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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.

Where Mankrik's wife? will still get a flinch from open-beta or early release players on the Horde side.

This isn't specific to MMOs, notably. Even ignoring the extreme outliers like those with encyclopedic knowledge of Mario 64 glitches, there's probably a pretty sizable subset of Zelda BOTW players who can recognize each of 120 shrines, 14 towers, 80ish quests, yada yada (though I don't think anyway cares about the 'golden seeds'). ARK pretty much requires you to memorize 100-150 creatures by aggressiveness (which isn't just a matter of 'fights me or not', but also what mounts it won't attack), taming approach, diet, and utility; 'note runs' involve optimizing some (usually 100ish) subset of 1000 explorer notes for rapid experience gain; certain resources have important-to-recognize locations dependent on a map, so on. They usually won't get as large a list, but that's mostly a limit of their content and scope. Fallout or The Elder Scrolls players can end up with bizarrely specialized knowledge.

Some of this reflects video games being able to centralize that knowledge. FFXIV has somewhere upward of 500+ gathering items available from probably upwards of 150+ 'locations', but these are all hugely identifiable locations, and even the most generic landscapes (probably Coethas Western Highlands, which was often bashed as a boring snowy plain) has a landmark in sight for each gathering location. And as the memory palace approach attests, the combination of repetition and spatial reasoning may improve recall. Of course, on the flip side, almost nothing in Morrowind was hugely identifiable and there's no reason to every return to most ruins and... there's someone out there that knows where the One Muffin is.

That said, I'd caution that there's a big space between "longterm X players" and most or even many longterm players. I haven't played WoW for a while, but back when I did play the notorious difficulty finding anything in Thunder Bluffs or the Undercity was pretty well-established. For FFXIV, the problem of 'I have no memory of this place' is pretty standard for raids or dungeon roulettes, of which there are far fewer and which players would often repeat day-after-day for months when they were first released. I always end up going to the wrong part of the Gold Saucer trying to find Wild Rose, despite having done so on a weekly basis for the better part of a year.