Richard Garfield wrote an essay on the useful of game design terminology (can’t find it via google for a link but I found a game review where someone else apparently remembers the same article) where he borrowed the term “kingmaking” from politics. In Garfield’s re-coining, the term describes situations where one or more players with no chance at winning are empowered by game mechanics to determine who wins in the end.
When my family plays Settlers of Catan, the winner is normally determined by kingmaking and a lot of the endgame fun comes from friendly metagame political wrangling (vengeful playacting, backrub offers, and such). If someone wins without any visible kingmaking on their behalf, we consider it a categorically superior sort of victory.
I remember reading an article by Garfield (this would have been in roughly 1998?) where he proposed the term as the kind of word that game designers need more of, and my memory of that reading (possibly simplified) was that he coined the term there. Now my guess is that he simply imported the term from political history to games, but I worked that out by tracking down references and discovering usage going back to literal king making in British history.
Checking just now, google scholar contains essentially no references to game theoretic kingmaking during the 1990′s. The terms “king” and “making” occur together, but it all appears to be political usage, a distinct re-use for websites whose links are especially critical in creating nearness relations, or accidental, as when talking about things made by Martin Luther King.
Richard Garfield wrote an essay on the useful of game design terminology (can’t find it via google for a link but I found a game review where someone else apparently remembers the same article) where he borrowed the term “kingmaking” from politics. In Garfield’s re-coining, the term describes situations where one or more players with no chance at winning are empowered by game mechanics to determine who wins in the end.
When my family plays Settlers of Catan, the winner is normally determined by kingmaking and a lot of the endgame fun comes from friendly metagame political wrangling (vengeful playacting, backrub offers, and such). If someone wins without any visible kingmaking on their behalf, we consider it a categorically superior sort of victory.
Is that usage really due to Garfield? I was under the impression it was much older than that.
I remember reading an article by Garfield (this would have been in roughly 1998?) where he proposed the term as the kind of word that game designers need more of, and my memory of that reading (possibly simplified) was that he coined the term there. Now my guess is that he simply imported the term from political history to games, but I worked that out by tracking down references and discovering usage going back to literal king making in British history.
Checking just now, google scholar contains essentially no references to game theoretic kingmaking during the 1990′s. The terms “king” and “making” occur together, but it all appears to be political usage, a distinct re-use for websites whose links are especially critical in creating nearness relations, or accidental, as when talking about things made by Martin Luther King.