[Academic Research] Seeking Warcraft 3 Custom Map Creators for an Interview

[bestius]

Hi everyone, I am looking for Warcraft 3 custom map creators who would be willing to participate in a short interview for my Master’s thesis research.

I was a bit disappointed that academic literature almost entirely missed the diversity of WC3 custom maps and, with a few exceptions, only mentions DotA and a few other big projects. I strongly believe that this piece of gaming history (and present) is worth preserving and understanding better.

Who am I looking for? I would like to interview anyone who has finished creating any custom map. What “finishing” means is entirely up to you. It can be a small map you did 15 years ago over a weekend, or a massive group project that you worked on for years.

Format & Length: The interview will take about 20–40 minutes and will be conducted via Discord voice call.

Topic: It will be semi-structured – I have a rough outline of questions regarding your motivation to create the map, your personal background, and your players, but we can talk about whatever seems interesting at the moment.

Privacy & Ethics: Your participation is completely voluntary, and you can refuse to answer any question without giving a reason. You can choose to be listed in the thesis under your real name, your nickname, or remain 100% anonymous. The thesis will be then publicly accessible for everyone forever in the university archive.

Recording: With your permission, I will audio-record our conversation purely for my own text transcription and analysis. The audio file will not be published anywhere and will be deleted afterward.

How to participate: I am in the EU time zone, but I am very happy to work around your schedule. I am looking for another 2 to 4 creators for this. I would ideally do all of this over the next week, since I procrastinated by playing W3 too much and the deadline is pretty close.

If you are willing to help me out, please fill out this short contact form with a few basic information: [Academic Research] Seeking Warcraft 3 Custom Map Creators for an Interview

Thanks to anyone willing to participate! (Also, if you know any other map creators who might be interested, please feel free to share this post with them!)

 

[Kyrbi0]

If I had ever finished anything that was played by anyone (other than Contest entries I suppose), this would be cool to help with. Still, good luck! I think you're right; Wc3 essentially spawned (both formally, with WoW (MMORPGs) & informally, with DotA: Allstars (MOBAs)) the two biggest gaming trends of the last ~20 years, and it's not really recognized enough for that.

 

[Pyrogasm]

I like this idea of yours, hope you get mapmakers of substance.

It's my opinion that most WC3 projects are never finished, and that's part of the magic of the World Editor. One is constantly encouraged to experiment, tweak, perfect, or even overhaul large systems in your map both by the community ("hey look at this cool physic engine USER_X created last week!") and by what the editor allows you to do.

"What 'finishing' means is entirely up to you" is reasonable, I just don't think most mapmakers would consider themselves to have fully finished a project.

 

[Retera]

Ahh shucks, I missed this post and now it's probably too late. I tried to think about whether I finished anything, and then it occurred to me that I have.

I have created throwaway Warcraft III maps that almost nobody has ever played, sometimes with a playing time of 10 to 30 minutes, for the purpose of making a YouTube video in one, long uncut sequence of a recorded play session. There are probably all sorts of ways to think about a creator like me in that situation -- is it mental illness? Is it making a public statement?

An example of such a map is the one here - this entire video was an unedited recording from beginning to end where I just turned on OBS to screen record and played my own thing through:

And now it has 25000 views so in a certain kind of way, it was not only finished but also had sort of a large userbase.
But in reality nobody is going to download and play this map from Hive, that's never going to happen, it's just a memory

Edit:
Big, big caveat: the map above is a hodgepodge of models made by other people, a Template section map uploaded to Hive by the Warcraft Sandbox user, and then triggers & dialogue and scripted events by me.

So another thing about this example is how it builds off of the works of others, and wasn't just me