You're listening to a very spatial podcast, episode 769, September 14th, 2025.

Hello, and welcome to A very spatial podcast.

I'm Jesse.

I'm Sue.

I'm Barb.

And this is Frank.

First some news International geomagnetic reference Field Explorer has recently been updated for 2025 to include the years from 2025 out to 2030.

It's a spatial tool that you can use.

Pretty cool from the British Geographic.

Society that they are the ones who maintain this tool.

And it was a very short release.

It's been released on social media and on their website they just say, you know, here it is.

We've released the New World Magnetic Model 2025 and left it there for everyone to explore.

Geome geomagnetic aspects of what we do underpin so much of what we do.

But it's one of those things that.

In my experience, gis people don't know much about, like, I think they get exposed to it at some point in their educational career and they go, oh yeah.

And then they like, don't think anything about it after that, like at all.

Other than pick a datu.

But I, I think it's nice to have tools like this so people can think about them and visualize them and understand them well.

It, it still plays a role in serving, it plays a lot less of a role.

For those people who are just relying on GPS and GNSS all the time because it, it doesn't matter where your North is, it's just where the device says you are.

So I think that's why we've lost a lot of it.

'cause orienteering, of course.

And even now with total stations being largely GPS driven in terms of where they are, as well as your back, as your back shooting, you don't need.

The compass direction quite as much.

I don't know.

It, it's, yeah.

Important but more ignored.

I mean, the thing I, I think it kind of, kind of somewhat, that's what I was trying, I combine those two words inadvertently, you know, depicts the, the, I'm gonna use the word ignorance we have of the fragility of GNSS.

I think like GPS, we use it for everything and then there's nothing to keep an administration at any point going click.

Okay.

It doesn't work as well as it used to.

And then suddenly we have to go back to, you know, other methods which are very viable and still work.

But being a little bit, I don't want, ignorance is not the right word, but a little bit unfamiliar with that now is, it's unfortunate.

So I think it's important for us to remember there are other options out there and there are other ways of approaching this and they're useful.

So.

That's all really have to say about that.

While there are some natural interferences with magnetism, it's, it's more likely to keep working if you're being spoofed.

'cause you know, we're seeing a lot of spoofing and jamming going on, especially in the, around Russia areas.

And, you know, even if you get rid of the political aspects of all of this stuff, or you know, you're in the middle of nowhere, sometimes you just don't have a signal.

So being in the wrong canyon, in the wrong woods.

Having something else to rely on helps orienteering.

Yeah, and I say that fully as somebody who is not expert at that by any search imagination.

Researchers between Stanford and universities in Italy have used GOAI and machine learning to.

Uncover hidden earthquakes that, you know, they, since the eighties they knew about some of the workings of what was going on underneath this volcanic mountain.

But this gives them more proof of exact, of exactly what the inner workings are to better respond to any issues that might arise.

And, you know, this was working with seismic activity and it gives them a clearer view of.

What is actually happening underneath the earth and, you know, was all done with machine learning and ai, which is helping us to, you know, quickly understand things that before would've taken a lot longer to analyze.

It's kind of interesting.

It's, it's, what is it?

Five times as much, four times as much earthquakes as they thought.

And there's been a lot in the last eight months alone.

So, you know, that's.

Important to know.

'cause what is it is I'm trying to remember.

How is it aftershocks often predict a bigger future shock?

Is that there, there's a rule of thumb there with earthquakes and I never remember what, what it is, is you have a bunch of little shocks and then, oh, that mean me being a big one or the other way around.

So being able to detect those would be very helpful.

Detecting if there's gonna be significant earthquake or not.

Well, and also, I think it was really interesting where they were able to see a clear pattern of a, a sort of ring fault.

And you know, that's one of the things too is, is being able to accurately map so many earthquakes or all, all the earthquakes that are occurring helps you understand the fault system that may be at play.

So that's another important thing as well is to try to better understand kind of where.

The activity is happening so that you can understand the subsurface structure a little bit better.

And they also talked about how they, because they were able to observe that pattern around the calera, they were able to see that the land would change, you know, rising and falling.

Which is something that a lot of times we think mainly about one singular event.

But this is actually, you know, constant change.

Blessed it for the news.

So this week our, our web corner's kind of a book corner and it's just a, a cool book.

It actually came out at the end of last year, but is sort of making the rounds on the media end of things, and it's called Mic Atlas.

