Saturday, December 18, 2010
Friday, December 17, 2010
Do Reflexes Even Matter in Gaming?
Back when I was obsessively obsessed with CS, that's Counterstrike not Computer Science or Chinese Syphollis, it was nerdcool to obsess over reaction times -- the belief was that if you could improve by even a few milliseconds, it could be gamebreaking in competitive play. Gaming "conditioning" for lack of a better word has never really gotten much traction though -- all top players across most games (of any genre) basically just stick to a "play a lot and you'll improve" mantra. Or dogma?
If you really think competitive gaming is an "eSport", why is there no equivalent of athletic conditioning? You don't "just play" football or basketball, you spend the majority of your time conditioning and working on drills.
What would the gaming equivalent really be? Reaction time and strategy study are probably the most obvious. I'm not sure APM is really a metric as it's sort of a complex measure of speed, but I think similar measures could certainly be predictive in performance.
With regards to reaction time specifically, in many games, this ends up playing out in a binary fashion -- are you fast enough to react to X? If yes with a high probability, then it is strategically sound to plan to react to action X, otherwise, you know you can't reliably counter via reacting. What's interesting to me is that no reflex tests I can find online really test for this, and the way that most nerdgamers approach reflex training is simply trying to get the best possible TOPSCORE. I'd argue that for most purposes, low variance is equally valuable to high speed -- or consider games where you're given a 1/2 second window to react an event, do you really always succeed in countering? Obviously not, you're distracted. It's my belief that top players, the people who look like they have "amazing" reaction times are not really any faster, they just have better anticipation. My ability to counter that 1/2 second move is basically flawless if I know it's coming in the next 2 seconds. (And so would anybody's)
Perhaps this nerdotry will get me back into gaming...
If you really think competitive gaming is an "eSport", why is there no equivalent of athletic conditioning? You don't "just play" football or basketball, you spend the majority of your time conditioning and working on drills.
What would the gaming equivalent really be? Reaction time and strategy study are probably the most obvious. I'm not sure APM is really a metric as it's sort of a complex measure of speed, but I think similar measures could certainly be predictive in performance.
With regards to reaction time specifically, in many games, this ends up playing out in a binary fashion -- are you fast enough to react to X? If yes with a high probability, then it is strategically sound to plan to react to action X, otherwise, you know you can't reliably counter via reacting. What's interesting to me is that no reflex tests I can find online really test for this, and the way that most nerdgamers approach reflex training is simply trying to get the best possible TOPSCORE. I'd argue that for most purposes, low variance is equally valuable to high speed -- or consider games where you're given a 1/2 second window to react an event, do you really always succeed in countering? Obviously not, you're distracted. It's my belief that top players, the people who look like they have "amazing" reaction times are not really any faster, they just have better anticipation. My ability to counter that 1/2 second move is basically flawless if I know it's coming in the next 2 seconds. (And so would anybody's)
Perhaps this nerdotry will get me back into gaming...
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