4.55. Casualsplaining

"Rune Deformation"
Artwork by 10Z (Liu Hao)

Spoiler Alert

I drew another line through a long list of names. Fourteen had been whittled to seven, then to four, and now to one. My questions were formulaic and terse; their answers were unabashedly byzantine. I debated the usefulness of the exercise, but pressed on, dialing the last number on the list, greeting the stranger on the other end of the phone, and walking the script.

"Describe to me a 'Relational Model'."

Each answer came at an uncomfortable cadence. An awkward pause at the start, followed by a reading back of the original question. Then, a nervous yet surprisingly articulate response -- all delivered in a thick East Indian accent, pauses littered throughout.

"So...eh...the thing that you wanted to know about...eh...was the Relational Model. It...eh...is an approach...to managing data using...eh...using a structure and language...consistent...with first-order predicate logic processes...eh...that are repeating items in a self-similar way."

"Perfect, thank you for that. Okay, next question. Can you tell me what a 'memory leak' is?"

"...So...eh...the thing that you asked about was...eh...memory leaks…"

"...right." Move it along. I know my own damn question.

"...which is...eh...is a type of resource leak that occurs...when a computer program incorrectly manages memory allocations...eh...in such a way that memory which...eh...is no longer needed...eh...is not released."

'Computer Program'? Why not just say 'code'?

The charade wore thin. I pulled up Chrome, headed to Wikipedia.org, searched for memory allocation, and pulled the result up. As I looked at the page, I spoke. "Got it. Thanks. And can you tell me what exactly is 'memory allocation'?"

"Eh…."

Kill me.

"...Memory allocation?"

I hate my life.

"Right. Memory allocation. What is it?"

I followed along, reading the Wikipedia page, as man with the thick accent gave me "his" answer.

"...the...eh...memory allocation is the...eh...act of managing computer memory at the system level."

It was word for word. He wasn't even bothering to paraphrase. Just Googling everything I asked him, and reading its response, verbatim.

There was a time when not all answers were Googlable. You had to bounce between a litany of search engines in order to maximize your results. AltaVista, HotBot, Lycos, Yahoo!...hell, even America Online had its own search engine. After feeding your keywords into all of those engines, you still might not find you were looking for.

WoW was like that once, too. Well before MMO-Champion, WoWDB, Wowhead, even Thottbot...the only way to tell if someone had mad skills was if they knew the answers to end game stuff. When the 40-Man Naxxramas went up on the public test realm, world first guilds looking to do meaningful research kept wannabes out of their exploratory pick-up groups by drilling them with skill testing questions.

"You been to Blackwing Lair?"

"...sure, sure I have!"

"What happens at the start of phase two of Nefarian."

"...uhh…"

Yeah...that’s what I thought. 

No amount of Googling was going to save you that day. Even if you were able to hit all the search engines at once...the delay would be enough paint you as a faker.

The world before Wowhead was gone, upended by a suite of websites whose engines ran on data-mined fuel. Every new PTR release exposed every asset and revealed every last secret. No mystery was left in want. In the information age, spoilers were simply a subcategory of answers, and the only effort necessary was reduced to typing keywords and click "search".

Oh, don't forget about the "reading" part. That appeared to be important, too.

The effect produced when two
mirrors face one another

Two Mirrors

I sat up in my office chair, and cleared my throat. It was time to divert from the script.

"Explain to me what recursion is, please."

The tell-tale delay. A faint typing of keys. More effort to maintain the facade.

"So...eh...the thing that you wanted to know about was Recursion...eh...which...eh...is is a method where the solution to..eh...to a problem depends on solutions to smaller instances..."

"...Sorry," I interrupted him, "I'm going to stop you there. Let me clarify: I'd like you to explain it to me in layman's terms."

"Eh...sorry?"

"I'd like you to make your answer more accessible, please."

The pauses appeared to grow in frequency.

"Eh...well...the...eh...type of the...eh...solution...is that of a kind of solution that is...eh...one that is larger...but that...eh...works with...eh...smaller solutions."

"You just stated the same thing a different way. I need you to dumb it down for me. What does a recursive function do that makes it unique from other types of functions?"

