I'm in the midst of a League of Legends-gasm this week, and while hunting useful information as to how to best play the game I stumbled across a video by one of the LoL staff explaining a concept I had never heard of called zoning. Watching the video, I discovered that zoning was something that, as a pretty damn good LoL player already, I was already doing intuitively, but nonetheless I was struck by how much my game improved simply by understanding what it was.
So here's my proposition. I have a list of six terms that I think should be a part of standard vocabulary when discussing the playstyle of gamers. These are skillsets, some of them intuitive, some of them earned, that everyone who plays a video game or wants to should have some idea about simply because being aware of what there is to learn makes it much easier to learn a thing. In addition, it should give me the language I need to parse why Devon keeps beating me into the ground at Soul Cal. Or so I hope. Let's find out, shall we?
1.) Micromanagement is the study of how important objects in a game interact with each other. In most instances it is focused around concepts of space and timing, which is why League of Legends refers to it as Zoning (this is the video here).
A lot of people have a really intuitive grasp of how things "fit", which is why games with heavy micro elements are so fun for them. Even if they haven't learned this concept, they'll learn it quickly through gaming as almost every game involves some sort of micro.
Platformers are heavily based on micromanagement, as are many fighting games (the more skills are "shaped" in their interactions the better). Even more "skill" oriented games like FPS's have these kinds of relationships - especially heavily class-based ones like Team Fortress 2 - where a shotgun has an effective range close up and thus is better for corners, a sniper rifle or a mounted machine gun decreases the space you can move safely in, and cover and positioning allow you to better protect yourself and key points on a map... all of these are micro-oriented parts of a game.
2.) Macromanagement, or Multithreading as I like to call it, is the sum total awareness of important objects and actions in a game. This is your ability to manage micro in the area you need to while still understanding what is going on elsewhere - in other words, your ability to correctly identify all useful information and stay focused on it. After a certain level almost no one has this skill intuitively, and building it is a much more laborious and difficult task which even the most hardened gamers do not necessarily have perfected. (The Day9 SC macro explanation: "Build something. Look at the minimap. Look at your resources. Build something else.") Lots of players who excel at other skills get burned on macro because as a general rule, people just can't think about that many things at the same time.
Being bad at Macro means random stuff - getting hit with that blue shell because you didn't hear it and slow down, being "ganked" by all those people who disappeared off the minimap a few seconds ago - happens to you more often, which is generally unpleasant and induces much rage. But Macro still exists in most games because A) simplicity breeds stagnation and B) informational noise is really pretty. You don't want a zombie, you want hundreds of zombies. You don't want a battle, you want a war, or in lieu of a war, an explosions fest.
Nonetheless, games try to minimize how much you focus on macro, usually by making sure the most important data you have to keep track of is a minimap and a health bar, and maybe a few other increasing numbers stacked closely by it. Interfaces have become steadily less complicated to relay important information in as effective a pattern as can be created while still simulating things of exceptional scale.
3.) Coordination (of the hand-eye variety) is the capacity to effectively execute an action. For the most part this delineates how a character responds to the player's actions and in that sense you could say the coordination is between the man and his avatar.
This is what FPS players will usually refer to as part and parcel of "skill". There are a number of different skillsets at which people become coordinated, some of which carry over to other games and some of which don't. Controllers and interfaces are an important part of this, especially in cases where precision counts for aiming a weapon or pulling an attack.
4.) Reflex is the capacity to quickly respond to new information.
With the exception of "Press X to not die" events, this is almost always important in conjunction with coordination and micro, since it lessens the possibility of getting caught off guard by something your macro sense didn't feed you. A highly coordinated sniper can still miss a shot at point blank range, and a surprised fighter with good micro can still drop his controller on his foot or kick in the wrong direction when struck by an attack that flips him around. Still, standing alone with this intuitive skill, poorly coordinated people with good reflexes can do just fine in some situations - provided they have shotguns and don't need to really "line up" a shot for the frag.
