Tag Archives: Warcraft
Warcraft Word Jumble – Zevia
Hi Folks! After the recent holidays and a month overseas I’m back (thanks in no small part to cajoling from Zevia). As a thanks (and payback? :p) the weekly World Jumbles will be making a return!
I thought I might kick things off with one on Zevia’s favourite thing in the world – Archaeology!
Huge thanks to [Cal Henderson] for his help in updating some of the Jumble coding.
UPDATE: The scoring page seems to be returning an ‘error’ response. Looking into it, but it wont stop you solving the puzzle!
5-Boxing Warcraft on an iPad
Running five WoW times through an iPad – Yeah really! :)
After having a play around recently and realising this was possible I had to put together a quick clip to share. You can see how responsive it all is and basically that it’s possible. I’m not sure I’d ever play this way (certainly not multibox!) but it was an interesting thing to do just to say I could.
Here’s a few screenshots taken on the iPad.. It’s a 1024×768 resolution so with warcraft running five times things are naturally a little squished:
So the diehard geeks will probably be asking “how?!” right about now. I actually used an iPad app called ‘Splashtop’ that lets me remotely control my desktop PC so, really, it’s sort of cheating :p
The result is the same though and I can even access my desktop through normal mobile network while I’m out. Granted the video quality is diminished but for small tasks (eg cancelling/posting auctions with the help of addons) it’s fantastic.
Any questions? I’d be happy to answer!
Warcraft Word Jumble – Cassandri
This week’s jumble serves as both a shout out and congratulations to Cassandri of [HoTs & DoTs] this week.
Cassandri recently completed her insane grind and is our latest [Hall of Fame] inductee.
Also a big congratulations goes out to the other recent insane inductees – Frozzy, Elzibar, Healthstone, Zerotorescue, Eudaemonea and Kalkaph!
Demarcation of Gifted Gamers
So just what is it that makes a ‘gifted gamer’ different?
Giftedness is a label typically bestowed to students who have demonstrated a superior mental ability. Giftedness arises from a physical difference in person’s brain (Clark, 1988).
It is important to note here that we are not talking about personal strengths. A personal strength is an assessment in comparison to yourself only. A gift, however, is a comparison of yourself to a (large) population. A gifted person’s weakness may still be way above the strength of an average person… Everyone has strengths and weaknesses, not everyone is gifted. (And not all ‘gifted’ people are equally gifted!) A gifted person is one who’s abilities are at least one standard deviation above the ‘norm’ in a large population. There is a significant difference between the the gifted person and the average person. Consider in intelligence one standard deviation below the norm can result in becoming labelled with a mental disability.
Psychologists have broken down the possible fundamental abilities that a person may be gifted in (in one, all or any combination) these are:
- Intellectual (e.g. fluid reasoning – inductive and deductive, crystallised verbal, spatial, memory, judgement and metacognition)
- Creative (e.g. inventiveness, problem-solving, imagination, originality)
- Socioaffective (perceptiveness, communication, empathy, tact, influence, leadership, persuasion)
- Sensorimotor (senses: visual, auditory, olfactive etc and motor: strength, reflex, endurance and coordination)
Ok, so if these are all the areas a person could be gifted in, just what is a gifted gamer…
Obviously they must be gifted in just the right areas that support the development of gaming talents. Lets have a look at how these various gifts, could be useful for gaming.
Prevalence of Gifted Gamers
Hi all, this will be my first post and to introduce myself I wanted to do a quick excursis into the realm of gifted gamers. I’m currently studying gifted education and I thought it might be interesting to apply some of these theories to the gaming world.
The first question I hope to address is, how many gifted gamers are there?
According to wowprogress.com there are currently 54765 guilds that have cleared at least 1/12 ICC 10man and 43647 guilds that have cleared at least 1/12 ICC 25man. Assuming a 25m guild has on average 35 raiders, and a 10man guild 20 raiders and that all 25man guilds also raid 10man occasionally, this represents 1.75 million raiders in the world. Lets add a few casuals who may not have reached that far yet and round it up to a nice 2 million world of warcraft players. (keep in mind this doesn’t include china who are still playing TBC unfortunately!)
Now the question is, how many of these WoW players are actually talented. Stealing from psychology the definition of giftedness refers to the top 10% of the population (Françoys Gagné, 2003). However, current understanding of giftedness indicates that there are various levels of giftedness. Feldhusen (1993) indicates the following statistics for the ranges of giftedness and I have used these to extrapolate the estimated number that currently play wow:
| Level | Prevalence | Estimated # in WoW |
|---|---|---|
| Mildly gifted | 1:6 to 1:44 | ~200,000 |
| Moderately gifted | 1:44 to 1:1,000 | ~20,000 |
| Highly gifted | 1:1,000 to 1:10,000 | ~1,000 |
| Exceptionally gifted | 1:10,000 to 1:1million | ~50 |
| Profoundly gifted | < 1:1 million | ~2 |
Let’s compare this to the current number of players that have defeated the Heroic: Lich-King encounter:
- 25 man – 218 guilds = 7630 people
- 10 man – 792 unique guilds = 15840 people
- total – 23470 people
Hence, it seems this encounter is a good measure of identifying the moderately gifted among us. Well done blizzard in implementing a difficult encounter.
Do you think you belong on this scale? If so where would you place yourself and why?
I intend to run a theme on ‘gifted’ gamers, up next we’ll look at what a gifted gamer ‘looks’ like and whether the image above represents a true image of them.
Age and maturity: the blurred line
With my recent gold cap escapades I’ve probably had a few more random whispers each day than usual. I make it a point to always give my time readily in answering any questions or comments random people have.
It’s not really a hassle and I actually enjoy helping people. One thing it has done lately though is given me a lot to think about when it comes to the types of people we share our gaming experience with.
When someone young whispers me for gold making advice I’ve noticed a disturbingly similar trend in how the conversations tend to go. Usually something like this:
[Person] What’s the best way to make gold? got any tips for me?
[Saate] Actually you’re in luck! I’ve written an entire guide on it that you can read. It covers a lot of the principles and guidelines I use to make my gold. You should go have a read.
**2-3 Minutes Later**
[Person] That’s too much to read. Can’t you just tell me what to buy?
I’ve seen it so many times that I should be used to it yet it still surprises me every time. It’s got me thinking a lot lately about our education system. About how it seems kids are taught to remember and regurgitate (it’s how you pass a test!) without actually learning critical thinking. Is this something independant of education that you either have or don’t have the ability to do?
It’s also interesting to note that within World of Warcraft we have no way of gauging the age or maturity level of a person until after we’ve interacted with them. This I think is the source of a lot of the conflict in the game. I wonder how many arguments have been had between people in pugs and trade chat where age wasn’t even considered?
A 13 year old child is generally going to react differently to conflict than a 23 year or 33 year old will. In real life we mitigate this by maintaining a peer group of people at our own age and maturity level. Anyone falling outside of this is simply filtered out and their opinions are certainly considered to be of less consequence.
In WoW we don’t have that luxury. We treat everyone as being part of our peer group until experience proves it to be otherwise. Is that guy begging you for gold just a real-life-loser, or is he just a 10 year old behaving as expected?
I’d be interested to hear everyone’s thoughts on this topic!
Warcraft Word Jumble
Just a quick puzzle for you guys today. The ‘Word Jumble’ puzzles that appear in the newspaper here are a favourite of mine. Since people seem to like puzzles I had the idea to put together some of these except with a wow-related theme.
Let me know what you think and maybe we can make it a regular weekly thing? Also instead of posting the answer in your comments and giving it away how about just saying if you also think _ _ _ _ _ is the worst place of all too? :D