This is something that I've thought about for a really long time now. I'm sure that it's also a topic that has frequently come up in the discussion of Starcraft and the role it plays in the player elevating their game to the next level. However, what makes awareness interesting is the fact that it's part of our every day life and it's something that we practice without realizing it at times. Simply put, the idea behind awareness is to have a good grasp of the situation around you. In turn, you can act accordingly.
A good real world example is when you're walking as a pedestrian. You have to keep an eye out and can't just walk with your eyes closed. The same is true if you are driving or are doing any kind of activity where you need to concentrate. In a game such as BW where you are faced with many tasks that have to be accomplished in a finite period of time, awareness becomes extremely important to master in order to become a better player overall.
Infact, I would even go as far as saying that you will fail as a player if you lack good awareness. Sound harsh? Sure, but I personally believe it's a true statement.
Let's take a simple early game TvZ situation where not a lot of things are going on. You as the terran have already went for a 1 rax FE getting the cc on the low ground on a map such as Circuit Breaker (long map for any non-BW folks). You scout the zerg who spawns close position. Unfortunately, you are a noob and lose your scouting SCV after seeing that his pool is nearly completed. With the SCV gone, you have no further information to go off and are playing in the dark. You become aware of your current predicament, switching from the usual autopilot that usually grips you after you've played enough games.
You have several options and they depend on knowledge of your opponent's playstyle as well as the weakness of your build. It also depends on just how risky you want to play: 1) Send out an SCV as soon as you realize that you're going to lose it to keep scouting. 2) Get a bunker and play it safe. This is advisable if your opponent is a zergling abuser! lol. 3) Forgo the bunker and just park some marines behind an SCV on hold command.
You might be thinking cmon Bigfan, the logical thing to do would be #1. Oh, I would agree! I think #1 is a fine option as well however, there are several things to consider: 1) Can this SCV survive enough to catch any hint of what the zerg is doing? 2) Depending on your build, that SCV might be worth too much to have it scout around.
Keep in mind that the game is also continuing as we speak so you can't just ask the opponent to pause and give you a chance to consider your opponent. As the game continues and you are forced into making a decision, you have to keep maintaining awareness of your situation at home as well. You have to keep a constant eye on your resource and supply count as well as keep an eye on the map. I've lost count of how games I've lost when I first started playing 1v1 due to having zerglings slip past my bunker when my attention was diverted elsewhere. You might say this comes down to multitasking as well. Sure, these ideas intertwine anyways.
You decide to go with option 1 reasoning that it's fine overall and worth the income lost. Your SCV miraculously makes it's way to the opponent's base and you manage to make it up the ramp only to run into 4 zerglings. The SCV survives just enough for you to see drones pop out of the main hatchery. This makes you feel fairly safe and you decide to forgo the bunker instead parking a single SCV in a narrow choke while you continue marine production. Should you just relax and assume that your opponent made 2 extra lings for the sake of denying scouting?
I'd argue that this is the point where you are most vulnerable. Before you scout the drones, it was a toss up, but now you've let your guard down and guess what happens? You get zergling busted. Turns out your opponent had better map awareness than you did and spotted the incoming SCV (see video for map awareness example). Realizing that it'll make it into his base, he made some drones in the main, but kept pumping zerglings at the other 2 hatcheries. Sure, this is mind games now, but you can't deny that you could've done more to catch on? Counting drones at his expansion or keeping the worker alive or sending out another worker to keep scouting around the entrance of his base. You need information after all!
Let's kick things up a notch! Let's assume that you were correct and your opponent goofed up. He meant to make 2 lings, but made 4 otherwise he was just droning and was playing a standard game. Fast forward to a bit later after you've added gotten an acad, added some rax and have stim researched. You are getting close to have your first mnm group out. You've already gotten a comsat station and scan your opponent to reveal both a spire and a hydra den. You move out towards their base when you're ready, but you're in a bit of trouble too since you're unsure of what your opponent opted for. What do you do?
