EPTWhy do gamers practice the way they do? And why is it so different from how we practice virtually everything else?
As far as I know, the Korean method seems to mostly be massing games supported by the experience of old hands at the business. Though people here often criticize Korea for their long hours spent massing games, common practice methods here in the foreign scene don't seem all that different to me. We may mass games, but we tend to not lose as much sleep over it. Day9's advice to focus on improving one thing at a time still involves a lot of game massing. Build orders and counter build orders seem to be tested vs practice partners and still involves a lot of playing lots of games. The most radical suggestion I think I've heard involved saving games in middle so that one could immediately jump to practicing the midgame. Finally, here and there are the odd multitasking or micro maps which some people use and some people don't use.
What confuses me is that this thing with playing the entire game seems to dominate the whole scene, and as gamers we tend to practice things completely differently from what I would expect from, say, a musician.
To illustrate one aspect of this, I've never, ever, heard anyone recommend that you play at a slower game speed in order to practice multitasking correctly before you speed up. If you have difficulty with a piano part this would be standard practice, and you'd start slow and just practice going faster until you could do it full speed. But in Starcraft? No, I've never heard such a suggestion, and I'm not good enough to know whether such a thing might help.
Perhaps other differences are more explainable. When you play a piano piece it doesn't suddenly diverge into a million possible forks depending on what the person flipping the pages decides to do to you. Games are entertainment and are meant to be fun when played in their entirety, so we tend to play them in a way that's fun. Perhaps most importantly, games are not a generally respectable profession with many years of history and experience helping to work out kinks in practice methods.
This leads me to wonder: What would practicing Starcraft or Starcraft 2 look like if it did have maestros with lifetimes of experience and knowledge? Would we see more specialized training maps? Hundreds, if not thousands of saved games where you can jump to any point in your BO and your opponent's BO in order to practice?
Or have we been right all along with what we're doing now?
