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Friday Fun Thread for March 17, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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WoW Geoguessr videos are... wow.

There are 125 zones in WoW and 190 dungeons, and the base game sprawls ~80 square miles and the full game maybe 150 square miles now. Each zone has at least 60 unique identifiable “places”, possibly more, whether that be a random feature of the environment, a mob encampment, a random hut, an npc, etc. This includes major landmarks and the random “things to see” in-game. Longterm WoW players are able to determine the location of 7500 unique identifiable places covering 150 square miles down to the meter, often able to name the residing zone and town and what “happens” their ingame. Counting dungeons, that’s about 19,000 unique things they have pinned down on a map sprawling 150 square miles.

19,000 pieces of information navigable on a map.

And then you remember it’s a game, and the game is not even about this information. There’s also maybe 4000 cosmetic items, and players like Asmongold are likely to tell you the name and where to find them and what quest it involves. There are 30,000 quests, half of which these players could tell you about just by seeing the NPC. There are bosses and mob types, surely at least 500 unique ones which can be named. 9000 spells, and a given player will know 150 of them and what they do by their image and when to use them.

Then there are the random things: the potions and other consumables, the emote commands, what you do in a raid, the hundreds of different vendors, the hundreds of materials for building things. Not to mention the lore!

These longterm WoW players easily know 45,000 pieces of distinct information. It’s crazy when you add it all up like that.

Genuinely, a similar thought in my youth is why I started to study history + geography as a hobby. I realized that given I had an interest in learning place names, cultures, the course of different wars, the lineage of different monarchs, etc, I really ought to put that drive towards things that actually existed.

This certainly hasn't stopped me from being a "lore nerd" for different games and series, but it at least keeps a little voice in my head to spend at least as much time on reading about actual nations as I do about fictional ones.