For starters, scouting is always key. If your opponent decided to go for a lurker bust, there'll be signs of it. Let's say they went mutas and you've caught on due to seeing a muta, but how can you be sure that they didn't also get a lurker or two? Hold lurkers can be a pretty big threat in BW games. Savior was lauded for his accomplishments during his bonjwa years precisely because he knew how to play the zerg race with smart positioning, threat of counter attacks, isolating armies and cutting off retreats/reinforcement etc... Some of this stuff might be more standard now, but it wasn't at the time from my limited understanding.
Maybe the opponent went for the 7 muta 2 lurker build? Typically, without being able to detect lurkers, it's not advisable to move out. You count the mutas and find out that he's made more than 7 of them so you decide that it's safe to at least leave your expansion. You move towards the direction of the third base, but as you get near the bridges, your spidey sense is tingling. Several options present themselves: 1) Do you walk across the bridge with your army? 2) Do you go up on the high ground and make your way around the bridge? 3) Should you just ditch and go home?
If you can't confirm 100% that his lurkers are not on the other side, the smart thing to do would be to turn around and go back home. However, let's not forget that you have some scans available now. If you want to save them, the alternate is to send a single marine ahead to scout. If he gets skewered to death, you know that he lost his life for a good cause. You can predict how many there are and the position of the lurkers from where the spikes originated. Just another example of being aware of the situation.
Let's take things to the extreme end! It's now late late late game TvZ. One of the most difficult tasks in the late game as terran is trying to predict where the opponent will strike, with how many units and how much units is enough to keep around for defense. Basically, a good exercise in space control. While a good defense is a great offense, you can't leave your base naked and open to a counter attack. More than that though, in the late game, you are now facing the brunt of it all:
A) Have to manage 4+ mining bases! B) Have to keep macroing, while keeping a close eye on resource and supply count! C) Have to keep tabs on their expansions/expansion paths D) Have to stay aggressive otherwise the zerg will take over the map E) Have to predict where the opponent will strike through scans and prepare appropriately F) Have to keep tabs on their unit composition and adjust as you see fit G) Have to watch the minimap closely
All of this requires some form of awareness: A) By looking at your counts, you can get a good, but imperfect idea of how well you are doing macro-wise prompting you to add more prod structures etc... B) By scanning constantly and keeping units at certain areas of the map (think bases or base entrances etc...), you can react accordingly and change your plans on the fly. This is extremely important because late game zerg has an OP unit called a defiler! If the zerg manages to land a dark swarm near your base entrance, unless you have enough melee units and ones that can do splash, it can cause crippling damage, if not end the game right then and there (you can see the videos below for details). By keeping an eye out for attacks, you can irradiate defilers well in advance and increase your chance at defending. In some cases, the zerg will just withdraw and not bother attacking. C) By studying their unit composition, you can adjust yours to maximize its effectiveness. Also, another small tip is that you can monitor their upgrades and in turn that can help remind you to upgrade your units as well if you forgot. D) By keeping an eye on the minimap, you can detect unit movement and save scans for when you really need them (your vessels were sniped and 2-3 lurkers are stopping your whole army! lol). You can also catch map pings which can help you get a ton better at macroing. Alternatively, you can also hear the unit sounds too in BW, but you need good awareness for either one since your can get really absorbed by the game.
I could write a lot more, but I feel that this is long enough already. To conclude, for a player to succeed or at least improve in Starcraft, they need to work on a lot of different things with awareness being one of the most important ones. For anyone who wants to increase their awareness, you can do several exercises in real life such as deciding to keep an eye out for a certain object (ex. blue car) daily etc...
well, your hypothesis seems kind of obvious to me, but it's an interesting subject nonetheless. to put a real world spin on it: my wife is extremely lacking in peripheral awareness when she's focused on something, so if she's in a conversation or watching a video she can be totally oblivious that someone is trying to get her attention, or if she's upset she might almost walk into traffic without looking at where she's going. the thing i always wondered was how much of awareness is a practiced skill and how much comes with genetic factors or as a side effect of things like depression and anxiety.
obviously, like your blue car example, you could raise your minimap awareness by setting mental or physical reminders that form the habit of looking at the minimap until you do it without thinking. but in these cases are you really "raising awareness" or just forming habits? is there a difference between a learned, practiced, habitual "awareness" and a "general awareness"? or is a "general awareness" just a "fast reflex"? it would seem another dimension of what you're talking about when it comes to starcraft is not only raising awareness but knowing the correct balance of multiple awarenesses. which i assume generally would just be "the smallest amount of awareness that allows you to notice something happening and react to it," but easier said than done
Awesome blog. Really shows how crazy this game is. Makes me think of a Game I saw where Larva sauron Zerged Flash on Circuit Breaker. Just and insane game of non stop Zerg aggression. Flash had banked up a good amount of minerals at one point to. I thought he had the game won.
