TortelliniTime

Bio

About me

I am a student from the Pacific Northwest with an interest in all kinds of computer-related subjects, including programming and game development for the most part, as well creative projects in Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Premiere Pro. Often times I'll be playing video games with friends and find a game mechanic that I will try to replicate or just simply figure out how it works from a technical standpoint. A large aspect as to why I enjoy game development is because of the various design patterns that can be used to create a modular and maintainable project; there are a million ways to solve any given problem, so its always fun to figure out my own solutions to them and do so in a way that is sustainable as the project grows. Aside from computer-related subjects, I also enjoy learning Russian; the way that the language sounds has always appealed to me and only being able to speak English felt limiting. The Russian language uses a case-system, which makes it rather difficult for native English speakers to learn. The Foreign Service Institute puts Russian at a Category III language, meaning that it takes an estimated 1,100 hours of class to achieve speaking level 3 and reading level 3 on the Interagency Language Roundtable scale.

My Wikipedia interests

Since I am so interested in game development and computer science as a whole, I hope to one day be able to create Wikipedia articles about my own programming and game development concepts. However, until I have a concept worth sharing with the world, I can refine already existing ones. A couple of my favorites include Conway's Game of Life, a zero-player game that gives way to some incredible emergent properties from its simple rules, and ant colony optimization algorithms, which, one again, create amazing patterns and behaviors from relatively simple rules.

Article Evaluation

My search started when I began looking at the Wikipedia articles for video games I've played. Unsurprisingly, I quickly found out that the articles for more popular games, such as Rust and Counter Strike: Global Offensive, are very detailed and refined, so I had to dig a bit deeper and look at the articles for the more obscure games I've played. After lots of searching and no luck for a good article to critique, I eventually stumbled across a mobile game called Bit City, which I have not played, that seemed to need some further refinement done to its article. I visited the Bit City article on Wikipedia, and found three aspects of it worth commenting on: the outdated ratings, the self-published source, and the very short, broad gameplay section.

When reading the article, the first thing that immediately caught my eye was the ratings in the summary at the top of the article. The article states that "as of 17 March 2017, the ratings for Bit City are 4.5 stars on the App Store and 4.3 on the Google Play Store."The ratings that the article stated are from over four years ago, so I decided to look at what they are now; on the Google Play Store, the game now has a rating of just 3.7 stars, much lower than the rating in the article, though the rating on the Apple App Store has actually increased to 4.6 since.

Next, I saw that the article was flagged by Wikipedia for having self-published sources and upon looking into what does and doesn't count as self-published, the article appears to indeed have a self-published source. This Twitter post that was cited shows the game reaching the number one spot on the Apple App Store, which has two major problems: firstly, the post came from NimbleBit, the studio behind Bit City, and secondly, the image could easily be faked. In order to correctly cite this accomplishment, a reference to which game ranked number one at the alleged time Bit City did from an official list would be better.

Finally, I noticed how shallow the Gameplay section of the article was. Sure, reading it gives the reader a vague idea of how the game is played, but there is distinct a lack of details on the mechanics and depth to the game. Without having played this particular game, I wouldn't be able to tell exactly what further details should be added to this Gameplay section, though I can infer several aspects that appear to be missing. For example, though I can see different tiers of buildings, I see no explanation of how exactly they function. Additionally, there are mentions of cars that, when tapped, give either coins or a bux bonus. Are there different types of cars that give different amounts of coins? What are all the things these coins can buy? What are the bux for? The Gameplay section doesn't go into detail on what any of these aforementioned things do. Perhaps these details belong in a separate Game Mechanics section, but they shouldn't be entirely absent as it leaves the reader with gaps in their understanding of how the game works.

In conclusion, while the Wikipedia article on the Bit City mobile game attempts to inform the reader about the game, it falls short in a few areas. The game's ratings in the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store in the article are outdated by over four years, one of the sources in the article is self-published and does not provide solid evidence for Bit City's accomplishment of reaching number one on the Apple App Store, and the explanation on the gameplay is shallow and missing several key details. In general, the article seems to cover the basic principles for what makes a good Wikipedia article, though a few key revisions would make it a much more robust, information-rich read.