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'StarCraft' Gameplay Boosts Mental Flexibility, Says Study

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Re: 'StarCraft' Gameplay Boosts Mental Flexibility, Says Study

#81

Post by wonderzombie »

EthanHeilman wrote: post #38
dmead wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you say that, until you get proxy everything'd

I haven't been successfully proxied in a very long time and I'm an awful sc2 player (you see many more proxies in bronze than silver). A standard build order will crush a proxy 99/100 assuming the players are vaguely close in skill.

Not necessarily. There are plenty of strong economical/greedy build orders which are vulnerable to proxy play, esp if you don't scout.

Actually, some of the recent WCS games are great examples; there's a reason why people will proxy or 6 pool. Sometimes it really does come down to luck, as in whether you scout at a specific time or not.

Re: 'StarCraft' Gameplay Boosts Mental Flexibility, Says Study

#82

Post by ajuc »

cpeterso wrote: post #78
rfnslyr wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah that was me, sorry. I tried, for fun, to cheese my way into GM and it's entirely possible.

For us non-StarCraft players, what is a "cheesy build"? <:)

It's cheesy cause it "smells" :) If enemy is scouting on time he will notice your cheese and if he reacts properly he is almost guaranteed to win no matter what. But many people don't scout (or don't understand what they see even when they scout) and then cheesy strategy is easy win.

It's usually very gimmicky strategy - for example building your barracks near enemy base at the start of the game and pumping army instead of workers, or attacking with your soldiers AND workers before opponent has army to defend.

Most players look down on cheese, cause it's much easier than to play a regular ("macro") game - you only need to learn a few first minutes of game and then either you won or you lost, you don't need to react to enemy, and you don't need to multitask much (you have few units and only one base at the beginning of the game).

On the other hand people say that cheese keeps others "honest" - people often play greedy (skip scouting and defense to get economy faster) and cheese punish that.

In tournaments when players play each other a few times choosing to cheese or not is another level of metagame.

Re: 'StarCraft' Gameplay Boosts Mental Flexibility, Says Study

#83

Post by rfnslyr »

cpeterso wrote: post #78
rfnslyr wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah that was me, sorry. I tried, for fun, to cheese my way into GM and it's entirely possible.

For us non-StarCraft players, what is a "cheesy build"? <:)

Anything extensively on 1base when you should be on 2base. If 1basing, your limited resources all go towards one attack, or one attack with a small follow up.

If you defend against it, you pretty much win as they sunk all their resources into early low tier army, instead of economic balanced expansion.

Re: 'StarCraft' Gameplay Boosts Mental Flexibility, Says Study

#85

Post by lifeformed »

rfnslyr wrote: post #39

Top 100 world ranked grand master here. The amount of time I have poured into this game is absolutely unreal, I could have probably raised a family of 5 in the time I spent playing StarCraft. I found myself better at a lot of games after being so intense in SCII. Co-ordination, decision making, a better understanding of strategy, all improved. I got better at Chess, was able to pick things up quicker. Great experienc…

> Once you play at top competitive tier in SC2, every other game is honestly a joke (videogames, not boardgames). What other games REQUIRE you to have 300APM? None, that's how many.

There are plenty of other highly competitive games that are just as difficult as Starcraft, but in different ways.

Dota 2 and Counter-strike are highly team-focused games. You need a crazy amount of teamwork and strategy to compete at high levels.

Quake is a game that requires a godly amount of spatial awareness and ultra-precise twitch precision. Most shots made in the game are faster than the limits of human reaction time to visual stimulus. They are possible because they are responding not only to visual stimulus, but to intuition. Cues like footstep sounds, knowledge of the map, thinking in the mind of your opponent, are all enough information to deduce where exactly to shoot your gun.

Imagine being given 50 milliseconds to click exactly on a single flashing pixel on your screen. People make those type of shots all the time in top-level Quake matches.

Here is a video of a compilation of clips of the two best Bulgarian Quake CPMA players fighting other players, and each other, in 1vs1 matches: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q76UNcuKSVY

Most of the shots are made before the enemy is even visible on the screen! And the railgun shots at 1:10 and 3:12 are examples of those one-pixel hits. Not to mention their mastery of the difficult movement system gives them added speed and agility.