You've come to a different conclusion than I would about the complexity of StarCraft and its implications.
It is actually because of the limitations of our ability to think and do things at the same time, our limitations to look at every part of the map and think about every detail, that experience and practice are most important. You want your decisions to be completely automatic for these things. You do not want them crossing your mind at all, so that you can focus on the higher level problems, you can put your attention fully into the execution of commands, you can think about what you want to do in a grand sense so that the smaller automatic decisions actually make sense and lead toward an objective.
Before you learn to punch, a punch is just a punch. When you begin learning to punch, it is a series of complicated movements one after another that you need to put a lot of mental energy. When you've mastered how to punch, a punch is just a punch again. I think I read that in a Bruce Lee book when I was 14 lol.
I write software for a living. When I was first learning, I would have to think about every possibility, and I would be wrong about what was most likely the problem. Now it is very automatic for me to pinpoint the most plausible source of errors. There's no conscious awareness of filtering out different possibilities, I just have the experience to know what to do.
This is why even at the highest level, players who were very strategic but not necessarily the best mechanically, could still do very well. They surprise their opponents with something outside their experience, and their opponent falls apart if they can't get the game back on the rails they're used to. At the highest level there's really not much improvisation, it's all situations they've seen, played, thought about and solved before. When people start planning out exactly what they want to do and how they want to react in x, y and z situations before the game starts, that's when people start improving leaps and bounds at SC.
Hilarious misplays like Jaedong getting all his units stuck on his ramp because a drone was in the way kind of exemplify this. Top performers count on their well practiced hands to automatically do most of the work. That kind of tunnel vision bites a player one time in a million, and the rest of the time drastically increases their performance. The less you have to think about each decision the better. Very rarely does a top player make a novel decision throughout a game. Faster reactions are rewarded more than late, but thought out reactions.
@brickrd: yep, it was pretty obvious. I mean, you need to have awareness to even play the game in the first place anyways. What I wanted to touch on in my post was that as you mentioned, there's a lot of stuff that you need to keep track of and this only intensifies at the later stages of the game. Interesting to hear about your wife's lack of peripheral awareness. That's pretty dangerous. I hope she manages to conquer it because walking into traffic is something that can be avoided. What are her thoughts on this?
I would say you are raising awareness in order to get it to a point where it becomes a habit, however, at which point is raising awareness no longer profitable or worth it? Honestly, it's a difficult question and I have no clue what the answer is. You are obviously aware enough as you live your daily life so where is the limit? I touch on this part briefly in my reply to Chef below about LDing. I would say it's a special form of awareness? There is general awareness, but you focus on what concerns you, so this goes a step further. I mean, imagine you're walking on the side of the road listening to music and something happens on the opposite side. You are focused on the music and what you can see infront of you, oblivious to whatever else is happening.
Ya, exactly! I was trying to touch on the fact that there are different types of awareness (if you can call it that) even within the same game and each one needs a dedicated portion of your limited time. The difficulty as you mentioned is trying to balance everything well enough and I would say that makes the game more brutal. It's like that macro vs micro argument that gets thrown around. Focus on macro, less on micro but sometimes, you have to give micro its dues too. Definitely an interesting subject.
@NoS-Craig: ya, this is a really hard game in a vaccum, but it's also a thrill when you're fighting someone who's equally skilled and the games are really close in general. My previous BR blogs touch on this.
@Chef: I don't personally think we disagree. My main point was to state that you need to have lots of awareness during a BW match, especially for any players that want to improve much further. IMO, what we see from the pros, especially someone like Flash is the peak that we'll ever see in BW. I have doubts about someone coming along and surpassing that level. Flash will eventually be beaten, but it'll come due to age, loss of passion etc... In order for someone to get to that point where they can challenge Flash or an expro, they will need to train their awareness to a point where it becomes second nature much like you stated. That comes through a lot of practice and experience.
