EPTDisclaimer: Starcraft is fun. We play for fun. This writing will not apply to everyone, is not the only way
to play the game, and is aimed at people who probably do not exist: the ones who want to be the best and are
willing to do what it takes. Beyond that, it is just a musing on how to apply deliberate practice to fields
without established pedagogical principles. Thank you for your time.
- What is Deliberate Practice
1. Deliberate practice is focused.
This one seems obvious. Deliberate practice requires 100% of your attention. Thinking about being
hungry, being bored, what you saw on Game of Thrones last night, or why your girlfriend/boyfriend is
being unreasonable is thinking about something other than the perfection of what you are working on.
A free throw shooter at the line sees the rim, feels the ball, releases. As soon as his hands are off
the ball he is following its trajectory, remembering how it felt coming out of his hands, keeping in
his mind the mental model of the geometry of the shot. If it veers off to one side, he either knows
immediately why or tries to update his mental model to understand why. Did his left hand move back during the
shot? Did his right hand give a little more spin than usual? Did his body lean forward or back? Did his feet
shift underneath him? There is no room in this process for other thoughts. There's no room in the mind for
both the mental model of what you are trying to accomplish and the wandering of an unfocused mind.
Improving your ability to focus is the subject of a great deal of study. I stand by mindfulness meditation as
one path towards this goal. The ability to enter this magical 'flow state' where everything else drops away
and it is you and your target left in the world is the pot of gold that everybody is chasing. You have
probably felt it before. Maybe you were writing a paper for college and time seemed to stand still while you
cranked out page after page. Maybe you were in a game and suddenly your APM increased by 30 or 40 and you
were nailing your macro cycles. Mindfulness meditation can help you achieve that state involuntarily, which
is a step towards being able to achieve it voluntarily. It is outside of the scope of this article, but there
are plenty of resources out there and I highly recommend exploring it.
Unfocused practice is not only less effective, it is often destructive. When I was studying music performance,
I would practice three to four hours a day. Locked myself in a practice room that was all of 40 square feet.
And for the majority of my time in that room, my practice was unfocused. I would move past notes that were
off by just enough to be noticeable to someone who was really listening. I would be off of my intended tempo
by a few clicks of the metronome and not notice, because my mind was elsewhere. This is the main reason I was
not able to break into the top echelon of professional musicians and do it for a living; at the time, my
ability to focus just was not there. And when I practiced this way, and my pitch was off, my muscle memory
and my neural pathways would still adapt to those wrong things. Those wrong notes became bad habits, and
even if I knew the right way to perform it, my conscious mind was at conflict with my unconscious mind, which
led to anxiety and adrenaline during my performance destroying my ability to be both accurate and expressive.
Practicing without focus is the fastest way to develop bad habits, bad ideas, and put your future practice in
jeopardy. Therefore I recommend not even playing casual games unless you are able to be at least mostly
focused on what you are doing.
2. Pushes personal boundaries. Motivation and exertion.
Deliberate practice must push your current limits.
When a professional pianist sits down to practice, he chooses etudes and studies that are just beyond their
reach. They may warm up with scales they have had memorized since childhood, but when the time comes to put
hammer to anvil, they work on things they could not achieve yesterday. This may seem obvious, but putting
this in practice is very difficult. Not only is it more comfortable to repeat the work you did yesterday, it
is also more satisfying. This is a perfect storm of human psychology, a trap that most amateurs fall into. It
feels great to nail the performance, no matter what the field. It feels excellent to deploy the code you
wrote. It feels satisfying to putt the greens you have worked on for weeks. And that positive feeling and
comfortable execution creates a cycle wherein the performer stagnates.
This concept is easy to understand in the context of physical fitness. Compare two people: Person A bench
presses 100 pounds, three times a week, for 20 weeks. Person B bench presses 60 pounds, three times a week,
adding 5 pounds every week, for 20 weeks. It should be obvious, logically and mathematically, who comes out
stronger at the end of the twenty week period.
3. Repeatable, drillable deliberate practice emphasizes repetition.
Repetition builds muscle memory and reinforces neural pathways, the definition of learning. How many layups
did Lebron do as a child? How many free throws did Kobe shoot in a practice session? How many swings did Joe
DiMaggio take every day? Repetition is the fundamental idea of deliberate practice (and, as we will discuss
later, one of the great difficulties in learning Brood War).