Re: 'StarCraft' Gameplay Boosts Mental Flexibility, Says Study

#86

Post by coldarchon »

xal wrote: post #76

I'm CEO of a medium sized company now. I played semi pro broodwar and masters level SC2. Nothing in this surprises me. More then anything else Starcraft is a game where you learn how to use limited information better than your opponent. Think about it, it's really silly that people treat chess as this game with all these advantages for your brain and games like Starcraft are ignored. When in life do you have perfect…

Top 10 in Broodwar in Europe and a grand master in chess on FICS here. I don't think Starcraft can ever have the same impact on your brain and cognitive skills like chess. Unless you play Blitz chess, you have to learn to think at least 9 moves ahead, in Starcraft even your macro never exceeds 2 moves. The advantages to learn to concentrate are amazing in chess and non existent in Starcraft. On the other hand Starcraft gives you some understanding of process chains.

Re: 'StarCraft' Gameplay Boosts Mental Flexibility, Says Study

#87

Post by rfnslyr »

phaus wrote: post #62
rfnslyr wrote: post #39

Top 100 world ranked grand master here. The amount of time I have poured into this game is absolutely unreal, I could have probably raised a family of 5 in the time I spent playing StarCraft. I found myself better at a lot of games after being so intense in SCII. Co-ordination, decision making, a better understanding of strategy, all improved. I got better at Chess, was able to pick things up quicker. Great experienc…

>Once you play at top competitive tier in SC2, every other game is honestly a joke. You could say this about top-level play for a lot of games. You just happen to prefer SC2. I play competitive Counterstrike:GO. People often think that FPS games are simple, just a bunch of people running around trying to shoot each other in the face. That's like saying a game like SC2 is about gathering resources, building bases, and…

Can you email me your Steam username? I'd love to get a solid team of 5's in CS. I'm super serious if the other four are serious.

Re: 'StarCraft' Gameplay Boosts Mental Flexibility, Says Study

#88

Post by rfnslyr »

phaus wrote: post #62
rfnslyr wrote: post #39

Top 100 world ranked grand master here. The amount of time I have poured into this game is absolutely unreal, I could have probably raised a family of 5 in the time I spent playing StarCraft. I found myself better at a lot of games after being so intense in SCII. Co-ordination, decision making, a better understanding of strategy, all improved. I got better at Chess, was able to pick things up quicker. Great experienc…

>Once you play at top competitive tier in SC2, every other game is honestly a joke. You could say this about top-level play for a lot of games. You just happen to prefer SC2. I play competitive Counterstrike:GO. People often think that FPS games are simple, just a bunch of people running around trying to shoot each other in the face. That's like saying a game like SC2 is about gathering resources, building bases, and…

Can you tell me your Steam username? I'd love to get a solid team of 5's in CS. I'm super serious if the other four are serious.

Re: 'StarCraft' Gameplay Boosts Mental Flexibility, Says Study

#89

Post by wisty »

lutusp wrote: post #43
wisty wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, almost any sample size can be sufficient, as long as the effect is big enough. Though in psychology, larger samples are often needed, because there's generally smaller effects. If you want to test whether penicillin can cure a staph infection, you can get statistically significant results with a handful of tests.

>> Sample size has nothing (not strictly true) to do with whether a result is statistically significant. >> I hate to rain on your parade, but sample size has everything to do with whether a result is statistically significant. > No, almost any sample size can be sufficient, as long as the effect is big enough. Your sentence says "no", but it agrees -- sample size has everything to do with determining statistical sig…

Normal distribution of a sample scales with sigma, and inverse to sqrt(n-1), so effect size is more important than sample size. That's all the guy who originally posted was talking about.

I don't think anyone on hn won't know this. Everyone is just quibbling over the wording.

Your new point is very good, and I'd expect someone has used the correlation != causation argument too.

Re: 'StarCraft' Gameplay Boosts Mental Flexibility, Says Study

#90

Post by phaus »

rfnslyr wrote: post #87
phaus wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Once you play at top competitive tier in SC2, every other game is honestly a joke. You could say this about top-level play for a lot of games. You just happen to prefer SC2. I play competitive Counterstrike:GO. People often think that FPS games are simple, just a bunch of people running around trying to shoot each other in the face. That's like saying a game like SC2 is about gathering resources, building bases, and…

Can you email me your Steam username? I'd love to get a solid team of 5's in CS. I'm super serious if the other four are serious.

I play competitively, but I'm not top 100 caliber or anything, though I was pretty close as a teenager. I normally sit around Master Guardian II, which means I'm really good, but there are still quite a few people that are much better.
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