But this also brings up another interesting point. Are you familiar with the idea of lucid dreaming? I certainly am because I practiced to have one almost a decade ago and succeeded in doing so. One of the things that was important for accomplishing this was the idea of raising your awareness during daily life. Raising your daily life awareness also means that your awareness will in turn be raised during the dream state increasing the chance of noticing signs of the dream state. This is the general awareness that Brickrd touched on imo.
I also agree that pausing mentally to make decisions which in turn affects your reaction rate will mean that you will most likely lose against a similarly skilled, if not superior opponent. Like mentioned above though, you will need to work and experiment enough in the game to even get to the level where you can make decisions on the fly. One thing I want to mention is that I made it sound like you need to spend minutes making a decision in my post, but I mostly wanted to point out that various options exist. In reality, it takes me like a second at best to come to a decision (that SCV example above for instance) and at times, it's subconscious when it's a simple "obvious" one.
On July 18 2018 05:13 Chef wrote: You've come to a different conclusion than I would about the complexity of StarCraft and its implications.
It is actually because of the limitations of our ability to think and do things at the same time, our limitations to look at every part of the map and think about every detail, that experience and practice are most important. You want your decisions to be completely automatic for these things. You do not want them crossing your mind at all, so that you can focus on the higher level problems, you can put your attention fully into the execution of commands, you can think about what you want to do in a grand sense so that the smaller automatic decisions actually make sense and lead toward an objective.
Before you learn to punch, a punch is just a punch. When you begin learning to punch, it is a series of complicated movements one after another that you need to put a lot of mental energy. When you've mastered how to punch, a punch is just a punch again. I think I read that in a Bruce Lee book when I was 14 lol.
I write software for a living. When I was first learning, I would have to think about every possibility, and I would be wrong about what was most likely the problem. Now it is very automatic for me to pinpoint the most plausible source of errors. There's no conscious awareness of filtering out different possibilities, I just have the experience to know what to do.
This is why even at the highest level, players who were very strategic but not necessarily the best mechanically, could still do very well. They surprise their opponents with something outside their experience, and their opponent falls apart if they can't get the game back on the rails they're used to. At the highest level there's really not much improvisation, it's all situations they've seen, played, thought about and solved before. When people start planning out exactly what they want to do and how they want to react in x, y and z situations before the game starts, that's when people start improving leaps and bounds at SC.
Hilarious misplays like Jaedong getting all his units stuck on his ramp because a drone was in the way kind of exemplify this. Top performers count on their well practiced hands to automatically do most of the work. That kind of tunnel vision bites a player one time in a million, and the rest of the time drastically increases their performance. The less you have to think about each decision the better. Very rarely does a top player make a novel decision throughout a game. Faster reactions are rewarded more than late, but thought out reactions.
Bruce Lee's theorized that we begin understanding concepts simply, then in complex forms of thought analyzing and abstracting a concept to it's further and further conclusions. And ultimately with mastery, a practitioner returns to simplicity.
One thing I want to mention is that I made it sound like you need to spend minutes making a decision in my post, but I mostly wanted to point out that various options exist.
Actually, you gave me too much credit. I was just shitty and responded before I read your whole post, and ended up thinking it would be about one thing when it was about another keke. I don't really have any excuse, my post was dumb. For some reason I was responding to a post you didn't make about super-human awareness and I just wanted to state that no matter what, we have tunnel vision and that thinking about the whole puzzle can only happen in study outside the game.
One thing I want to mention is that I made it sound like you need to spend minutes making a decision in my post, but I mostly wanted to point out that various options exist.
Actually, you gave me too much credit. I was just shitty and responded before I read your whole post, and ended up thinking it would be about one thing when it was about another keke. I don't really have any excuse, my post was dumb. For some reason I was responding to a post you didn't make about super-human awareness and I just wanted to state that no matter what, we have tunnel vision and that thinking about the whole puzzle can only happen in study outside the game.