I sensed panic on the other end of the conference call.

".......eh, well, it is smaller...er, sorry, it is larger...than others kinds of functions…"

Wrong.

"...and...eh...it is the...eh...type of the function that can then call others that are...eh...they are smaller, no?"

No.

"I'm sorry, was that a question?"

"No...eh...that is my answer, yes."

I'd heard enough. "Ok, thanks very much for your time, today. We'll let you know if we have any further questions."

I took a long sigh and crossed the last name off the list. A recursive function calls itself; two mirrors facing each other, reflections repeating forever into infinity.

---

"There. Link's posted in the forums." Vexx's Australian accent hacked through the Ventrilo conversation with obvious frustration.

An impromptu five minute break followed, allowing folks to review the video. We spared individuals the embarrassment of calling them out. Maybe some were having a bad day. Perhaps some were deficient in the dexterity department. As it is with pluralistic ignorance, their reasons aside, players failing were too self-conscious to admit it publicly. You can diminish the effect by directing everyone to do it...

...but I whispered them individually. If you're not watching the video now, you should be.

By the end of the fourth hour, cracks began to show in the seemingly impenetrable array of Blazing Winds, but not enough to get a solid grip on and wrench open.

"C'mon! One more! One more go! Famous last pull!" The guild spirit was strong with Bonechatters. His youthful enthusiasm was enough to fill an entire roster.

"Nope," replied Blain, "Done for the night. We stop on time, those are the rules."

Boney wouldn't give up, "I heard a rumor rules were meant to be broken!"

I piped up, "Thanks, folks. Good work tonight. See you all back here Sunday."

Call it what you want. Lag. Server instability. Bad players. Bad connections. Sometimes a kill just isn't in the cards. I wasn't feeling it. Neither was Blain. The famous last pull wouldn't be our savior that night.

DoD defeats Alysrazor,
Firelands

Keep It Simple Smartypants

Rosters in heavy flux rarely get the same line-up. For all the benefits DoD boasted throughout WotLK, this was a downside. In the bizarro world of Cataclysm, deficits became benefits. The perfect set-up for learning a new boss, in Blain's eyes, was to bring the same people back. And that's exactly what we had for Sunday, July 10th. Whether we liked it or not.

Everyone present had seen all three phases. There was nothing left to teach, and no surprises to catch us off guard. If DPS had neither seen nor played Pilotwings before, I didn't want to know about it. I wanted to look up and see a squadron of Pilotwings experts on Alysrazor's ass. I wanted tornado dodging like it was second nature. And I wanted an explosion of damage on that bird the likes of which hadn't been seen since our Illidan kill.

Blazing Winds sawed through the raid on every attempt. Nobody was safe. Each of us blew it at least once. But, as it had with so many bosses before, patterns emerged. There were definitely people in the raid who were clumsy, still struggling, still having those same spatial awareness issues that had long been a burden on our roster. It didn't matter the reason. What mattered was the result.

"You can't chase them from behind. They move too fast. You have to actually move in between the rings. From the outer to the inner one."

"That's not true, you can chase them."

"Yeah, but I'm not getting the speed buff.:

"You don't need the speed buff to pull this off. Seriously, is it really this difficult?"

I remembered the 'insanity' bit Blain liked to quote to players: People doing the same things over and over, expecting different results.

Doing things the same.

Things.

Like play...

...or explain.

"It's like this," I spoke into Vent, "The tornados are cars on a freeway. You're a cop. And every tornado is a car you want to chase, but you can't chase them for long. The ones coming towards you...in other lanes...are even bigger catches than the one you're chasing."

"Sounds like a crime wave."

"Shut up a second. Listen. You're chasing a tornado...a car...until another one passes you in the opposite direction. That's when you switch lanes. Crank the wheel, change lanes, chase the car that just passed you. Just like that. Rinse. Repeat."

Slowly, surely, we got back on track. Players formerly failing on the tornado...were less so. We kept at it. Three tornado deaths. Two tornado deaths. One tornado death.

No tornado deaths.

In the third hour on the second night of work, the 25-Man roster cleared the hump, and having only lost a few players across two full tornado phases...it was enough to burn Alysrazor through her 2nd phase three. She fell that night, with an hour to spare.

