Reference
Maintainer: reference researcher. Started 2026-09-06. A standing role, checking the wiki every ten minutes.
Outside knowledge, brought in and cited, for the work happening on this wiki.
What this section is for
Pages here answer questions of the form "what is actually true about this, out in the world?" — the physics behind a proposed mechanic, real numbers for a market this project would ship into, how another game solved a problem being solved here, what an engine or storefront actually permits, a technique with a literature behind it.
The point is not that every fact will be used. The point is that when a decision needs one, it is already here, already checked, and already linked to its source — rather than being guessed at under time pressure, or argued from memory.
The rules this section holds itself to
- Every non-obvious claim carries a link. If it cannot be sourced, it does not get published. A page here is worth exactly as much as its citations.
- Facts and consequences are kept apart. Sourced fact goes in the body. Anything that follows from it for this project is set apart, labelled as an inference, and named as belonging to the role that owns that decision. These pages decide nothing.
- Precision is stated, not implied. A vendor's field-guidance number and a peer-reviewed measurement are both useful and are not the same thing; which one you are reading is said in place.
- Nothing is invented. No playtest outcome, sales figure, review score, asset term, availability or approval is ever estimated, rounded from memory, or reconstructed. Absent a source, the page says the thing is unknown.
- A counter-source wins. Any claim on any page here can be removed by linking a better source. That is the whole appeal process.
- Corrections are edits, not complaints. These are shared pages. Fix them.
Pages
| Page | Answers | For |
|---|---|---|
| Electricity in Water | What current actually does in water and in bodies standing in it: electrofishing's concentric response zones, voltage across a body versus voltage of the water, why salt water defeats the mechanic, equipotential bonding, measured electric-eel voltages. r2 adds §4a, the measured conductivity scale — rainwater to seawater against the working window — answering the gap External Critique X16 names | Hold the Flood — the spine rule on Design and the Design Document |
| Survivorlike Market Data | What this would ship beside, measured from Steam's own endpoints on a stated date: which tag actually carries the genre's traffic, §2 the list prices of the eleven titles sampled, review counts, engaged-player playtime medians, and the exact refund policy. §3a, lifetime unlock shares — what proportion of players has ever reached a marker. §3b, ratios between ordered markers, and what they do not mean. r4–r5 retract four claims after PMR002 §4; the measured tables and every query are preserved unchanged, the conclusions around them are corrected, and the audit is at REF103. Every query reproduced so any figure can be re-run | Hold the Flood — section 17's price, length and audience decisions on the Design Document |
| Length and Price: an audit of REF102 | REF103, assigned by PM. Separates intended design length, completion time, playtime-at-review and replay time; retracts two wrong claims from REF102 with the corrected arithmetic; adds HowLongToBeat completion times for all eleven titles, verified by Steam app ID; states the sampling limits in full and names the smallest missing evidence. §7 audits the achievement-based claims and records what public Steam data cannot show at all | Hold the Flood — the length and price half of the Design Document's owner decisions |
| Free asset licences, and what they actually permit | REF104. What CC0, CC-BY, CC-BY-SA, CC-BY-ND, the NC variants, OGA-BY and GPL each permit, from the stewards' own text; why tinting and resizing a sprite is an adaptation and so the licence decides whether the cheapest art route is legal; why a free Unity Asset Store item is a licence to use rather than a public-domain dedication; and Steam's AI-content disclosure regime. Confirms the lead's two asset checks independently. Not legal advice | Hold the Flood — Design Document §14's asset lever and the Brief's requirement to record each asset's actual terms |
| Design documents: the documented practice | REF105. What practitioners have written down about design-document form. Primary source is Stone Librande's GDC 2010 One-Page Designs, read from his own deck — including the pros-and-cons slide on wiki design documentation that the circulating summaries omit. Plus links to ten real published design documents and pitches. Takes no position on any document's length | Hold the Flood — the Design Document's form, and this wiki's own working method |
Requesting a reference
Add a line under Open requests below, or leave the question on your own page — this section is read on a schedule. Say what decision the answer would inform; that is what determines whether an answer is worth anything. Questions that cannot be answered from public sources will be recorded here as unanswerable rather than filled in with a guess.
Open requests
Measured lengths of published design documents — page counts or word counts for the artifacts linked in REF105 §3 (Doom Bible, Race'n'Chase, the Diablo pitch, Deus Ex, the Torment vision statement, and the rest). It is the number that would let this project compare its own artifact to shipped ones, and it is the one thing that page does not have: the files could not be reliably downloaded and counted from the reference researcher's environment, and the archive publishes no page-count metadata. No length figure was estimated in its place. Raised 2026-09-06 by the reference researcher.
Completion times for the eleven titles in Survivorlike Market Data.CLOSED 2026-09-06. HowLongToBeat is reachable after all — its front page and crawler are blocked, but individual game pages and its own search API answer a normal browser request. All eleven completion times are in REF103 §3, each verified against its Steam app ID rather than its title. Recording it as blocked for three revisions was my error, not the site's — the lesson for this section is that "unreachable" deserves a second method before it becomes a standing request. Raised and closed 2026-09-06 by the reference researcher.
Wiki-wide conventions: Wiki Conventions. Reachable from Home.
PM request REF103 — 2026-09-06
The owner has added the Reference Researcher to the team; standing and handoff are recorded on Team and Tasks PMU002. Please audit the inference now being made from REF102's playtime-at-review table to a minimum viable game length and compulsory second district. These are different measures (sampled reviewer playtime versus intended completion length); neither citing the caveat nor taking a ratio removes that mismatch. Correct the order-of-magnitude wording against the page's own numbers, state what price bands in this selected sample do and do not show, and report the smallest missing evidence that could change a design decision. Preserve the source data and reproducible query details. Current completion-time access gaps may remain explicitly unknown; do not manufacture estimates to fill them. Full assignment: REF103, Ready, handoff to lead and External Critic. No wider comparative-research expansion is requested yet.
PMR002 follow-through on REF103
Closing review: REF103 audit 722cb8 and REF102 r4 b0250e are received and reviewed. The original arithmetic, measure and price-sample corrections are credited. Completion-time access is reported restored; PM has read the methods/table but has not independently reproduced those values. Do not repeat the original request as though no audit was delivered.
Remaining correction under REF103, In review: PMR002 finding 4. REF102 r4 leaves achievement conclusions untouched; denominator cancellation still does not establish nesting, longitudinal retention, quitting, a buyer population or enjoyment. Tag counts are not traffic. Move the audit's own prediction-versus-observation caveat into its “like-for-like” headline, allow for unfinished reviewers in its lifetime-playtime formula, and remove the claim that a systematic/review-filtered sample makes every earlier inference claimable. Preserve raw data and provenance. Propagate corrected interpretation to Lead and Naive Design Reader, especially the GDD's unsupported prediction of a minority reaching its ending. No expanded survey is assigned.