And it's essentially an Atlas of the world's McDonald's, but it's a little bit more than that.

I think even author himself or in discussions about it, refer to it as a visual social anthropology.

And I do think that has a lot of validity, right?

It's a.

Yes, it's a fast food global giant.

Yes.

You think about it kind of breaking down or homogenizing maybe food cultures in different places.

But in reality there's also a lot of adapting that goes on.

And I, if there was a series number of years ago, I think we may have mentioned it even on the podcast called Fast Food Gone Global.

And one of the, one of the restaurants they looked at was McDonald's.

But just.

First of all, he amazing photos some of the photos out of, out of this book of the, the various places so that even the landscape around it kind of has that cultural adaptation.

But anyway I just thought it was a kind of a cool sort of social look at food.

And even though we have a lot of global trends still are cultural elements that get injected into it and give you something unique for local regions.

It, it's very fascinating to me, the companies that don't do this well, that don't do what they're talking about and saying, okay, we're making a product that is local bound and it's supposed to be for the local market, and there's.

Dozens and dozens of famous examples of this, of, you know, naming a, a, a, a product that the translation in, in the local vernacular, or even language is a bad word, or, you know, a says it's a piece of junk or something like that.

That happens a lot, but I, it's really neat to see when you've got a company like McDonald's that does it well.

That gets that you have to think locally, even if you're acting globally in marketing.

Yeah.

And, and Sue, I was going through the, the book looking for, I was looking for like maps and things, but also, you're right, the, the photos are just amazing.

But just the book itself, it's, it looks like a McDonald's hamburger.

It's got the sleeve that looks like that.

It's just totally embraced that in terms of, its, its whole design.

For its discussion.

I did the same thing, by the way, is that the very first thing I was like, where is the companion mapping site for this?

And there isn't one.

I was very disappointed in that.

Which is why it started out, it was like, well, this could be the Web Corps.

There must be a map that goes with this.

There was not you know, hint, hint, maybe companion website in the future that that has that for it.

But but yeah, I just I remember it 'cause when I used to teach world regions I actually.

Utilize fast food, gone global.

And again, it was interesting quotes at the various McDonald's and, and other places about, you know, the sensitivity to cultural traditions, the food that is in specific places.

Right?

And there's all kinds of, I guess, fan groups that go and try McDonald's in different parts of the world to see the items that they have.

So I think it's, it's really really interesting and, and kind of a cool, cool book project.

This week we're gonna step away from the daily grind to talk a little bit about.

The fun stuff.

Ooh, world building.

We talk about it occasionally.

It's time to come back around to it, right?

It's time to figure out, you know, the technologies we're using to build these video game worlds.

These times that we're sitting around thinking about the concepts that we're gonna build into our books that we're never gonna write about fantasy or science fiction you know, all these things about creating the geographies that will hopefully.

Be a basis for something that will or will not exist, but at least make us happy as we're building them for ourselves or enjoying the worlds that others have built.

So does anybody.

Building a world right now.

Do we wanna kick this to Frank or Sue on this one?

I, I'm not exactly building a world right now, but well, technically yes.

So we're playing a game that we both like, Barbara and I both like, called Seven Days to Die.

And the interesting thing about this game that it's azo, it's basically a zombie apocalypse.

You're gonna have to survive all that sort of stuff.

It's a little bit like Minecraft in, in, if you think of it that way, in that the, everything in the world is destroyable.

You can do things to it, you can manipulate it, all that kind of stuff like that.

So it allows you to literally build a world, if you're of the mind, even though the world is populated, you can just reorganize it the way you want to if you're again of the mind.

And you know, it was kind of, it's kind of interesting because I haven't found many games that are capable of doing that.

And I think what I find interesting about it is most of the games.

I'm trying to think how articulate this succinctly, so I'm not going to, I'm just gonna say it and it'll be a bit messy, which is, most games have to have that narrative, have to have that story piece of it, right?

Otherwise it's not really a game, it's just an engine.

And most games end up falling, in my experience, end up falling more on the narrative to say, okay, I need to restrict your ability to do world building because I need to keep the narrative.

Moving forward, I need to keep that cohesiveness.

And it's, it's kind of interesting how much the technologies have evolved in such a way that they're not really, they don't really support.