5.) Empathy is the ability to appropriately measure the behavior of a games outside element.
This is the capacity to predict what your opponent is going to do and do something in response. It actually goes both ways - behaving in unpredictable fashions is often valid when someone is trying to understand your own behavior. Empathy relates to all of the skills above, but involves playing the person next to you rather than the person you're controlling. Co-op games require strong empathy, but Player vs. Player games desire this skill even more so, for the obvious reasons.
I'm being a bit broad with this definition because, while empathy is a human-human interaction, game developers often try to establish an empathic relationship with gamers, for good or ill. For example, serious survival horror games interfere with a players capacity to react effectively and reasonably by messing with their heads, constantly using red herrings or atmosphere to put them off their game and then introducing challenges at the times when players are least effective at responding. If you took all of the fog out of Silent Hill then players would behave like reasonable adults and kill everything with a minimum of fuss. Instead they practically drop their controllers trying to pull out their pistol when the evil babies come a calling, fire shots wildly into the air, panic and run the wrong direction, and hey, now the game is suddenly hard. Good level design involves the developers having empathy for you, the gamer.
In addition, many games have computer opponents with predictable behaviors to exploit, and in the spirit of true empathy can even have weird relationships with you without any sort of mutual understanding as to why. My original StarCraft playstyle somehow influenced computer Overlords to constantly fly towards my base, freak out as they were shot by my missile turrets, fly back, and start the process over again, which provided me with some substantial advantage in every game I played. Devon discovered this when he created a custom map which I immediately broke with this pattern, and commented on its oddity. I had merely assumed this brand of broken AI was inflicted on everyone, but that was apparently not the case, and since I have improved at the game I have never been able to recreate my inane dance of death with the floating meatsacks of the Zerg race.
6.) Strategy is the ability to effectively plan a winning set of actions. To be fair, when the plan must be invented or changed over a short period of time, it's considered to be a tactic.
Strategy is important in any game because it involves playing to your strengths. The best 1v1 player on the Halo servers when the mode existed was merely a highly coordinated sniper, and much like anybody else with substantive micro skills on that broken, broken game, could kill everyone 20-0 as they spawned before they got their own sniper rifles to kill him back. The only difference between him and every other player below his caliber was that he had mastered the art (on the singular map he played) of using a grenade to blow the sniper rifle off of the ledge it was on and into his hands, giving him access to it several seconds before his opponent did. (Bungie eventually got rid of ranked 1v1 entirely - one assumes because this kind of gameplay existed in the first place)
I want to say that Strategy is also an important element in puzzle-solving games, but that might require a bit more depth than I want to go into at this point. Suffice it to say that games that do not require you to "think fast" will often have a substantial amount of strategy in that strategy is something that occurs outside of the field of play.
So, when you ask a professional player of first person shooters his secrets, he might tell you to first study the map (Strategy) and determine the spots of the best tactical value. Or maybe he'll give you his trademark "short-hop short-hop long-hop" advice, which tends to stump snipers (Empathy). He'll almost certainly relate when not to use specific guns (Micro) and tell you to slowly ratchet up your mouse sensitivity so that you can still aim perfectly for the head(Coordination) while being able to turn a complete 180 in under a half a second (Reflex). Beyond that, he might mention some good surround sound headphones so you can better hear enemies from a distance or praise his graphics settings for enabling him to more easily notice snipers in a heavy firefight (Macro).
I cooked up some player profiles using these terms, which hopefully no one will object to. Everyone who plays games for any period of time has all of these skills in spades, but I thought it might be interesting to describe people by their strengths.
While I don't know Mark that well, from what I do know I would consider him to be a Micro oriented gamer. His choices in games - like Storm of the Imperial Sanctum and Smash Brothers - are an obvious clue, but in addition his playstyle revolves heavily around the elements of spacing and attack patterns. In StarCraft he limits his strategy to infantry balls so that he can keep complicated macro to a minimum while using the units he is most familiar with to deal damage at appropriate times. Mark can also apparently play Dragon Age II, a game heavily based on spacing and attack patterns, on Nightmare mode. Which is not, as far as I am aware, a possible thing.
