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.
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.