That level world building that a, a game like this can do, that you can destroy every pixel on the screen and reorganize every pixel on the screen.

They are like, well, we're not gonna let you do this stuff over here 'cause that takes too much processing power.

We're not gonna let you do this stuff over here 'cause we don't really wanna do the art about it.

And, and so I'm, I'm finding that fascinating.

The lack of, of free, true world building and games lately, it's, it's much more constrained world building.

So actually I was thinking about Sue the other day, just 'cause they said they had the, I think it's the 30th anniversary of Tomb Raider and I was reflecting on, you know, one, how hard it was to jump in Tomb Raider.

And then like later on they started to add, you know, the orienteering and weather impacting you and you had to pay attention to all those facets of the real world.

Within the video game world and say, and just to preface this, the video game, not the movies, but yeah, the video game.

And then I, and you know, and that was one of the first games I knew of that had added that, you know, temporal and weather component.

And then in some of the world building games that we've been using, like Valium, where you can build things.

They also add in physics where a law can roll on you.

And kill you or maim you and weather where the wind is actually blowing and impacts how things happen.

So it was just something that made me think about Sue when, when I saw that announcement because of the, the Tomb Raider.

Yeah.

So the many, many inspirations that ended up being the, the body of work that I do I've actually rediscovered in a time sink kind of way.

As I, as I have, so every fall I teach a class on video game worlds.

And one of their jobs is to actually build a small a small world to tell the story.

And so it's on spatial storytelling, environmental storytelling, but, but the concepts of of world building right?

Are the things that we focus on.

So.

Those things that once you get started, you realize you have to add more and more and more sometimes in, in your mind to make something compelling and how you do that.

And as part of it, I give some examples of games.

That really do it well in particular ways.

And so Frank, you're absolutely right.

Right?

'cause there's the choice.

Do I just let people wander around my, my world?

Whether it's detailed, whether, whether it's, you know, kind of cartoony, whatever it is, or do I guide them with a story?

And that means I can focus more on the things that, that they're actually interacting with.

And the stuff in the background can be you know.

Kind of nice and slow or whatever, because it's not, not relevant.

So there's a lot of technical things that, that the students learn related to that.

But it's also great for me because every year I have to come up with examples to, to illustrate.

And one of the things I did is go back a little bit to, to the so the Elder Scrolls popular Game series and Skyrim was one of their more famous ones and people still.

Get into Skyrim and, and play it a lot because you can mod it and there's all kinds of things going on.

But they actually recently remastered oblivion, which was the, the, the game prior to that.

I believe in the series.

But I, I mentioned this because in, in my world, building questioning, I, I've gotten on and gotten sucked back into oblivion, which I am able to compare the graphics and the.

The gameplay and all of that, the mechanics, as you know, being of a time, a time quite a while ago, and yet it still compels me to where I sink hours and hours into this, into this game.

And then come back to the questions, why is it right?

Why when I can recognize that the graphics aren't as, as state of the art as we can do now that things some might, might be stilted.

The dialogue is, is hilarious in its simplicity, but yet.

Two hours will go by and I'm like, what have I been doing running around this world?

And whacking on things so I can get more gold and buy a house in a town kinda thing.

And it's, it's really interesting to just have those feelings.

Like, why, why am I in there?

And, you know, when people experience these worlds, because then it comes back to my actual work.

So how do I replicate some of those things that make people wanna stay in there, in the stuff that I'm doing?

Yeah.

And, and Sue, I can relate to your, your, you know, going back and what sucks you in and that nostalgia, because it's around this time of year that I start to feel nostalgic for the old World Warcraft.

And sometimes I will log into the old version just to get that, that feeling, even though it really does not work as well.

Sometimes you're like, that's.

That's what I want to experience again you know, is to get back in even though I don't have the time to spend on a multiplayer like that.

And that kind of brings you back around to Frank's first example of a thing that, that sounds to me like what Fortnite was promised to be, but then of course became something else.

Is that kind of what it is?

The original promise of Fortnite that you could destruct and construct to stay away from the zombies?

I think so.

Yeah.

The only, I, I tend to liken it more to, to Minecraft in that everything is, you know, editable, is that the right word?

I wanna say.

Yeah.

I don't know.

That was kind of the promise of the first Trailers Yeah.

Of, of Fortnite.

And I was really excited and then of course it became what it is.

Yeah.

