Are Wizards bad for fantasy?

| Thursday, September 23, 2010
As we all have never been told, the dungeon finder interface is powered by a wizard waving his hand. This is the same wizard who powers things like whispering across continents and respawns.

Most wizards are pretty good for fantasy. In some cases even essential.

But when a wizard waves his hand, anything is possible. Which means that perhaps nothing is possible. We're left with the troubling question: "was that a wizard, or just a vast network of servers?"

Too much hand waving makes us wonder if there's no hand at all.

Can I trust or even believe in the wizard off the screen who does everything? At some point I cease to believe that a wizard did it and all immersion is shattered. Maybe we need fewer wizards and more visible, potentially mundane explanations. Engineering, ancient ley lines, tears in the fabric of the universe, or even just a wizard who we sometimes see actually do something, even interact with.

Or maybe I should just start to worship him.

I want to talk to you about a personal friend of mine known as Wizard. Have you been waved at by his mysterious hand?

5 comments:

Syl said...

As far as i know all the ingame chat channels are brought to us by gnomish engineers, working day and night in the bunker's below gnomeregan, operating comm-tech machines to deliver messages all across azeroth without delay!
it's another one of those wow secrets ;)

Faeldray said...

Cross-continent whispers, group chats, cross-server PUGs, and the eerie restriction of only being able to bring 5 people into a dungeon are all caused by one thing: hearthstones. Summoning you to your inn of choice is only a fraction of their true power. And be warned, those innkeepers have known all of this since the beginning. Notice how they cannot only control the powers of a hearthstone but also have food and drinks that never spoil? They have powers beyond wizards, my friends.

Anonymous said...

Intercontinental Whispers are really where the suspension of disbelief breaks down for you?

If you get past the character creation screen with a sense of wonder intact, you zone in to face a "person" who only ever has one thing to say and never moves, eats or sleeps. In fact, the whole starting village is full of "people" who are rooted to the spot and never interact with each other. If you stumbled onto that scene in real life, you wouldn't do favors for them; you'd make a quick exit and call the police, your therapist or both.

Klepsacovic said...

@Syl: That makes no sense at all. As of yet none of my messages have ever turned into chickens. Also, Gno Mail, as featured in the machinema The Grind, is terribly inaccurate. And run by racist gnomes.

@Faeldray: Can't they at least tell us these things?

@Anonymous: Lists of examples are rarely exhaustive or exclusive and are not intended to be taken as the limit of a thought.

Glyph, the Architect said...

I always used to imagine that the mailboxes were literally run by the mages of Dalaran. You put letters in, and when you close the box they get magically teleported off to a very large warehouse/tower where the walls are lined with millions of mailboxes. The magic sorting matrix would then sort the letters to the proper boxes. When someone wanted to retrieve their mail, they had a special key (which of course they had to buy from the post office) that they would insert in the mailbox keyhole. Turning it would transport all the mail in the box associated with that key to the mailbox being used.

I was exceptionally and extremely disappointed when I went to Dalaran and could find no such warehouse/tower. Not even a portal to a walkway over such a room where you could see all of this going on.

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