A cellist working on a concerto cannot effectively improve by playing the whole piece over and over. That
would not be efficient or remotely sustainable. Instead, they break it down into the smallest possible
repeatable piece that needs improvement. I cannot begin to tell you how many days I could spend an hour or
more on a two note sequence, a single shift, or a bow technique. Trying to improve those things in the course
of a full performance is impossible, obviously. But when I was able to repeat the single sequence over and
over, I would improve quickly. This kind of discipline is so difficult for the same reason that pushing
personal boundaries is so difficult. The performance is more enjoyable than the drill. Nobody, or at least
barely anybody, truly enjoys practice. Practice is repetitive and hard, on the body and the mind. It takes a
force of will to remain on the same repetition, the same drill, the same concept, for hours and hours.
4. Based on what you currently know.
If you put a golf club in the hands of the beginner and tell them to swing for the fences, they will probably
hit the ball itself one in ten swings. This exemplifies why deliberate practice has to begin from a place of
knowledge. Similiar to point number two about pushing boundaries, you need to reach a little further than you
are currently capable, not body lengths beyond your grasp. A beginning golf player should not even fully swing
the golf club. Any good coach would tell them to take the driver, pull it back two feet, and hit the ball slowly
and right in the center of the club. A hundred times. A thousand times, and then pull it back another six inches.
(Remember what we discussed about repetition?) Part of this process is learning how the club feels in the hands,
how the shaft vibrates when it strikes the ball, what sound it makes when it hits well as opposed to hitting poorly.
All of these things improve the mental model of the performer.
Developing the mental model is one of the main goals of deliberate practice. That is why repetition and this
idea of "baby steps" are so important. One does not pick up a tenth grade physics textbook and then go to
work on a nuclear reactor. You have to expand your knowledge over time. The same goes for any type of
performance. Those that can hold a more complex and thorough mental model of their respective discipline are
the ones who excel, and you cannot just leap over the Grand Canyon to get there.
5. Informative feedback on your performance.
Feedback is the last fundamental, inalienable idea of deliberate practice. This does not only mean feedback
from teachers or peers, but also from the act of performance or practice itself. Here are a few examples of
feedback in a variety of fields.
1. A coach watching your golf swing and telling you how to adjust your stance and posture.
2. The sound the golf club makes when it strikes the ball.
3. The distance and accuracy of the shot itself.
4. Your body's reaction to the swing; pain, discomfort, comfort or ease.
5. A review of your last 18 hole performance by yourself or a teacher.
All these things add up to inform your practice, to identify your personal boundaries so that your next
practice session can push back on them. In some fields, coaching is readily available. Chess, athletics, even
memory training or personal psychology. But in many minor disciplines, and especially Brood War, there is no
pedagogical theory in the foreigner scene. I believe that is one of, if not the most important, differences
between the foreigner scene and the Korean scene. Korean culture emphasizes mentorship, both from teachers
and peers. Older students mentor and teach younger students in the classroom setting, in the athletic fields.
This mindshare is not only useful for the student, but as anyone who has taught knows, teaching can be the
most revealing light on your own weaknesses, and one of the fastest ways to learn.
The rest of this article will explore how to apply these principles to create a pedagogical idea for Brood
War.
- How can these apply to brood war?
1. Focus: Do not mass game. If improvement is your goal, do not play at all unless you are ready and able to be 100%.
Start with focused warmup, such as a UMS micro map, or the hotkey trainer map. Something that
activates the body and brain right off the bat.
2. Push personal boundaries: Set benchmarks and exceed them. Be critical but not self-flagellating. Cut with a laser, not an axe.
If you are doing single player macro practice (yes, it is very effective) time how long it takes you to
to max out. Set goals such as tech you need to have and upgrades at certain times. Focus on execution.
3. Based on What you Know: Those benchmarks need to be relative to your current capabilities. Trying to run a marathon when you can't
run a mile is not going to work. If your first attempt at a macro practice takes 14 minutes to max out,
aim for 13:45 next time.
4. Repeatable, Drillable: Use techniques and practice methods that are easy to repeat. Full games are the performance, not the practice.
UMS maps, single player practice, or save states with a friend are excellent methods of doing
repeatable pieces of practice.
5. Get Feedback: Replays are a critical form of feedback. Learn to love them. Learn to really work them.
Take lots of notes, watch replays with other people, share your analysis and have discussions about them.
Work with a coach or just a friend who is stronger than you.
- What are brood war's skill sets?
If any of these are not mostly self explanatory, please refer to Ver's Guide on How To Improve.
1. Macro
2. Micro
3. Builds
4. Strategic Thinking
5. Multitask
6. The Mental Game (Focus, calmness, clarity, physical relaxation, and the avoidance of tilt.)
- The art of pedagogy.