Which is, you know, awesome for epic games.

But yeah.

It, it, it, yeah, it, it is.

You know, and, and technically it's not done yet, but it's been in development for at least 10 years, if not longer.

And they've had, it was released in, or early release, like 10 or 12 years ago or something like that.

So they're still evolving it, and they, they in fact, are evolving their own game away from that.

Minecraft crafty thing and more into narrative driven experiences, which, you know, has created a lot of, of controversy within that particular subcommittee, subcommittee, sub community and that there are people who want that world building.

I just wanna make my little worlds my bases and, and have the obstacle of the zombies, and that's what I want to do, versus the people who are looking forward to this more.

First person shooter esque, dungeon explorer type of approach to the game.

And and it's interesting to me that, that that intention almost always, Fortnite iss a great example where they've said, we need to limit this somehow.

We need to place some bounds on this, either for narrative purposes or for technical purposes, or both.

And, and I think that happened to fall out 76 as well, you know, that you could go in and you didn't have to interact with any really of the NPCs that weren't like really talking to you or anything.

You know, it was a more open game and then they decided they needed to add that in.

So it was sort of a shock to almost be in a silent world, to a world that did have more of those guardrails on you and what you could do.

Well, and, and I think that's.

That's the dilemma, right?

So when you start doing this is if you start with the world, then you ha and, and what you have is exploration, right?

Is a key, as a key motivator.

Then you always have to have new things because if you want someone to continue to visit the world, there has to be things for them to do, right?

They have to continue to explore.

When they get to the end, well then they're done.

So that, that's a constraint.

On world, just open world building, right?

Is, is a reason to, to have, have that world on the other hand, right?

If, if it is too story driven, it's the same thing, right?

I go from point A, B, C and then I'm done.

So what's my compelling thing to come back to it?

And so some mix of it, right?

Some guidance combined with exploration.

Seems like it should be the magic bullet, right?

To, to create something that everybody's gonna like.

But, but that's the reality.

Not everybody's gonna like everything but that, that tenseness it's tough.

So right now, as an example, I'm working on a, a long-term project that I've had to upgrade several times as new, newer versions of technology came out to do things I wanted to do.

And in my current sort of planning and upgrading, my biggest problem is this, is that it's, it's essentially a journey.

And so how much of the journey do I put in though?

Because after a while, the journey is kind of boring.

Like in the real world.

This place, this, this pilgrimage in Japan, right?

There's a lot of walking through, very similar looking landscapes for great distances, and then it'll change landscape a little bit.

But, but the reality is that you know, it's, it's a lot of traversing between things.

So how do I balance wanting to be able to see the whole island of koku, if you will?

With, Hey, we need to get to 88 temples.

We have to do it.

And so what's the balance in between there?

And I've gone through three or four different models to try to figure this out with the available technology.

And every time I, I settle on one, I'll get, I'll get people's, try a little piece of it and like, yeah, well, okay, so this part's good, but this is super boring and I wandered off here and couldn't find my way back.

So as I look at different examples.

And continue to see what's coming out.

That's kind of one of the things that's always on my mind is what are the, what are the games, what are the experiences that can do the balance?

Because that's ultimately what I'm looking for.

And what's interesting to me is some of the games I know of that do the balance well tend to come up and then be un unique.

You don't see anything that can replicate sort of the feeling of what they've done.

And I'm, I'm thinking of.

Fire watch, which I really enjoyed and actually was realistic enough to be used as examples for real world people that are, are doing, you know, fire watch type work and, and being outside like that in a, a national or a state forest and haven't seen.

Anyone else that's developed something like that, for those of us that liked Fire Watch.

And it's, it's getting to be an older game, but it's still the only game like that that, that you can play that gives you that, that balance of realism and a sense of that journey with challenges in it.

But it is a little bit of a super sad story.

Well, the challenges with video games, right, is the fact that they're trying to sell a product and then.

You know, it's not make a product profit retire forever.

You know, they have to make another one and they have to make another product moving forward.

And so I I, I'm not sure how much of the balance they, they worry about, you know, it's just about getting people compelled through the narrative or through the, the experience and then saying, okay, well there's something else that you'll buy, you know, down the road, it, it's, you should enjoy this thing as opposed to, you know, it's one thing to rule them all, as it were, it's not dissimilar to a novel, like, you read a story, you've read the story, great.

