The point where being a ‘good’ WoW player intersects with theorycrafting is worth investigation, as it changes the terrain upon which players engage games.
#World of warcraft gameplay mods#
Theorycraft is more than a word it is a way of playing WoW that depends on work and analysis outside the game and a set of user mods and discussion within the game. A community of theorycrafters emerged, eventually becoming a prominent force in WoW’s ongoing design decisions. Coinciding with an increase in statistical analysis in sports and society, theorycrafters developed and advanced a specific way to play WoW based on the theoretical potential of the game, seeking understanding of the rules behind the game. The combination of these factors fuels the development of things like theorycrafting. Online games offer many ways to play, iterative design, and a social base upon which to test new approaches. The growth in the role of theorycrafting offers room to analyze how games change over time and how players can influence a game’s design by reshaping how they play. Since then, theorycrafting has become a norm for WoW players, especially those who raid. It was my introduction to theorycrafting and I was hooked.
#World of warcraft gameplay how to#
There I found a cornucopia of information about how to play WoW, with discussions of the optimal talents, the most valuable trade skills, and sophisticated analyses of my spells. One day I stumbled across the Elitist Jerks 1 web forums. I was focused on raiding, large-scale group player versus environment play as a mage my primary job was to do as much damage as possible. Shortly after the release of World of Warcraft’s (WoW) expansion Burning Crusade (Blizzard Entertainment, 2007), I became interested in the emergence of theorycrafting, as it helped me play ‘better.’ Theorycraft, a strategy designed around the mathematical analysis of WoW, is a discursive construct predicated on advising players how to optimally ‘play’ WoW, suggesting what equipment to wear, what talents to choose, and an order in which to cast spells. When new approaches are successful they are often copied, imitated and integrated into other styles of play, effectively becoming new norms for the game, like the forward pass in American football or the offside trap in soccer. New tactics are tested and developed, allowing players to test new strategies and to improve their odds of success. One of the striking things about games is that they can be played in many different ways. Keywords: rhetoric, process, paratexts, gameplay, design, WoW, theorycraft, raiding Understanding theorycraft demonstrates a distinct approach of how to 'play' WoW, uniting game studies research that focuses on procedural rhetoric and paratexts, while expanding the role of rhetoric for the analysis of games. Using rhetorical analysis and game studies literature to analyze the discourse surrounding theorycraft, this paper discusses the implications of theorycraft, arguing that this player-created practice has fundamentally changed how WoW is played, while also reshaping the relationship between players and designers. By using statistical analysis and mathematical modeling, theorycrafters seek out the underlying formulae that govern WoW, largely in an attempt to play WoW better. PaulĪs an emergent practice of World of Warcraft (WoW) players, theorycrafting is the search for the optimal set of strategies with which to play WoW. Optimizing Play: How Theorycraft Changes Gameplay and Design by Christopher A.
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