"The participant pool was composed entirely of 72 female students at the University of Texas at Austin, because researchers were unable to find male participants who played computer games for less than two hours a day."
The sample size seems far too small and narrow to draw any conclusions from.
Sample size has nothing (not strictly true) to do with whether a result is statistically significant. I imagine they chose this sample size because it could potentially yield a statistically significant sample.
A larger sample size means that a smaller average increase is required to show that it is a statistically significant deviation than a smaller sample.
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 significance. The ratio of sample size to population is critical to deciding whether a result is significant: http://classroom.synonym.com/select-statistically-significan...
> Though in psychology, larger samples are often needed, because there's generally smaller effects.
Yes, but many of those kinds of result are insignificant and instantly forgotten regardless of the circumstances, because psychologists generally aren't testing a falsifiable theory, only measuring an "interesting" effect, like whether leaning to the left makes the Eiffel Tower look shorter (the 2012 Ig Nobel Prize winner):
Title: "Leaning to the Left Makes the Eiffel Tower Seem Smaller --
Posture-Modulated Estimation"
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.
True, however, I also noted the sample was not just small but narrow. 72, female, university students - I would be surprised if over 6-8 weeks their cognitive capacity didn't improve in a measurable way - university can be a very demanding environment.
The study makes no mention of controlling for degree programs or a variety of other factors which would affect cognitive development, combined with the incredibly small sample size, It is my opinion that any conclusions from this research need to be taken with a pinch of salt.
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 information about a situation?
Building a company is incredibly similar to a 1:1 in starcraft. You start blank slate, you make lots of decisions based on the information you have. You invest into experiments and reconnaissance and you eventually try to build up a small advantage that you leverage into a win. Early game, mid game, and end game are totally different phases that all map well to the lifecycle of a startup.
The best analogy I've heard is that a good game of Starcraft is very similar to fencing; you have to predict what your opponent will do, and react accordingly, with speed and agility. Another good comparison is chess; see where the pieces are going and be sure to be ready when the battle comes.
One thing those analogies miss is that starcraft is an imperfect knowledge game. You don't know everything about your opponent as you would in chess and fencing. It is similar to poker in that regard.
This is probably my favorite part of the game -- watching pro level players react perfectly to even the slightest tell.
That's not true. Starcraft is a game of perfect knowledge. For instance, good scouting and/or good observer placement can reveal what units are built, what is being produced, and what technology has been researched. There is nothing that a player can hide from well-executed scouting. Unlike poker, where you can never see the opponents hand, in Starcraft you can see everything your opponent is doing if you scout well.
There's no such thing as perfect scouting: at all levels of the game there are points where you have no idea what's coming except by reading your opponent and the metagame. For example, expecting a 6 pool or early all-in after your opponent has just taken a game in a 5 game series. Or, figuring out it's a banshee rush based on nothing but a blocked ramp.
So no, Starcraft is not perfect knowledge; much like poker you do a lot of reasoning and what amount to Expected Value (EV) calculations to figure out what your opponent is most likely to do. To gain information about what your opponent is doing in the game requires expending in-game resources, which is pretty much the exact opposite of perfect knowledge.
I think you misunderstand what is meant by a perfect knowledge game. Take a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_information . Basically, it would be perfect knowledge if there was no fog of war, if you could see what was in your opponents medivacs, what their buildings were producing, what tech they were researching...basically, if both you and your opponent had ready access to all the same knowledge.
Starcraft does not have this, even with impossibly perfect scouting, so it is not a perfect knowledge game.
I'd say levelling (getting inside a players head, understanding how they'll react to a situation and staying one step ahead) is important for higher level play in both games.
Starcraft is arguably a more difficult game due to the real-time element and the fact that the pieces aren't constrained by squares on a board (meaning there is more positional variation). As Bobby Fischer complained, chess between accomplished players can seem stale when the first twenty moves are often played from memory, following opening theory and leaving no place for experimentation.
