SC2SEA.com - Starcraft 2 SEA eSports Community Site

Order, Patterns and Chaos
 

I haven't written a blog in a while and this is something that I have been mulling over a bit so I thought I'd just sit down with a coffee, some music on Pandora and ramble on for a while. I recently started a new job and have to take a bus in to Castle Hill each morning. This gives me an hour of idle time each day where my mind runs wild and also put some thoughts into my mind.

In my first week the bus trips seemed chaotic, but by the Friday I was beginning to spot familiar faces getting on from the same stops each day and sit in exactly the same seats on the bus. I too began to slip into the routine of it all and sit in the same place each day through the 2nd week. I felt like I was beginning to "figure it out" when suddenly in my 3rd week there were twice as many people on the bus every day. This threw my whole impression of the routine out of the window. Slowly things returned to their original state over the next 2 weeks and there was another 2 week period of quieter trips with the original regulars. Now I am noticing that things appear to be on a monthly cycle of increased business. Naturally the Starcraft player in me started searching for parallels in Starcraft.

As a new Starcraft player nearly 2 years ago I felt extremely overwhelmed by the game. The races, the units, the maps, the tech trees and then all the extra parts of playing like macro, micro, strategies, timings, build orders and such. To me, a Pro match of Starcraft 2 was this undecipherable mass of chaos that they somehow seemed to make sense of. As I continued to throw myself into playing the game for hours on end over the first few weeks it didn't seem like I was making any progress. But over time I learned all the units, tech trees and upgrades of each race. I saw the importance of hotkeys and control groups from the start and focused on hammering them into myself until they became natural extentions of my hands when playing. But still, games seemed to be this unpredicable bundle of chaos that could never be understood. I continued to play hour upon hour and watch nearly every GSL match season after season.

After all this time spent on Starcraft I still have a long way to go on mastering the game, however I am beginning to piece together things and understand now what used to appear to be random. I realise now that gamesense and understanding the metagame can only come through exposure to the game as seen through a broad lens.

When observing a pattern that appears consistent at first, but later on you encounter anomalies the pattern you are seeking may be on a broader scope than you are currently looking at. Starcraft with all the variables available in each game is completely predicable given enough exposure and when you apply a broad enough scope to the information you have at hand.

I don't know if anyone is still reading, but this is something that ran through my head on the bus the other day and I felt like writing a blog. I would love to hear some higher league player's opinions on this though.