You can continue to read other stories in that universe.

In the case of.

A series like, you know, Tolkien or whatever it may be, or it can be, you know, read a different world.

And so I think there's always gonna be that end point for the experience.

And that, that becomes really challenging is how do you know when you, how do you know when to sunset your world, I guess is what I'm saying.

How do you, you need to said, I've said everything I need to say about this world.

Well, I, I think that's, that's a debate that that goes on.

So for.

Studios and, and a world.

So the last of us is a really good example, right?

One where the world is amazing and immersive, but the story is definitely the thing that drives it and drives your exploration through it.

And so they're built to self-contained.

Episodes almost, right?

So sequences, and they do have a definitive, Hey, this is how I ended this one.

Which has led to a, a lot of, a lot of debate going on, right?

As you see that migrate into another world, into the world of television.

And what do we do?

Because in tv, oh, we like more seasons if you like something or, you know, kind of other things like that.

But then you have.

Stories that, that are within a universe that people say, yeah, but I'd like to hear about this character.

I'd like to do this.

And the world is set up such that I think the best, most compelling worlds are worlds that you think time moves on and, and things happen as world when I'm not there, right?

They feel so real that you can imagine.

And we actually have, and this is a little bit of a, a side thing, but you know, we have people who are fans of these different worlds who go on and create.

Works based on them.

So there's a whole thing I called fan fiction out there, that that feels that that world is so compelling and the characters that are introduced within it, that they continue on and think about the other things that might be going on and, and becomes series onto their own.

Yeah, exactly.

And so I think that, that, that's one of the real.

Amazing things about world building when it's done well and like all the examples and every time I play a new game or this summer I played one that's gotten a lot of popularity.

It's called clear obscure Expedition 33, and it came outta nowhere for me anyway.

I'm sure other people were, were expecting this to following it, but a cap compelling world building, although the actual overarching world was typical RPG in that you couldn't necessarily see it.

You went into little sections of it.

So that, again, that's kind of navigate around and then go into a level, if you will, and, and complete some actions, but well built and, and a very innovative story that was compelling for its small details.

And so that's an example of one where that's, it's a world war.

In theory, other things could happen because of the, the backstory that they had for it.

And so those are ones that kind of.

Make me go back and say, you know, how can I do something like this a little bit better?

How can I make my world in, in such a way that I can have pieces of it to it that I can add on or update or things like that.

So I think, I think that's part of the interesting question too, in, in building these worlds.

Yeah.

One of the, the things I, I've, that's both nerdy but also would encourage other people to do is we've played multiplayer games with other geographers and it's always fun to have a geographer's perspective on a world when you're trying to, to do things together.

And, you know, in this case we're playing raft, which is again, one of those games where you, you, you both make your world and it's on the ocean.

So that's was a good idea.

'cause then, you know, where's the end of the world?

Well, it's the ocean.

So it, it gives you a different perspective.

To bring in all your geographic knowledge and if you do serious games, the, the game acknowledge as you try to play a game together.

So, I mean, there are a lot of things we could talk about with world building moving forward, but you know, this is sort of where we're at right now.

Very video game centric.

We didn't mention other, you know, alluded to things like series you know, star Wars being a very.

Dominant world that was built on a very gem of an idea.

And then.

Grew from there an an amazing amount.

We could talk about books and things like that.

I just finished last night a book called The Cartographers, which was a, a story built upon a really interesting, weird story in the real world that they made a fiction world around it.

I won't say anything about that other than it's an interesting little, little story.

So you can check that out.

But that's certainly something that's done in a novel form, a lot fantasy almost.

I was gonna say almost every, but I'm thinking I can safely say every fantasy book is building a world of some form or fashion that's completely fictional and that's kind of interesting.

So there's a lot of world building stuff we can do and a lot of stuff we can talk about.

But that's sort of a update thing on world building.

Onto the events corner.

As always, if you'd like us to add your event to the to the podcast, send us an email at podcast@veryspatial.com 'cause we don't have any this week.

If you'd like to reach us individually, I can be reached at sue@veryspatial.com.

I can be reached at barb at very spatial.com.

You can reach me at Frank@veryspatial.com.

I'm available at kind of spatial and can find all of our contact information over at very spatial.com/contacts.

As always, we're the folks from very spatial.

Thanks for listening.

We'll see you in a couple weeks.

The heating.