Starcraft has codified openings too. Even casual players use them, and on high level these are almost mandatory (except for a few players that develop their own buildorders). First 3 or so minutes of proffesional games are usually played "by book" with very small variations, and you can recognize from minor details how the game will look until someone make a mistake.
The difference is - in starcraft the metagame isn't stable - in a year buildorders that were very strong become almost useless (because of balance patches, better strategies discovered, and most often because the popularity of buildorders make them weaker - more people blind-counter them).
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.
If you really believe that, I'd suggest you check out the WCS Season 2 Grand Finals from last night. Really, all of the WCS event. Proxies do quite well against standard build orders--that's one of the things that makes pro play so much fun to watch.
I played proxy oracle vs terran in silver and gold and had 80% win rate with them. I stopped doing it cause it's not fun the 30th time, but it works very reliably.
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.
I dunno, I follow a build order to the point that I can actually read a news article or two until about the 4 minute mark, and I've successfully stopped proxies more often than not.
Consider the opportunity costs involved. The huge amount of time and energy usually 'spent' on games like this could have been used for something else, possibly boosting mental flexibility and other things equally or more than Starcraft.
I would expect the purported positive effects of gaming should be way more pronounced, given the many hours many people play each day. It seems that someone who spends the same time honing a real skill (e.g. programming) would come out way ahead!
Tangentially, speaking of the "costs" of gaming:
A game like Starcraft combines
- a competitive 1 vs 1 mode, forcing a maximum effort each game
- is using a wide range of motoric and cognitive skills, requiring not only quick reactions and multitasking, but also several levels of higher level thinking (analyzing the ongoing game, analyzing build orders and metagame between matches, reading up on things on forums).
To me this seems to lead to a complete exhaustion of the player, instead of giving a challange combined with relaxation and distraction.
I would rather recommend casual games ("let take my mind off work for a few minutes"), 3D shooters (positive stress, excitement, but resting cognitive brain functions) or "thinking games", be it chess, or a civilization style building game (giving a mental challenge that one might have missed in today's work). And avoid a super competitive environment that gives you a negative feedback if you're giving 100% all the time.
Or you know, the programmer ends up working for a large corporation and makes $100,000 a year being a code monkey and the gamer wins millions after he switches to playing professional poker.
If all you have in mind is personal development, than that might be true but most gamers just want to have fun playing. If it has any positive side-effects thats a nice bonus, so atleast you dont waste away all your time just for fun.
Just for personal developments sake, your right, gaming is probably not the perfect activity, but its also not the worst.
In the study the casual game alternative (Sims) didn't provide the same effects. I play team games often because it as easily accessible way for me to have fun competing, just like any other sport in fact. It's a flow experience and has the nice side benefit of completely putting my mind off of other things. I can't get these things from other fun but casual games, that provide very few benefits (not even taking into account the possible boost in cognitive fitness).
I think playing starcraft as part of an active, diverse mental life enriches is particularly complimentary as it a sport-like game that is challenging in many aspects (you need to multitask, think strategically, react quickly and control with great dexterity) and team games also open the social aspects. If it is not done in moderation then yes, you have to wonder if your best mental efforts during the day would better be directed at something more productive. Not for the sake of productivity, or for some moral reasons. Only because it might start to hurt financially/socially/healthwise etc. In the end, there are no skills particularly relevant in the grand scheme of things, we live, we have experiences, we die, universe goes on.
As kayoone already said, people usually play games for fun. Knowing or realizing games have some benefit is a bonus.
As the effort/exaustion part, people actually like that. In fact, the tiredness is mainly something people tolerate as a "cost" for all the "fun".
When I play sports with friends I'm not doing it to be fit, I'm doing it for the social intercation, the friendly competition. I'll be tired and with some bruises, and will struggle to get off bed the next morning, but I feel it was worth it.
