Metagame 5

Tide Hunter

Tide Hunter is a data visualization application designed to process statistical output from Bruno “Statsman” Carlucci’s Dota 2 (2013) replay parser. To produce Tide Hunter, data was collected during “The Turn of the Tide,” a seventeen-second upset that has since been regarded as one of the most important plays in the history of Dota 2. Within the visualization, this information is repurposed to drive alternative representations of e-sports and dive beneath the spectacular surface of Valve’s software. Set within an aqueous landscape in which the eponymous Tidehunter’s abilities were famously turned against him in just seventeen seconds, the game offers players a navigable interface for exploring the microtemporal operations that took place during the match between Natus Vincere and Invictus at The International in 2012 (see Figure 5.16). To download Tide Hunter, go to http://manifold.umn.edu/tidehunter.