His version of Smash Bros, Minus, plays up the dramatically shaped movelists that interact with each other in a very visible fashion. All random and excess information is reduced as much as possible (items are turned off). In addition, he plays heavily around the stages themselves, which change the flow of combat. Since he's reaaaally coordinated with his characters, he can typically generate a huge advantage unless you create an overwhelming amount of threats against him (which becomes the SSB Minus rule: gank Mark if you don't want to lose).
In one of the last Smash Bros games I played against him on Brinstar, I was suddenly confused as he abandoned his attack on me in order to double jump backwards into the air, where he immediately performed a backwards kick into empty space. At this point, the stage flipped, conveniently lining up my face with the back of his heel, which in turn conveniently put my torso through the edge of the stage.
"Yeah," he said. "That happens."
Devon is a consummate strategist in his element (Magic), but he is also an extremely empathic gamer, and uses his ability to predict other players actions and effectively obscure his own to great advantage. He's been known to tilt cards at you when they could obviously be blocked and killed just because he trusts you'll believe that the cards in his hand are instant speed pumps or burn, and his playstyle in combat games similarly relies on knowing what move you'll do or not doing what you'd expect, regardless of whether or not he knows his own movelist. Since Devon likes to play with or against people, and doesn't like to "study" video games the way he does board games or card games, I would refer to him as an empathic gamer first and foremost in that arena.
It would be insulting not to say that Logan is at the top of all of these skillsets, since he's spent a lot of time earning those skills - although some particular brands of strategy really bore him and he won't use them or play games that involve them. If I had to pick a strength, I would say that thousands of hours of Counter-Strike have especially honed his reflexes and coordination and given him a lot of insight and empathy into the behavior of people on internet games. He's discussed with me how he was once banned from CS servers for cheating when he headshot three moving targets with a Desert Eagle while completely blinded by a flashbang. He wasn't cheating, but simply memorizing their positions pre-flash, predicting where they would move, and firing three perfect shots before they could effectively take him down with their sprayguns. Having seen him play FPS's, I don't doubt this story for an instant.
I always considered myself a strategist, but I have a simple greed for information when it comes to video games that comes from a part of me that wants to understand how games tick - the part that writes weird articles about skillsets in video games, for example. As a result, I've played all types of games with all types of focuses and stopped specializing in the strategic for every game that I play. I actually think Macro is my strongest skill versus others just because I have put so much more effort into it in games like StarCraft, but it's not my favorite part of games. Still, I appreciate the Micro-Empathic ballad more than anything in skill based games, especially fighting games, especially against Devon.
When I lose against Devon in Soul Calibur, though, it is by virtue of strategy. I seem hellbent on knowing and using every move that exists within that game, which means I have never settled on a solid micro strategy with any particular character. My desire for variety is a ridiculous compulsion, and I experiment constantly in fights where I should not in order to develop full coordination with my character, trying to wreak some sort of strategic advantage while I rely on sheer reflex to block and guard impact attacks.
Devon, who learns enough moves to utilize a specific micro strategy for every character, uses our goddamn mind meld to inflict effective damage, and experiments only when he is in a strong position. Instead of wasting time learning reams of unimportant information, he picks up on the moves that I find useful through my experimentation, and then integrates the counters he already knows into his moves.
In other words, Devon wins at Soul Calibur because he is way more skilled at it than I am.
There's an upside, at least. I do have as much of an empathic advantage as he does (via the MIND MELD) and a very strong knowledge of Soul Calibur spacing. This means I always have a few opportunities to exploit his difficult patterns after forcing him into a position where my uncanny knowledge of moves will be useful.
I'd call that utilizing effective zoning in conjunction with a tacit empathic understanding of his playstyle. He'd probably call it "Ring-Out Whoring".