Another example, video game related. I like Dark Souls. But I kind of suck at it. During a more frustrating sessions, after some groans and curses my girlfriend naively asked me: "If the game makes you so angry and frustrated, why do you keep playing it? Why don't you play another game?". It made me think. I guess I like being challenged. And the harder and the more times I fall, the better is the feeling when I finally win. The more I shout and swear at the game, the bigger is the smile after beating a challenge (or the sigh of relief).
> It made me think. I guess I like being challenged.
I think this is a somewhat overlooked aspect of gaming and its relation to one's personality in general. I've found, especially as I've aged, that I much prefer competitive, difficult games. Especially with starcraft, the combination of the skill and focus required seems to relax me in a way - even when it frustrates me, I'm still completely drawn away from every other thing I was focused on / worried about previously. I've now found that if a game isn't genuinely challenging, for the most part I don't enjoy it (and to the point, play very few games at all anymore).
Conversely, I have a friend that only enjoys casual games - I think he'd happily complete every game available on God mode, if it were an option.
Excellent post. I was about to mention the same things but you beat me to it.
However I think it's worth mentioning that games such as Starcraft offer the unique opportunity to taste glory (at least in Korea) at no personal risk. In the same way that Rome's gladiators had their whole lives defined and determined by the games, perhaps Starcraft players live and breathe the game and consider it their ultimate purpose? With such a mindset, analyzing costs and missed opportunities becomes irrelevant: you don't need to learn skills because you are already doing what you love.
as a hardcore gamer myself I have to disagree with you. I must play competitive style games like 6 hours a day for more than 10 years now, even though it's a "waste" I'm pretty sure that gaming helped me, and friends, for a long-term: We analyze stuff really quick and have a fast logical response also. In my case (I belive I'm the most hardcore of them all, playing stuff since I was 6), I'm the fastest learner of them all and I link it directly to my gaming life.
I know that it may sound I'm just justfying my addiction but I really like to learn new stuff and it helps a lot. I quit gaming earlier to read some book (currently reading thinking fast and slow) and in the early morning I keep reading interesting sites like HN articles :)
I think one of the things that makes SC2 special is not simply the gameplay, but the stress that it puts you under at the same time. Not only do you have to make the correct decision, you have to make the correct decision NOW and if you don't, you will suffer consequences. This combined with the need for precise control forces you to either develop or suffer repeated failure. As it's also - in it's highest difficulty - a competitive game, there's also social pressure to not fail. Look only to these comments to see that; one commenter states his rank, others try to discredit his position. This pecking order is something important to them.
A game like the Sims as a control, is very different. You tell a story, you might have game elements, but there's much less stress, you have much fewer decisions you need to make in a short period, and if you make an error it changes the story rather than typical cause disastrous failure. You can not develop and still enjoy yourself. The fun is in the narrative, not "win" or "lose". There is no competition.
Nothing new really. There have been alot of studies that show that games train reflexes and other mental abilities [1]
If engaging in a very strategic game for a couple of hours each week wouldnt lead to any positive mental improvements, i would be suprised. Human ability is based upon experience, training and talent in almost any field.
What is a far from obvious, to me, is that this specific training in a specific context improves response outside of this context and for other tasks.
Really how knowing that you have to build immortals when you see roaches - or vikings when you see colossi, could possibly useful in everyday life?
Unit counters are just heuristic, and not very good one (you can easily lose game building just perfect counters to enemy army composition).
I think the part that helps in other contexts is keeping complex structure and rules to modify it in memory, trying to predict how it will change with time and to direct that change to your benefit. Just like chess or math, but more fuzzy and in real-time.
It's not the information that useful but how you use them. I have no study to back me up but imo if you keep playing strategy games that tell you which thing is best than another and how one thing can be beaten, it can apply to anything in life when it comes to decisions, that's the lesson learned.