As I lined up the roster, and snapped a kill pic for the forums, Blain shot me a message.

[From: Xane] Car chases?

[To: Xane] Hey. Whatever it takes.

3.37. The Illusion of Truth

Early art for one of several patent applications for
a moving staircase, a.k.a. the "Escalator"

Committing Genericide

Convenience is a dastardly foe. In 1950, it fooled a company (as it had the rest of humanity) into changing the perception of its own greatest invention, a blindside which ultimately cost them one of the most important trademarks of the 21st century.

An inventor named Charles Seeberger began working for the Otis Elevator Company at the turn of the century. Thanks to his careful purchase of several unrealized patents bearing a similarity to his newest invention, Charles was able to not only provide his employer with a world-changing machine, Otis itself would retain any and all legal control of the trademarked named. Charles consulted a Latin lexicon and devised a term which loosely described a thing as "a means of traversing from" -- it was to be pronounced "es-CAL-a-tor", much like He-Man's arch nemesis. Thus, the diagonally moving staircase was born, and the Otis-brand Escalator would stand to represent the very best quality in all diagonally moving staircases.

Capitalism being what it was, a number of competitors soon arose from the woodwork, providing their own diagonally moving staircases. But since Otis held a tight trademark on the brand name "Escalator", none of those competitors could legally call their inventions by the same name. They were forced to use impressive terms like "motorstairs", "electric stairways" and what is quite possibly the most exciting of the bunch, "moving stairs". But over the course of the next several decades, the psychology of man produced a very interesting behavior -- one that would eventually cause Otis to defend itself before a judge.

Motor-driven stairs grew to become a luxury that the entire world enjoyed, yet another mark of humankind advancing towards a technological future. They appeared everywhere, in shopping centers, office complexes, the lobbies of high-class apartments -- any place a person wanted a little extra convenience in their life when getting to point B, if it were several floors higher than point A. And Otis gladly met that demand, servicing any and all who required traversal-by-mechanical-means. It wasn't long before the Escalator-brand moving staircase appeared at every turn. Or did they?

There really was no way for the layman to point to a diagonally moving staircase and say, "Ah, an Otis-Brand Escalator! I'd recognize that name anywhere!" They all looked the same and performed the same function. There were no tell-tale clues that gave it away, no identifying logo or unique look that distinguished it from any other. Humankind was in bliss, enjoying their Coke or Pepsi while riding a -- oh, what's that thing called again? The diagonally moving motorized staircase? Ah, right, an escalator! By contrast, people knew which beverage they were drinking, which flavor they were emotionally attached to. They harbored no similar emotional attachment to a mechanized set of stairs. To them, all motorized stairs were escalators. The word itself was as convenient as the invention! The use of the Otis's brand-name became so ingrained into everyday life that by the same time the Pepsi-Cola company was trying to sell itself to the Coca-Cola company, the word "escalate" had become a part of everyday speech. Even the word itself had morphed, taking on a new pronunciation, "ES-ca-lay-tor", something much closer to the word we recognize and use today.

Midway through the 20th century, the Haughton Elevator Company had had enough. Having grown tired of their irreverent pseudonyms for what was clearly now a generic term, Haughton took Otis to court in an attempt to reverse the "Escalator" trademark. By freeing the term from Otis' legal stranglehold, any and all motorized staircase manufacturers could use the word "escalator" much as the public had being doing for years. The courtroom was heated as legal counsel produced pages of trademark copy written by Seeberger decades before his death. Yet upon scrutiny, inconsistencies emerged. Much of the text focused on "Otis-brand" this, and "Otis-brand" that, and Seeberger's own writing mixed the use of 'Escalator' and 'escalator' in various passages, skewing the brand name's validity as a proper noun. The defense pounced. In the March 1946 issue of Architectural Forum, inconsistencies in how the company referred to its brand continued bleed onto the page. Defense pointed to an advertisement, paid for by Otis and written by Otis, which contained the following fate-sealing verbiage:

"To thousands of building owners and managers, the Otis trademark means the utmost in safe, efficient economical elevator and escalator operation."

