Official State of the Game Podcast Thread - Page 713

On April 08 2011 02:39 Liquid`Tyler wrote:

Here's an analogy:
You are regularly presented with a set of 5 doors. The only way you ever get food is by opening the doors. Every time that you opened 5 doors, you got food from at least one of them. You've currently opened 2 doors, but can't figure out how to open any more. Are you going to spend your time trying to open a 3rd door, or are you gonna ponder whether opening all 5 doors guarantees food? How much time will you spend trying to open the 3rd door, and how much time will you spend checking the two opened doors again and again?

Day[9] thinks StarCraft players' only job is to open doors. There is nothing else. Perhaps on your lunch break you can engage in some idle conversation about the metaphysics of the doors and the morality of opening them. But it's just idle conversation. 99% of the time it's just this: open doors, open doors, open doors.

The real argument that would happen between Day[9] and IdrA is about whether or not all 5 doors have been opened. Day[9] thinks they're not all opened. He can see them. Maybe one is cracked, and no one is sure whether food can be smelt on the other side, but it's certainly not open and clear to everyone. This isn't faith or belief or any kind of "balance zealotry." Perhaps people have interacted with the closed doors, but they haven't picked the lock and turned the handle and swung it wide open. Faith comes in if he says "I know you guys worked your asses off to open 4 doors only to be disappointed. And you've spent months trying to open the 5th door. DO NOT DO NOT DO NOT rebel against your circumstances!!! TRUST me. Keep working on opening the last door. When you do, you will get food." Such opinions would certainly constitute faith of a sort. But like we've said at the start, every time that all the doors have been opened, food was in at least one. There's just never been a way to prove that food is guaranteed. Faith would also come in when Day[9] says "Hey, there's definitely a 6th door out there somewhere. It's nowhere in sight, but let's try all sorts of crazy things and see if we come upon it."

IdrA would say he's opened all the doors, or at least inspected the unopen ones well enough to know there's no food behind them. Or he's gonna say how it's easier for his Protoss friend to open his doors.

That's the gist of things. And we can't very well be experts on things that aren't in the open and clear. So that's all Day[9] can say is "hey try getting a ton of infestors in this specific way and see how that works" and I can say "hey, balance your resources toward gas as heavily as possible without dying and see how that works" because those kinds of things are unopened doors to us. And IdrA would have to spend many hours of practice to open them and perhaps find no food behind them, which would be doubly frustrating when that was his suspicion the whole time. But damn it, that's StarCraft. Opening doors is what we do. Being the first to find food is the greatest pleasure a player can have!