I think you've got the right idea. The 'facts' of what-counters-what don't matter too much; it's the feedback mechanism that matters. When you see Player 2 do X, you use that info to play the best Y. Good scouting decreases this feedback timing, and the player that iterates better will, given enough time, come out on top.
In SC2, there's a spectrum of usefulness to information. Finding a proxy pylon is hard, but screams intention. Scouting early double gas is easy, perhaps, but is more clouded. In chess, all the positions of the pieces are obvious (no concept of scouting), but all the information is clouded beneath layers of moves-after-moves. A very powerful attack can be hidden in plain sight.
In this more general context of iterative gathering & analyzing of information in pursuit of a victory condition, I can see how it applies. The fact that the general mechanism (however it works, exactly) can be exercised through a specific game is still intriguing.
I think it's not those specific pieces of information that are useful, but the mental training to develop those associations and to access and put into practice that sort of tactical information on demand. It's like how lifting weights makes you better at lifting other things too.
The conclusion would not surprise me. Competitive games with a high "skill cap" require as much mental activity as anything else. The cause and effect may not be clear, but gaming can, at the very least, increase confidence in one's decision-making capabilities, which will improve performance on other mental tasks.
I think I'm going to try and play this game now, I've been playing call of duty for the past 4 years I'm addicted to Black ops and I feel like this game also increases decision making and better understanding of strategy.
I feel Dota 2 and probably other MOBA games have a similar effect too. The game is incredibly fast paced. It's like the hunting party edition of RTS games.
I've also noticed from personal experience that playing video games for long lengths of time reduces your ability to concentrate on real world tasks or simple things such as reading.
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 experience but I'm too burnt out to keep going in SC2. It got so hard you had to treat it like a job.
The thing about SCII competitive is, once you seriously get competitive, every single game you play is such an absolute mental drain. I used to have to do pushups / run a few KM before a few games. I had to mentally prepare myself for every single game.
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.
SC2 does not require you to have 300 APM. Maximizing APM is to SC2/BW as pre-optimizations are to programming in my opinion.
I do agree with the rest of your points though. I never got much into SC2 (became #1 in my Diamond league within the first month of the game being out) as it lacks several playability characteristics that the first SC had. I played BW for about 8 years and went to several tournaments and was B or better in a few early WGTour seasons.
I have kept in touch with some of the other top players from my time and it is interesting to see a lot of us have moved onto things where skills we gained from playing BW definitely translate. Finance, poker and programming seem to be a common theme among most of us.
All the top guys in SC I'd heard of had APM in the high 200s at least.
Maximizing APM is more like agility drills in football: a basic foundational skill whose lack will prevent you from executing even if you have a great meta game.
Yes, unless you specialize in cheesy builds, you have to have a great APM. I think there used to be at least 2 GMs in WoL who were just cannon rushing or 6pooling every game with 100 or so APM.
To cpeterso: (HN has a reply depth limit)
A cheesy build has a couple definitions depending on who you are, but it generally refers to an "all or nothing" style build that usually depends on a gimmick that goes undetected.
For example, one race of Starcraft has early access to a building that can fire upon enemies. If they can build these building strategically near an enemy's base without the enemy noticing, they can effectively box an enemy in, preventing them from expanding or attack until they commit a large enough force to destroy those buildings.
The same race in Starcraft can build permanently cloaked units that can only be detected with an "observer" class unit/building. If you can obtain the requirements for building said cloaked units without your opponent noticing and then build a few, you can send in these invisible units to damage your opponent until they have the proper response.
Basically, it's a strategy that can be overwhelming if it works, but it has a few tells and being discovered committing one of these strategies early enough is basically a loss.
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.
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.
A lot of that 300 APM is from the early stages of the game where people are spamming actions like crazy. As the game goes on the average tends to come down. I do envy the players that are able to maintain 220+ in big battles though, but I only envy them if they're microing well and queueing units at the same time.
Actually no, the beginning APM isn't long enough to have a lasting impact on the next 30 minutes of the game. I have around 250 constant, no spam. Once you master hotkeys and mechanics it's second nature.
