goals and motivations
In a new Wired article, the always interesting Clive Thompson writes about how video games are inadvertently teaching kids about the scientific method. His primary example is the obsessive strategizing of World of Warcraft players. While many players use the WOW forums to bitch and moan, others use it for the purpose of analytical dialogue. They spend countless hours comparing data on a tough boss or a tricky dungeon, and use that data to literally reverse-engineer the algorithms that make the monster tick.
It’s not just World of Warcraft, of course. Starcraft players have been obsessing over their APM for the better part of a decade. The more dedicated players attain an almost supernatural attunement to Starcraft‘s precise timings. The game is won not by embracing its metaphor of intergalactic warfare, but by honing your efficiency to the millisecond. Likewise, there’s this bit from a Soul Calibur strategy guide:
To escape, the victim must press B for Summon Suffering or A for Criminal Symphony within 5 frames of contact with Ivy’s arm. A frame is 1/60th of a second, and this is the smallest escape window of any throw in Soul Calibur 2.
This writer has figured out the timing of Soul Calibur II‘s animations to within a twelfth of a second. I would kill to find a subject with that kind of dedication in my experiments.
The world is filled with fundamentally goal-directed creatures. Humans are no exception. I’m not talking about some high-minded Maslowian hierarchy in which self-fulfillment is paramount. I’m talking about evolution. Contrary to what the SATs might lead you to believe, we are very bad at learning things in the abstract. We didn’t learn math for the sake of knowledge; we needed it when we transitioned away from a barter economy (and even in a barter system, trading ten chickens for one cow has an inherent mathematics).
Likewise, if you have a medication-resistant seizure disorder, I can’t just tell you to calm down your neurological activity. That doesn’t make any sense. I can, however, link the electrical activity on the surface of your skin to a computer, and tell you to make an animation play. Eventually, you figure how to make the animation move forward (which, in this case, only happens when you quiet down the electrical activity on your skin), and thus your seizures are controlled.
Nobody learns about the scientific method for the hell of it. Everything we do, we do with a purpose in mind. You want to kill the monster and get the sweet loot? You need a plan. Enter science. I look forward to a future in which we are educated by slaying dragons and ridding the galaxy of the Zerg threat.
I’ve never seen any community as fanatically obsessed over timings as the people on GameFAQs discussing Super Smash Bros. Melee. They’d practice, over and over and over, dodging specific moves with even smaller windows than 5/60s.
With Starcraft, though, there are definite plateaus that people hit in regards to gameplay. My friends are the sort that beat their friends pretty handily, but I can beat almost every one of them without too much effort. The guy that I played against at PAX’s Starcraft tournament dispatched me with similar ease, but he was himself taken down by a guy who took SC to the next degree.
(And as he was kind of a jerk about winning, it made me feel better to see him lose.)
A lot of this is game knowledge, the comfort with which you can issue commands, navigate around a battle map you’ve played on before, and perform mundane tasks in the most efficient way possible. Another part is interface — the mice at PAX were very different from what I was used to, and indeed, some tournament participants actually brought their own mouse/keyboard sets.
The criterion that sets the better players apart, though, is the fanaticism and trust with which they play. These players have been in the game for so long, and to such a thorough degree, that they no longer bother to verify that their minions are performing to their exacting expectations. They simply click, and move on to the next kill, secure in the knowledge that their orders are carried out as they imagine.