found myself wondering about points of views in stories. There are many questions attached to these, after all, and it’s not always easy to know how to write, and at what moment.

I’m not sure whether first person or third person is better to tell a story; it probably heavily depends on the story itself, and on the author’s ability to use them to their full efficiency. For instance, I know that instinctively, I tend to use the third person one from my character’s perspective, rather than its omniscient version (it’ll happen, of course—just not that often).