It's like how when we see a piano player playing at like 500 APM. She can just hit the chords and it will still sound beautiful. That's not the point though. While you can still execute strategy at a lower APM, that extra APM helps to execute it on a new level.
> 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.
Wow. I got completely addicted to SC2, and I never even approached competitive levels before I realized that it was JUST TOO MUCH for a hobby. It ceased being relaxing or even fun, and turned into all out, balls to the walls competition. The day I found myself practicing keyboard commands to get my APM up is the day I decided that I needed to do something that was more physical fitness oriented if I was going to risk injury (RSM is a big deal in SC2).
I think you hit the nail on the head though: SC2 is of course a strategy game, but the real-time aspect of it makes the speed with which a player can chain together commands and movements much more important than the overall strategy. A well executed yet poorly chosen strategy will often defeat a poorly executed yet well chosen strategy.
>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 raising armies. It isn't entirely inaccurate, but it's definitely an oversimplification.
There is actually quite a bit of strategic depth to games like Counterstrike, and being able to shoot accurately is less important than knowing what you are supposed to do in any specific situation.
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.
sort of tangential point here, but this usage of 'require' is exactly why I dropped starcraft 2 and possibly will never come back. When a game stops being a game and starts being a... work, it loses all the fun.
Back in the days of WoL I toyed with the idea of playing with less APM and winning with more strategy, like pincer-attacks or enclosure; it worked up till Diamonds but when I found myself training for some micro, I knew it was time to give it up.
I'm still looking forward for the LoV, but probably will only play the single campaign and quit.
EDIT: I still fancy a competitive games against my friends, but that's a completely different story.
> When a game stops being a game and starts being a... work, it loses all the fun.
Unless your only aspiration was to play professionally, this isn't a reason to stop you, and even the professionals don't need 300 apm (and many don't have it). I was pretty comfortable playing Terran in Diamond league in North America (I stopped playing about 6 months ago) with 90-100 apm, and I never specifically worked on increasing my apm.
You don't need to be a top player to enjoy the game and take full advantage of it in terms of exercise. I switched to play on a MBP laptop (no Fs, no camera hotkeys, general crippled feel). In a way this was my excuse to myself for losing at high levels. And it was fine. You can make peace with it in a few days and after that it was pure joy.
I often think about SC problems and apply a lot of these thoughts in real world work problems. For example imagine you have all the ladder data from the servers like all build orders or replays of the games ever. How would you estimate if the game is balanced between the races? Thinking about problems like this gave me enough experience to tackle some jobs that used to be way outside my field.
I play probably 4 or 5 ladder games a week - I slowly have improved (although moving last month made my ability drop noticeably), and I'm investing about as much time per week as watching a movie each week.
Then again, I'm in Gold and happy to stay there. The ladder system seems to do a good job of putting me up against reasonable opponents.
Around 50% of the games I play, are micro practice. There are a lot of tiny mechanics, that when worked into real games and executed flawlessly, put you ahead.
For example, spent a few weeks trying to defeat the 30 level terran baneling micro map. I got to a point where I was able to get to the near end every single time I played. Then I tried working it into real games. It took a bit of practice but now I have near perfect marine splitting micro which puts me ahead of a lot of players.
Then dropship/heal micro. Worker fighting micro and tricks.
SC2 is so much more than just strategy, so many tiny little unit tricks to do. If you nail the mechanics and you're also decent in strategy you will make it so far.
>when I found myself training for some micro, I knew it was time to give it up.
What why? It's just another facet of the game. 50% mechanics 50% strategy.
At the upper echelons of SC2 it's less about builds and micro, but more of knowing who you are playing. I play the same people over and over again for the past 4 years. I know what works with some players, I know what doesn't with others. Strategy migrates into pure mind game play.
The sample size seems far too small and narrow to draw any conclusions from.