Playing Starcraft is an excellent analogy to playing the piano while also playing chess. I won't speak for designers and Photoshop, but for general computer usage, both strategic thinking and expressive hand-eye coordination are particularly useful skills.
Everything I know about design I learned playing Starcraft
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Re: Everything I know about design I learned playing Starcraft
#12I used to hear this argument from WoW players a lot. "It's skills you use in every business management, so it's just like work!" Go ahead and list it on your resume if you believe it.
My friend who's the leader of our counter-strike online team. (We play ESEA for money) Put that on his resume for a manager position at an apple retail store and ended up getting it. I'm sure it wasn't directly related, but it definitely helped.
Re: Everything I know about design I learned playing Starcraft
#13Design work is dotted with long periods of thinking and exploring. You only need a high APM rate because photoshop terribly sucks for anything other than manipulating bitmaps, you can do things much faster in an object-based editor like Fireworks. If only Adobe would make it 100% compatible with PSDs and actually mantain it, it would completely take over web design.
Its not that much as APM as comfort with the tools you are using. Most great programmers are great typists and are master of some text editor, so that the tools won't get in the way and you can actually concentrate on the hard things without having to be thinking how to do the easy stuff.
Re: Everything I know about design I learned playing Starcraft
#14Relating skill to Starcraft's ranking system was a nice analogy–it's easy to visualize/see in practice on a site like Dribbble along with the described improvement over time. Conversely, it's also easy to pick up on some designers constantly playing the same card.
Re: Everything I know about design I learned playing Starcraft
#15I used to hear this argument from WoW players a lot. "It's skills you use in every business management, so it's just like work!" Go ahead and list it on your resume if you believe it.
Tangential but awesome story: A few years back, I listed a starcraft-related project on my resume.
An interviewer at VeryFamousWebCompany(tm) went totally rogue (I am assuming) and we spent a good 30 minutes discussing the most recent patch and how it effects game balance. I'm guessing he was able to justify this was some kind of analysis/critical-thinking question. And I still got an offer. So there's that.
Re: Everything I know about design I learned playing Starcraft
#16Design work is dotted with long periods of thinking and exploring. You only need a high APM rate because photoshop terribly sucks for anything other than manipulating bitmaps, you can do things much faster in an object-based editor like Fireworks. If only Adobe would make it 100% compatible with PSDs and actually mantain it, it would completely take over web design.
I find this a funny comparison because StarCraft is at least in part made difficult on purpose, as is the case with any game. In particular, APM/micro/etc are a key aspect that separate the range of skill levels of most players. So while some multitasking aspects in the game would certainly be difficult no matter what, any good UI designer could make StarCraft easier and more accessible to use, but then there wouldn't be something to advance at. A good example of this is MBS (multi-building select). This feature did not exist in SC1, but was introduced in SC2 and makes it easier to build multiple units. There was some backlash with this feature because it made things "too easy".
Re: Everything I know about design I learned playing Starcraft
#17I used to hear this argument from WoW players a lot. "It's skills you use in every business management, so it's just like work!" Go ahead and list it on your resume if you believe it.
I have Starcraft on my resumé. If I were a master in chess, I would list that, too.
I spend my free time voluntarily putting myself in fast-paced, high-stress situations where I am forced to make critical strategic decisions as quickly as possible in order to succeed.
If that's what I do for fun, imagine what I accomplish when I'm working.
Re: Everything I know about design I learned playing Starcraft
#18Design work is dotted with long periods of thinking and exploring. You only need a high APM rate because photoshop terribly sucks for anything other than manipulating bitmaps, you can do things much faster in an object-based editor like Fireworks. If only Adobe would make it 100% compatible with PSDs and actually mantain it, it would completely take over web design.
I find this a funny comparison because StarCraft is at least in part made difficult on purpose , as is the case with any game. In particular, APM/micro/etc are a key aspect that separate the range of skill levels of most players. So while some multitasking aspects in the game would certainly be difficult no matter what, any good UI designer could make StarCraft easier and more accessible to use, but then there wouldn…
As a compeditive sport you can make games random but not easy. However changing the UI Makes different skills useful which shits the balance of power as well as the learning curve. Much like how the ideal GO and Chess players have related but different skills.
Re: Everything I know about design I learned playing Starcraft
#19I hate to be that guy, but this is a real poor comparison. First, who uses guides anymore outside of print? 1140 Grid or 960 does the job perfectly fine and prepares your design for responsive.
You can write an article about Starcraft if you love Starcraft, but juxtaposing against Photoshop workflow is disingenuous at best, misleading and confusing at the worst.
Photoshop isn't perfect, but it knocks Fireworks' socks off in every aspect: automation, formats, shortcuts, UI, precision, etc.
Re: Everything I know about design I learned playing Starcraft
#20>In Starcraft, nearly everything has a keyboard shortcut, and can be accessed in milliseconds. Professional players have average APM's of around 300. During intense battles, with their careers on the line, they can get up to 500 or 600. That's almost 10 separate moves per second!
EAPM (Effective APM) is more pertinent than raw APM. APM arguments have raged on for more than a decade (since Broodware at the very least), and there have been many top players with low apm (300 vs 100).
For HNers, an appropriate analogy would be typing speed for coding. We have ongoing (pointless) arguments about the importance of typing speed for programmers. Whatever one's opinion/preference for this subject may be, we've seen plenty of programmers be successful with high typing speeds but many mistypes, and other with relatively low typing speeds but very accurate. There's a pretty wide range in which one can be successful.
>The Starcraft equivalent of a boilerplate template is a build order, which informs which buildings to construct in the beginning of the game.
Build orders need to be informed by the map choice and opponent. I think similar considerations would apply in the template selection in photoshop as well, though not covered in OP. I wonder what the equivalent of such meta considerations would be in design.
>Rush / Macro
Is this the common terminology in SC2 these days? It's strange since the standard counterpoint to "Macro" (economy and production) has been "Micro" (unit control).