In WoW social situations, combat and non-combat pets alike usually just take up space looking pretty. Hunter and warlock pets have many actions they can perform to help fight an enemy, of course, and for a normal gamer there's no reason they would need to do anything more. But sometimes, as a roleplayer, if you pat your pet wolf on the head, you might expect it to look up at you with those adorable puppy eyes; or if someone else pats its head, you might expect it to bite their hand off. However, with the emote system as it is, we can only type out custom emotes with our own character's name at the beginning of the sentence, never the pet's.

There's a way around this problem, which is actually quite obvious once you think of it, yet roleplayers rarely use it, so far as I have seen. If you write the possessive apostrophe-S as the first part of your character's custom emote, you can make your pet seem to do something on its own: "Isabeau 's pet wolf growls and bares his teeth." It takes a little bit more typing, and it leaves a space between your characters name and the apostrophe-S (since that's built into the emote system), but effectively it lets you roleplay two entities at the same time. Hunters and warlocks can use the PetEmote addon to help make this a little more streamlined.

Our reader Ellyndia, for instance, roleplayed a very introverted character that normally would not introduce herself to others, but using such custom emotes, she could have her Jubling walk up and interact with people first to get conversations going. Pets can reflect what your character is thinking but not saying out loud (by hissing or purring perhaps), or they can do anything that such pets in real life might do. Special non-combat pets such as the Children's Week kids, the interactive Animatronics, or even the magical Mojo, could all be especially fun to animate a little now and then. Certainly this technique would become very annoying if overused, but in moderation it can add a extra spice of humor, entertainment and even a touch of realism into the game.

The uncanny valley is a longtime hypothesis about human reaction to robots and computer-generated images. The basic gist is that people like robots/CGI figures that aren't made to imitate humans --- thus the cartoonish style of WoW. We notice the humanlike characteristics of the non-humans and empathize with them. But as the robots get closer and closer to looking like humans, we become strongly repulsed and tend to notice the small things that set them apart from real people. Eventually, though, someday someone will make a figure that looks exactly like a human, and the uncanny valley will disappear.

And it looks like we're pretty close to that point, at least going by the CGSociety article going around the European WoW Forums. If it weren't for the step-by-step tutorial, I would have sworn that this picture of a night elf -- made by artist Max Kor for a Blizzard fan art competition -- was of an actual woman in night elf makeup. The eyes, which are usually the big thing that catches people in CG, look totally normal. Forumgoers are also pretty impressed; Megg of Scarshield Legion says, "In 15 years, that's what WoW4 will look like."

What do you think about this art?