Let's pretend we are a coach. We're about B level on iCCup and we're going to teach someone who is D level,
understands what all the units do and some basics about build orders and general strategy. Our pupil's name
is Joe, and we're going to shape him up to get to C- iCCup soon. Joe is a Terran (because that is what I play
and it's most familiar to me.) Let's walk through the steps.
1. Identify weaknesses
Joe sends you a handful of his losses, and there are a couple of different things you notice right
away. One, his macro needs work. The money climbs up fairly early in the game and doesn't fall until his
bases start mining out. But telling Joe "You need to work on your macro" is going to be ineffective here. He
knows he has too much money, what he is missing is the why and how.
So you watch his replays again and come to the conclusion that he doesn't add more production
facilities at the right time. His second factory is late after siege expand, and so he delays his quick third
base to the 8 minute mark. Then his next 6 factories, which should come in waves, are all a few minutes late
as well. These issues compound, but they all stem from the fact that the second factory is late and he didn't
have enough troops to feel comfortable taking a third.
2. Come up with an appropriate exercise or practice method
In my opinion (and this is subjective, and why pedagogy is not a simple field) Joe should practice
his siege expand build in single player several times, with an emphasis on making sure that second factory
comes down right when he has the resources for it. This is simple, repeatable, pushes the boundaries of what
he currently does just a small amount. He gets immediate feedback based on the clock and if he needs to he
can watch the replay to see if it came down at the right time. This can easily be done 3-4 times in an hour.
If he does this for a few days, he'll never miss that factory timing again.
3. Witness and evaluate performance effectiveness
Did Joe's macro problem go away after this? Probably not, but watching his next few replays you can
see his money doesn't start climbing for another minute or two into each game. We've made real progress on
the early part of his TvP build order. You can now move on to finding the next thing Joe's missing, and he
can push that boundary even further. Utilize save states in game to break this down into smaller, more
manageable chunks.
4. Show how to self-analyze, how to identify on your own. Teach how to learn.
Walk Joe through the process of analyzing the replays the way you did to find the problem. This is
the hardest part about teaching. My cello teacher in college would always tell me, "I am not here to teach
you how to play cello. You already know this. I am here to teach you how to learn the cello." It seemed
paradoxical but at the same time made perfect sense. I have his attention for an hour a week. I spend 4 hours
a day in the practice room. His true task is to make my 4 hours of practice effective, and in order to do
that, he teaches me to self analyze, to come up with my own solutions, and how to practice effectively.
- Self-learning examples.
We don't always have a coach. Here are some ideas for deliberate practice from my own experience learning the
game.
1. Macro builds solo. Choose a composition and a generic build order and max out. Record your timings,
the presence of tech as appropriate, upgrades, and things you've done on the map. Later on you can add things
like laying down mines all over the map while you do this, executing drops on phantom enemy bases, and
improving your building positioning.
2. Build orders solo. When learning a build order, study a replay, make notes on not just what the pros
are doing but also why they are doing them. In chess this is analogous to not just memorizing the
moves of the lines you are incorporating, but also the positions they lead to, the thoughts behind them, and
the options your opponent has to combat your ideas.
3. Self and Pro Replay Analysis
Another analogous effort to chess, studying your own replays, and the replays of high level games, is
probably the most effective use of your time. Again, this cannot be an idle watching experience. We can watch
brood war for entertainment, but do it outside of your dedicated practice time. Your watching should be
focused. What information did I have? What did I do to respond to that? Why did the pro player move his army
there? What was he expecting, and how did that differ from the actual situation of the game? There's a
wealth of information hidden under the surface of these replays.
4. Saved state practice
This is one I make use of a lot. For example, if you need to practice your siege expand against
forward gate zealot pressure, make a save state right before the first zealot arrives (assuming you executed
your build well up until that point.) Execute your strategy to beat it, then restart the game from that save
point with your partner. Now you're working on a small, repeatable section of something you need to improve
on. You can use save states for a lot of things, from small micro battles to large macro engagements. Use the
same units against each other in a big battle over and over again until you've executed to perfection.
This article is not meant as a be-all end-all of pedagogical theory. It's a starting point, because we don't
really have much to go on in the foreigner Brood War scene. If we apply the rigor of current expertise
science to our favorite hobby, perhaps we can push that barrier between the Korean scene and ours a little
further back.
- Further Reading and Credit
Ver's How To Improve Guide
The Inner Game of Tennis (It's not really about tennis.)
Peak: Secrets of the New Science of Expertise
