My brother just got Warcraft III. I played I, II, and StarCraft, and this a straight extrapolation. It seems to have ripped a few pages out of Myth’s book, too: the Humans have dwarfs and dwarven mortars with gung-ho Scottish accents. The rendering per se is nice (very smooth, with only a few jpeg artifacts) but the view control is abysmal — the camera won’t rotate, so you’re stuck at 45°. The engine could handle it, because the models are already 360°, and you can even zoom in and out on a curved pseudo-track, but I guess they just forgot spin. The excellent camera controls put a huge kick in Myth, which was so not-suckyI say was so not-sucky — well, with eight megs of video ram, Soulblighter is still cutting-edge. WWII is the best mod. partly because of that wonderful freedom — to lay mines to the inch, to follow winding paths, and especially to pull a formation toward you, over every knoll and ditch, watching the lines of sight from the enemy’s perspective. But WarCraft, for all its sophistication of gameplay and plot, is stuck hiding units behind a quarter of all cliffs.

Then again, the plot kinda sucks. In the original game, you played the Humans and fought the Orcs, right? Well, gasp in amazement when you hear that things have progressed to the point where, in the third game, not only do you play both species,Okay, so you can play the Undead and the Elves too. but (O bitter irony!) the Orc protagonist is more sympathetic than the Human protagonist! Talk about irony — wow! It seems reasonable to suppose that the dialog was done by someone hired for Lucrative Realtime 3D Engine Developer Position (some writing required). We get lots of deathbed expositions and trumped-up arguments,I’m sick of mutiny as a plot device. It’s too convenient. and it’s all read by robots. Plus, the subs are written advertizer-style. With no commas. Just periods for every pause. I like short sentences. Even if I don’t use them all the time. But sometimes they are just wrong. Some pauses are far better represented by commas. Not periods. Except when they’re extremely emphatic. Which is why advertisers like them. And game designers too. It makes things more urgent. But reading it is like listening to a slow stutter, a sort of stuttering of ideas, where nothing comes out whole and nothing connects to anything else.

When I think about it, I try to keep my sentences under sixteen beats, and to organize them neatly into cause and effect, or neat parallels, if they get longer.

When I think about it,
I try to keep my sentences
under sixteen beats,
and to organize them neatly
into cause and effect,
or neat parallels,
if they get longer.

1. Put this sentence at the end of something. It needs to have some fleshed-out ideas to work on, and it would be excruciatingly lame and pretentious to a cold reader. (Or, for that matter, out of contect, which is too bad, as it will be terribly quotable.)
2. Collect your main nouns and heap adjectives heavily on them: one each, or maybe two (listed with and, not commas). The adjectives are recalling and developing, and even re-interpreting, the nouns; this should be the first use for all of them. If you’ve occasionally used secondary names for some nouns, go ahead here too.
3. No more adjectives. Now that they’re extra-vivid, the nouns will fly alone for greater speed. We’ll have a better view of the action.
4. Make a good point with nouns and verbs.
5. End with a verb phrase. Extra points for using becomes.

Word! But back to complaining about WarCraft. I guess they should have worried more about naturalism. Orcs and Elves are one thing, but people just don’t say things like my first thought was to awaken you — or, if they do, it sounds more old-fashioned than it sounds mythical. The whole business of trying to evoke history seems weird. They seem to mean to associate the game with Beowulf and so forth, and thus to imply that it’s exciting and, uh, good enough to repeat for a thousand years. If I were trying to give legitimacy to something that sucked, I’d call it revolutionary instead of associating it with — well, here’s the thing, see: the Human protagonist is named Arthas, and he gets a magic sword, and his mentor is names Uther. But wait! Uther is not his father, and he gets the sword by betraying his friends, and then he goes crazy. Huh? Some of that Round-Table stuff was pretty dark, but none of it was at all like that. If they’re going to — jeez — I mean, would it have killed them to call Arthas (say) Malcolm, and Uther (something like) Ethelred? Would it have hurt sales?

Furthermore, why to the Elves refer to nature? In my experience, people who would have occasion to use the word don’t, any more than people in Manhattan are constantly referring to city. I will do it for the good of the city is no more absurd than s/city/nature/. If you live in nature, you don’t think about nature; you think about where you live. In everyday speech, people don’t talk about kinds of things, they talk about things. If Bungie can’t make a forest seem interesting without resorting to banal generalities, they got problems.

This sense of personal integrity in punks and mods — in a BBC broadcast, C. S. Lewis said:

People often think of Christian morality as a kind of bargain in which God says If you keep a lot of rules I’ll reward you, and if you don’t I’ll do the other thing. I don’t think that is the best way of looking at it. I’d much rather say that every time you make a choice you are turning the central part of you, the part that chooses, into something a little different from what it was before. And taking your life as a whole, with all your innumerable choices, all your life long you are turning this central thing either into a heavenly creature or into a hellish creature: either a creature that is in harmony with God, and with other creatures, and with itself, or else into one that is in a state of war and hatred with God, and with its fellow-creatures, and with itself. To be one kind of creature is heaven: that is, it is joy and peace and knowledge and power. To be the other means madness, horror, idiocy, rage, impotence, and eternal lonliness. Each of us at each moment is progressing to one state or the other.

Now, notwithstanding the various arguments against that as Christian theology, as an agnostic I feel reasonable twisting his words to imply that