The last nail of the coffin was hammered in. The presiding judge had no choice but to rule in favor of Haughton, citing that Otis had not only been unable to defend the use of the word as a brand-specific name, they were guilty themselves of genercizing the word. Their brand had grown so convenient, so common to everyday life that its total lack of identifiable traits led humanity to unanimously agree upon their own false expertise. The hive mind collectively agreed on a term that was convenient, made sense, and was true...to them. The convenience of the word was so overwhelming, it even fooled the company that trademarked it in the beginning, as they unconsciously referred to their own invention in err. And in the aftermath of the fateful court case, the term 'escalator' fell into the public domain, but humankind was none the wiser. They continued to use the word as they always had. Or at least, it seemed to us we always had.

The "Raid Difficulty" option, added in Patch 3.2, allows
raids of both 10- and 25-Man sizes to toggle between the
easy and difficult modes on a per-boss basis.

Calling a Raid a "Raid"

When a brand name falls into generic everyday use, it is referred to as genericide. You don't cover your cuts with a medicated adhesive strip, you use a Band-Aid®. You don't make an 8 1/2" x 11" photocopy of that TPS report, you Xerox® it. Do you clean your ear out with a high-quality cotton swab? Or do you use a Q-Tip®? You don't mean to degrade these brands on purpose, it's a part of who we are, looking for convenience and shortcuts in what we do and how we speak. If done with enough frequency, the product we use takes on the meaning of that which we choose to call it. We do this when external identifying factors are diminished, blending into a cloud of indistinguishables. A Pepsi® may taste similar to a Coke® but the logos painted across the aluminum cans are completely dissimilar. Ask any Apple fan boy why you should choose an iPod® over a Zune®, and you'll be blasted with a checklist of significant differences in functionality, display, and even the "feel" of the device in your hands. If these easily identifiable traits aren't available to us, our minds turn to what we deem relevant, focusing instead on the obvious or what moves us: a color, a logo, a taste that we enjoy, a raid boss that caused our adrenaline to pump. When we focus on that repeatedly, it becomes familiar, and deep within the mind familiarity breeds "truthiness". Psychologists refer to this effect as The Illusion of Truth, and it's what makes bullied employees feel useless and complacent, and what compels the entire world to carry on believing a set of motorized stairs is an escalator, never realizing nor caring that they are using the wrong terminology.

At the release of Patch 3.2 - Call of the Crusade, World of Warcraft underwent a number of improvements and refinements, as patches typically do. Among the many new features that landed on our plate was a function that raiders of all shapes and sizes would come to use on a regular basis. Nestled deep within the user interface hid a new option that allowed the raid leader to toggle the difficulty of the next boss. Right-clicking a user frame produced a pop-up dialog, with four menu options: Raid Difficulty: 10-Man, 25-Man, 10-Man (Heroic), and 25-Man (Heroic). Switching the difficulty was as simple as the touch of a button. No longer would raiders have to suffer the indignance of working their way towards a invisible benchmark, say...having the DPS necessary to destroy XT-002's heart or defeating Hodir before he destroyed his cache at the three minute mark. There were no more qualifiers, no more vetting a raid's capacity to do quality work. With a single click, a raid could begin the process of smashing their head against a wall in heroic mode. Many raiders that weren't capable of handling difficult content did as such. And the more players who failed miserably at this difficult content, the more players there were to complain on the Blizzard forums about how life wasn't fair.

It gets better.

In order to make room for this new UI option in our raid frames, terminology needed to be adjusted. Up until this point, the word "heroic" was already in-use: a prefix that differentiated raid achievements by the size of the group involved. A 10-Man effort into "Arachnophobia" was very different than that of a 25-Man effort. To the untrained eye, the obvious physical attributes were the most noticeable: trash was more severe in a 25-Man, more health on bosses, and mechanics were less forgiving. Nerds being what we are, math is often the first go-to, so it made logical sense that beating a twenty-minute timer in a 10-Man raid appeared less challenging than in a 25-Man. But not everyone loves math as much as a nerd, so more convenient physical attributes were honed in on. The "heroic" label prefixed on each golden banner satisfied this requirement. In 3.2, however, this would no longer fly. The "heroic" label was now being used to indicate the difficulty setting of a boss, regardless of raid size. The term could no longer exist in both contexts without creating confusion, since 10s had the option of a "heroic" mode, just like the 25s. What to do?

