Games 349 Assignment 8

Due Tuesday, April 27, before class

You may choose any four of the five questions to answer. Do not answer more than four! Grades will be decided by quality, not quantity. E-mail your answers to kgold@wellesley.edu.

1. Attach some proof that you've been working on your final project.
2. Design a new tower for the Tower Defense game you played -- that is, specify its power, and describe how its story or appearance would justify that power. How might you go about ensuring that it was neither strictly better nor strictly worse than the other towers in the game?
3. Suppose you were to write a behavior tree for the city management AI in Civilization IV that would decide what a computer-controlled city produces. Name three high-level behaviors might you specify, and what would trigger these behaviors. (As an example: "Expand" could be a behavior that produces settlers, and triggers when a city is not growing. No, you can't use that one.) How might you modify the behavior tree to express different ruler personalities?
4. How would you characterize Uricchio's reaction to the prospect of using simulation games to better understand history -- positive, negative, or mixed? Cite evidence to support your reading.
5. Argue whether it is ethical to buy gold from World of Warcraft gold farmers, assuming you do not know the conditions under which the gold was procured. Cite evidence from both "Wage Slaves" and Exodus from the Virtual World to support your argument and anticipate one likely counterargument.