Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
NOTES TO
CHAPTER 8
1.
Raiding requires a large group of people to coordinate their ef orts against
computer-controlled opponents. The need for coordination throughout the
group led to the development and implementation of a number of dif erent
socio-technical interventions to increase coordination and track participa-
tion. Ranging from player-designed add-ons that track damage done to social
norms, like DKP systems designed to allocate loot, to designer imposed lim-
its on the number of players in a raid all of these elements can be addressed
by wordplay. In this case, theorycraft leverages the data gained by add-ons
to craft a social discourse that shapes play on raids.
2.
Consalvo,
Cheaters: Gaining Advantage in Videogames
, 9.
3.
Steve Lohr, “For Today's Graduate, Just One Word: Statistics,”
The New
York Times
, 5 August 2009.
4.
Felix Salmon, “Recipe for Disaster: The Formula That Killed Wall Street,”
6.
Michael Lewis,
Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game
(New York:
W. W. Norton & Company, 2004), 131.
7.
Michael Lewis, “The No-Stats All-Star,”
The New York Times
, 13 February
2009.
8.
Sal Baxamusa, “Dorkapalooza 2009: The Sports Analytics Conference at
MIT,”
The Hardball Times
,
http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/article/
9.
Bill Simmons, “Never Come between an NBA Stat Geek and the Truth,”
ESPN:
The Magazine
,
http://sports.espn.go.com/espnmag/story?id=4011524.
10.
Clive Thompson, “Getting Lucky: Hard-Core Gamers Penetrate Peggle's
Physics,”
Wired.com
,
http://www.wired.com/gaming/gamingreviews/
11.
Voorhees, “I Play Therefore I Am: Sid Meier's Civilization, Turn-Based Strat-
egy Games and the Cogito,” 267.
12.
For background and other defi nitions of theorycraft, see: “Theory-
craft,” Urban Dictionary,
http://www.urbandictionary.com/defi ne.
php?term=theorycraft;
WoWWiki, “Theorycraft,” WoWWiki,
http://www.
13.
WoW
Web Stats has been supplanted by World of Logs as of this writing.
14.
Non-player character.
15.
Enrage timers were introduced by Blizzard to force players to kill bosses in
a certain amount of time, which made the damage dealers far more account-
able for their actions than they had been. Should a group fail to beat the
enrage timer the boss would gain extra powers and quickly kill any living
members of the raid.
17.
Chase Christian, “Encrypted Text: The fuzzy math of theorycrafting,” WoW
19.
Christian, “Encrypted Text: The Fuzzy Math of Theorycrafting.”
20.
Kyterra, “Theorycraft, 2.4. and Progression,”
Curse.com,
http://www.curse.
