Movement and Positioning

“Where to go” seems like a simple question. Which is why, in WoW, “don’t stand in the fire” is kind of the inside joke for all fail-raiders: people who can’t avoid standing in the wrong place (at the wrong time).

But it is hard–otherwise, people who have figured a lot of other things out wouldn’t get hit by trains, bombs, waves, and other hazards. And if you think it’s easy, let’s use an example where movement most definitely is NOT easy:

Driving.

And if that seems too easy, let’s make it even harder:

Race car driving!

Consider, for the moment, that you’re on the race track, and you see this in front of you:

You have TWO cars driving in front of you. You’re in third place. Just in front of you is the red car, and little further up and to the right is the white and black car.

Our problem/objective: passing these cars and getting first place.

A quick check in the rear-view mirror confirms that there’s no one behind you, and on our speedometer there, we can see we’re doing a lovely 112 miles per hour.

How do you choose to think about this problem? The common (and as we’ll soon see, wrong) approach is to think of these cars as gigantic OBSTACLES. Mentally, we see this:

The cars are simply big “NO NO NO NO NO” problem areas. They are obstacles. If we hit them, we die. In World of Warcraft terms, these cars are the proverbial fire.

This has the unfortunate effect of forcing your brain to take the long road. Your lizard brain can make decisions in an instant–the reasoning side is much slower. The reasoning side is forced to do work when you approach a problem like this as a series of obstacles.

Now, before you look at the next image (and I’ll throw in a few copies of the first image as filler to scroll through) try to think of it another way. Think of the path you would take around the cars. Forget that they’re obstacles and just think of the path forward. What does that image look like?

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Almost there…

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Did it look like…

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This?

Your brain can convert THAT mental image into physical action much faster, as in seconds faster. Why? I don’t fucking know, I’m a lawyer, not a neuroscientist!

But the important thing is that it’s faster.

If you really want a mind fuck, then ponder the following–if your brain instantly came up with THAT, why didn’t it come up with these two alternatives?

You could have gone far, far right. But that would have put you in the rear-view mirror of the black car, for a long time, giving the black car a lot more time to block you. Lizard brain picked the better path on its own, answering a question that seems to require a fair bit of reasoning. (This is because Lizard brain doesn’t reason at all, it just copies answers from previous experience. Very very fast.)

And the second, well, that would have put you in grass, and then later, cones. Which seems obvious, but it isn’t–you didn’t think of the grass as an obstacle, did you? It never had a big red X over it in your brain, when I asked you to consider the track as a set of obstacles. Even when you ask yourself to think in terms of obstacles, reasoning brain fails. Lizard brain does a better job of seeing obstacles you’ve encountered before.

When you ask Reasoning brain, as opposed to Lizard brain, what to do, Reasoning brain EVENTUALLY comes up with the right answer. But in a perceived emergency, Reasoning brain tends to pick the very first option it comes up with. If you asked Reasoning brain to AVOID CRASHING INTO THAT RED CAR RIGHT FUCKING NOW!, then Reasoning brain has a 50/50 chance of choosing the left side and sending you into the grass. You should never ask Reasoning brain to do anything in an emergency.

In terms of relative speed, it’s like having a grease fire, and Lizard brain is grabbing a fire extinguisher, and Reasoning brain is calling your mother and asking what to do. That’s how slow reasoning brain is at its job. In novel situations which are not emergencies, reasoning brain is the better choice. Decisions like “what interest rate is good for my car loan?” are great for Reasoning brain. For Lizard brain in the first-time car-buyer, it can result in shooting the guy in the car dealership in the face with a fire extinguisher, and then bludgeoning him, while yelling and crying.

All of this may seem insane, and perhaps, difficult to experiment with outside of a racing video game, where you can measure the fractions of a second you save by thinking of a track as a series of ROUTES and YES rather than a series of OBSTACLES and NO.

And also measure the frequency that you crash into trees at 112 miles per hour. Which you can’t experiment with elsewhere.

If you do try it with a racing game, you will notice the difference immediately. In Warcraft, you might notice after a couple fights. Regardless, ask your brain to think about where to go, rather than about what to avoid.

How Does This Affect Vent/Mumble?

As raid leads, or anyone tasked with occasionally shouting orders out (i.e. you) it’s tempting to issue commands in the form of obstacles. That would sound like this:

“Move away from X.”

“Move off of track 2.”

“You’re out of range of the healers.”

“You’re about to get rolled over.”

“Get away from the left wall.”

What if we phrase our commands in the form of routes, rather than obstacles? Here’s what that sounds like:

“Move toward blue.”

“Move to track 3.”

“Get in range of the healers.”

“Move to the safe zone.”

“Move to the center.”

Notice that all of these line up. Here, I’ll put them in a fucking table and prove it to you:

OBSTACLES	ROUTES
“Move away from X.”	“Move toward blue.”
“Move off of track 2.”	“Move to track 3.”
“You’re out of range of the healers.”	“Get in range of the healers.”
“You’re about to get rolled over.”	“Move to the safe zone.”
“Get away from the left wall.”	“Move to the center.”

As you can see, you’re communicating a near-identical goal, but you’re triggering the other person’s lizard brain. How fancy of you, deciding in advance whether to trigger someone’s lizard brain!

WoW Benefits of Moving With the Lizard Brain

And what benefits do these lizard brain shortcuts present?

Speed

As we saw above, in the race car example, it was faster. You’ll just have to trust me on this. Or not: just try it and see for yourself. You’ll notice that you’re able to process movements quicker when you think in terms of where to go, rather than where NOT to go.

Better Results

As we saw above, with the race cars, Lizard brain picked the best result. Your Reasoning brain, if asked to do something in an emergency, will simply choose the very first option that presents itself. In World of Warcraft, this will result in you literally picking ANY GODDAMN PLACE WHICH IS NOT ON FIRE.

The place you choose, out of the fire, may still be terrible. Out of range of the healers, or the boss, or doomed to die to the next mechanic, whatever. Reasoning brain just picked the first thing it saw which wasn’t on fire. When you ask yourself to “find a better place” Lizard brain will take over.

Conclusion: Stand out of the fire

The point of all this is to say, really, that “don’t stand in the fire” suffers from a cognitive problem. If you ask yourself, or your raiders, to stand in a safe zone, they will:

1. Get out of the fire (goal number 1)

2. Find the best place to stand, rather than simply a shitty one which lacks fire

3. Do one and two faster.