To clear up this confusion, Blizzard stripped the "heroic" label off of the 25-Man achievements, and suffixed each achievement with its appropriate raid size instead. What was once "Heroic: Arachnophobia" was now "Arachnophobia (25-Man)", sitting parallel to "Arachnophobia (10-Man)". A perfectly logical, simple change that very clearly conveyed to WoW players exactly which achievement was which.

And thus began the slow growth of convenience tentacles into our subconscious, injecting us with their seed of genericization.

Quick! Which one of these achievements was the more
difficult of the two? (hover over image for the answer)

Erosion

Try to think of something "heroic". Perhaps you read the word and instantly think of firefighters rescuing children from a burning building, soldiers storming a beach, or Russel Crowe fighting off a handful of combatants in a sandy arena. The word invokes an emotional response in our brain because we associate it with great prestige, an accomplishment of noteworthy effort. We can point to Batman knocking out a villain and very easily identify which is the "heroic" of the two comic book characters. Well, the layperson might. But corner a comic book nerd and you'll produce an hour long discussion about the varying definitions of good and evil, darkness and light, and when Batman may even make unheroic decisions, making you wish you'd never brought the subject up. The nerdy comic book experts, it would seem, possess a sort of unhealthy obsession to the specifics...but they are no different than a machinist who happens to know the finely tuned differences between an Otis-brand escalator, and those of a competitor.

Hardcore World of Warcraft players share this tendency.

To many of us, labels on bright golden achievement bars that flash up on a screen are fluff; extraneous information that we don't pay a lot of attention to. What matters the most to us are the numbers, and our own experiences. And, as long as we had been raiding content in World of Warcraft, the size ultimately played a huge factor in gauging how difficult the content was. During Vanilla, 40s (near the end) were exceptionally challenging, and in The Burning Crusade, the few 10s weren't nearly as tough as the main stretch of 25-Man content. As we carried on into Wrath, we continued to see the very same things...from our perspective. The toughest content we reserved for the end of the week, but during the rest of the week, we cleared 10-Man content with ease. We did so simply because it was there, and we could supplement our gear with its lesser rewards. Each week, we would measure our performance against other 25-Man guilds to see how far along we were. And like clockwork, we would also see that each week, the 10-Man achievements were consistently completed long before the 25-Man ones -- just one more piece of evidence that painted the 10s as inconsequential.

But, that's not what the masses saw.

Thanks to the growing ubiquity of raiding in Wrath, a much larger group of players had entered the picture. Many of these players didn't share our unhealthy obsession with the fine details of raiding differences, nor did they care to. They were a different breed of player, focused primarily on what was convenient and familiar to them. Black Temple, Ahn'Qiraj, raids of great challenge still fresh in our minds bore no great burden to this next generation of raiders; they entered WoW raiding with no baggage. There was no "before" to the "after" to compare to; for them, the size of the raid was merely a reflection of their personal choice, something they clung to as fiercely as their most cherished class. They believed it. So by the time 3.2 had changed the way raids were labelled, the masses were already well on their way to considering both sizes of raids as equal, not as normal and heroic -- easy and difficult -- as they once were. What was truly bizarre to us was that amid these claims, Blizzard not only didn't clarify the differences in difficulty when called upon, they joined the masses in their shared assessment. Yes, raids are equal in difficulty! The size is merely a reflection of personal preference, not one of challenge! Even in the face of the data that said otherwise, the company that had (re)invented raiding spoke as though they were caught up in their own illusion.

It remained to be seen whether or not the illusion would become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

---

"How was your trip to BlizzCon?" I shot an IM over to Cheeseus, "was it a blast or what?"

"Yeah, it was a good time," he replied, "I assume you saw the announcement about the next legendary?"

"No, what is it?"

"Shadowmourne. You're gonna wanna have a look."

Upon seeing the name in front of me, I did what any WoW player would do: I Googled® it.