What can World of Warcraft teach us about the inception of society?

I've been perusing the pages of Jared Diamond's The Third Chimpanzee lately, and I will admit it has been a wonderful read so far. One of the things he touches on is how important longevity was towards the survival and increasing success of various ancient human tribes.

This was because of the phenomenal nature of personal experience in an era that predated record-keeping. From an example given in the book, let's say we have two hunter gatherer tribes. One has an average lifespan of 40 years, the other 60 years. They both inhabit a region in which food becomes scarce for a year.

The first tribe dies off due to not having enough nourishment. The second tribe has a few elderly members who recall a previous food shortage, and know that certain plants and nuts can be safely consumed for nutrition, in spite of their unappetizing taste.

And thus, longevity can literally be the difference between an entire tribe's surviving or dying off. Due to the simple ability to share their experience.

I often think about how powerful language is. The ability to communicate clearly and accurately to each other, to formulate plans and talk about past, present, and future. The ability to put emotions and feelings and other intangibles into symbolic form. Even the ability to just think is pretty much reliant on articulating your thoughts into words, no?

All of this came to my mind while I was learning some new raid encounters in ICC 25 the other night. For those of you who avoided getting hooked on World of Warcrack, basically there are "raids" where you join up with 9 or 24 other people, (there's two different sizes to every raid encounter,) and then you go in and participate in difficult "boss" encounters which are highly technical and require exceptional performance and communication from all members of the raid.

In order to learn these fights, we could go in and die 30+ times as we slowly learn the mechanics of each fight. That'd be a rough way to go about it, though. Instead, due to the power of communication, an experienced raider (elder tribe member) is able to explain the fight's strategy (strategy for survival) and prevent the inexperienced raiders from making mistakes.

Through the experienced person's communicating and sharing with the rest, we all are able to survive and prosper. Haha, probably a bit of a stretch as far as analogies go, but I enjoyed the idea when it first occurred to me and thought I'd share.

One last thing: I threw the word "inception" into today's title as homage; it is an amazing film, go see it if you haven't!