Even then, not like your post really detracted from the discussion. Infact, I agree with what you wrote. I've gotten tunnel vision and gotten stuck in the game at times doing the exact same thing over and over, even though I could've changed composition or the direction of my game. It happens so easily and maintaining some awareness is useful to overcome it imo.
On July 18 2018 04:09 NoS-Craig wrote: Awesome blog. Really shows how crazy this game is. Makes me think of a Game I saw where Larva sauron Zerged Flash on Circuit Breaker. Just and insane game of non stop Zerg aggression. Flash had banked up a good amount of minerals at one point to. I thought he had the game won.
The dual FPVOD is an interesting format that I haven't seen before. Just when you thought watching normal FPVODs was bad enough, now we have not one but two seizure inducing videos at a time, and I have no chance in explaining to someone unfamiliar with RTSes how I'm able to enjoy myself while watching this hahaha.
"Yes, I can follow what's happening. Yes I'm crazy."
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What happened there at 8:19? The outcome was the opposite of what I had expected, which was that 2 lurkers would die and the natural would have been in danger.
I'm not personally a fan of these dual FPVs. While it's cool to see the game from both sides, it'll less enjoyable to jump from one to the other to see how each player reacts to a situation imo.
edit: ^ looks like the first couple of marines attacked the zerglings instead of lurkers and some of the rest tried to circle around to attack the lurkers due to pathing. Having lurkers near the bridges is really rough to deal with as a terran, even Flash has issues haha.
On July 19 2018 07:11 BigFan wrote: I'm not personally a fan of these dual FPVs. While it's cool to see the game from both sides, it'll less enjoyable to jump from one to the other to see how each player reacts to a situation imo.
It is invaluable to know what's going on, on both sides, while focusing 99% of your attention on one player if you so desire.
On July 19 2018 07:11 BigFan wrote: I'm not personally a fan of these dual FPVs. While it's cool to see the game from both sides, it'll less enjoyable to jump from one to the other to see how each player reacts to a situation imo.
It is invaluable to know what's going on, on both sides, while focusing 99% of your attention on one player if you so desire.
Your opinion has poor grammar, and it is wrong.
ha ha
Sure, but I'd rather just watch separate fpvs then.
On July 18 2018 05:13 Chef wrote: You've come to a different conclusion than I would about the complexity of StarCraft and its implications.
It is actually because of the limitations of our ability to think and do things at the same time, our limitations to look at every part of the map and think about every detail, that experience and practice are most important. You want your decisions to be completely automatic for these things. You do not want them crossing your mind at all, so that you can focus on the higher level problems, you can put your attention fully into the execution of commands, you can think about what you want to do in a grand sense so that the smaller automatic decisions actually make sense and lead toward an objective.
Before you learn to punch, a punch is just a punch. When you begin learning to punch, it is a series of complicated movements one after another that you need to put a lot of mental energy. When you've mastered how to punch, a punch is just a punch again. I think I read that in a Bruce Lee book when I was 14 lol.
I write software for a living. When I was first learning, I would have to think about every possibility, and I would be wrong about what was most likely the problem. Now it is very automatic for me to pinpoint the most plausible source of errors. There's no conscious awareness of filtering out different possibilities, I just have the experience to know what to do.
This is why even at the highest level, players who were very strategic but not necessarily the best mechanically, could still do very well. They surprise their opponents with something outside their experience, and their opponent falls apart if they can't get the game back on the rails they're used to. At the highest level there's really not much improvisation, it's all situations they've seen, played, thought about and solved before. When people start planning out exactly what they want to do and how they want to react in x, y and z situations before the game starts, that's when people start improving leaps and bounds at SC.
Hilarious misplays like Jaedong getting all his units stuck on his ramp because a drone was in the way kind of exemplify this. Top performers count on their well practiced hands to automatically do most of the work. That kind of tunnel vision bites a player one time in a million, and the rest of the time drastically increases their performance. The less you have to think about each decision the better. Very rarely does a top player make a novel decision throughout a game. Faster reactions are rewarded more than late, but thought out reactions.
Pretty much agree. And that is why some progamers develop tendencies that can be exploited by an opponent. When one practices hundreds/thousands of hours honing a set of skills and habits, it becomes hard to break in the midst of gameplay.
EPT
