SC2 confirmed as a WCG 2012 title - Page 8

Your argument from your first four sentences:

1. Competitive games are defined by mechanics, team play and other things.
2. Different competitive games emphasize different components of competitive games.
Therefore,
3. Different competitive games take the same amount of effort.

As far as I can tell, (1) and (2) are not relevant to (3).

I proposed to measure how much effort playing a game takes by measuring how much time during play is spent expending zero effort and how much time during play a player's maximum effort is insufficient to accomplish helpful tasks in game. I don't claim that these measurements provide an unquestionable conclusion but I do believe the measurements to be relevant to the issue and I'd prefer that when they are questioned, the questions be intelligent and backed by relevant argument.

You haven't made a connection between different games requiring different skills and different games requiring the same amount of effort. I don't know what to make of what you've written.


There are games simple enough and easy enough to play, such as tic tac toe, that can be played perfectly with a limited amount of effort. It is possible to become a perfect tic tac toe player and any effort to improve beyond that will go to waste.

Similarly, there are parts of more complex games that can be perfected. For example in LoL, when a player dies and can do nothing but shop, he can shop perfectly with very little effort. The player can also formulate strategy and tactics, check cooldowns and oversee teammates, but cannot actually do anything in the game. The player can't put effort into a game that the game won't accept. If a LoL player tried to do more than shop while dead, he'd be wasting effort.


This is something you'd have to support with argument but it's not something worth supporting. I think it's wiser (but still not a certainty) to say that with the theoretical maximum amount of practice possible, a team could still not execute fights perfectly.

A LoL/DOTA team can put as much effort into practicing as possible and benefit from that effort. But this is a different matter than putting as much effort into playing the game as possible. Effort on maximizing and optimizing practice is different than effort on playing. I believe both LoL/DOTA and BW/SC2 benefit from a maximum effort on practice. In other words, there's never a time for these games when proper practice is unable to improve a player's abilities.


If this is true, then shouldn't the 1000th best player be indistinguishable from the best player? There are enough people playing LoL and enough people trying to be the best they can at LoL and yet there's a very small group of players who distinguish themselves from everyone else. You say the game is absurdly easy mechanically and in other ways. I'd have to think that implies the skill ceiling is low and an awful should be hitting it. But the fact is that the skill ceiling isn't low and nobody has hit it and I'm wondering why it matters where the skill ceiling is at if nobody can hit it anyway.


What do you mean by "can't manage"? There's a difference between doing something and not succeeding and not being able to do anything at all. We can talk about two kinds of effort. If it's possible to put more or less effort into a single act, and putting more effort raises the chance of the act being successful, then I'm assuming players are always giving a maximum effort. That's one kind of effort. Another kind of effort is simply that it takes more effort to do two things than it takes to do one thing. It takes less effort to do nothing than it takes to do something. This is the kind of effort I was measuring.

I don't know what kind of effort you refer to with "can't manage" but I consider the first kind irrelevant to the discussion because it is practically ubiquitous in both games. Almost everything in both types of games has a chance of being messed up and half-assing actions increases the chance of failure. If you mean the second kind, then I agree with you that it happens sometimes in LoL/DOTA (probably more often in DOTA) that a player can't manage to do everything he wants to do. But I stay firm with my belief that this happens far more often to the BW/SC2 player. So it still seems to me that the BW/SC2 player expends more effort.


They aren't blanket statements and they aren't presumptuous. A definitive measurement of effort is beyond our means but we can take the steps that we can take without presuming much at all. I believe Chess and Go take a hell of a lot of effort to play and are extremely exhausting and yet they require no mechanical skill at all. The question of effort is obviously complicated and we have to take it one step at a time. You haven't attempted to take any steps so what the fuck are you doing here?