The myopic gamer

Life can be reduced to a video game. Everything and anything we do can be described as some aspect of a game. Many parallels can be drawn between things you do in a game as well as things you do in life.

I will list each example with the real life activity first, followed by the gaming example.

Real Life: Earning money
We all need money. To eat, to travel, to buy frivolous things for ourselves. Unless you were born with a silver spoon or you grow a money tree, most of us would have to actually work to earn money. We slave for hours to end and when we get home everyday, deadbeat and exhausted, we ask ourselves, 'Why am I doing this? Oh right, I need the money."

In a Game: Farming Gold
We have all done it. From breeding Air Dragons to sell in Dragonvale and spamming collect on the Plant Habitats, memorizing mining routes like these to level our Mining profession in World of Warcraft to trade more lucrative ores,

Typical Mining Route in World of Warcraft

to killing more mobs in Skyrim to collect more material for sale. We often do things that are boring and monotonous and grind-like to get more gold. When you are extremely bored and tired and ask yourself "Why am I doing this? Oh right, I need more gold."

Real Life: Multi-tasking
If you have a dog, a girlfriend, a clique, and a family, that is already 4 different groups that you have to divide your attention between them. You fail to do so in any aspect and that could mean soured ties, and the effects could snowball and just come back and bite you in the butt later on. You could even lose your girlfriend.

In a Game: Multi-tasking (Macro)
In Starcraft 2, players have to multitask constantly to keep their economy going. If you are unable to multitask to keep up your larva injects, Chronoboosts and MULEs, it could snowball and come back and bite you in the butt later on when you cannot produce enough units to defend a push. You could even lose the game.

Don't lose your MULES!

Real Life: Building friendships
Psychologists list many types of relationships, and a famous related principle is the social exchange theory, in which individuals focus on the costs/benefits of a relationship to determine whether it's a worthwhile relationship.
Whether we like it or not, relationships involve investment, effort and time to maintain, and you have to put in some amount of these, otherwise you will never have good, healthy, friendly relations.

In A Game: Farming Reputation
Anyone who has played some kind of RPG that requires reputation with a faction will know what this point is about before even reading on.
In many games, you have certain ties with groups of people (factions) in the game. You will need to do quests for them, kill monsters for them, etc, to improve your honor/reputation with them. There are various thresholds such as Neutral -> Friendly -> Honored -> Exalted, etcetc, to indicate your level of relationship with the particular factoin.
Whether you like it or not, forming these reputations involve investment, effort and time to do so, and without these, you will never have a good, solid reputation with any faction.

Someone with leet In-Game reputation but probably terrifail Real Life relations.

Real Life: Work in a Team
School project groups, work project groups, teammates in a sport... I could go on and on listing the different types of teams we work in. You can't escape it, you have to learn how to work with other people and coordinate efforts to contribute to a joint result. You may have problems such as people not turning up, people being late, conflicts within your group, etc. But if you are the leader, you're going to have to mediate and iron these out, in order to have any level of success in your group's tasks.

In A Game: Work in a Team
Whether you are in a 25-man raid in World of Warcraft or playing a 5v5 DoTA game with your buddies, teamwork and coordination is usually crucial in winning/killing a boss. You can't escape it- you can be the best Rogue, the best Lina Maiden, the best Holy Paladin in your group, but if the rest of your team f**ks up, you're going to fail.
You may have problems with people being late or not turning up for raid, and maybe even conflicts over whose fault it was that you failed the last wipe. But if you are the leader, you're going to have to get everyone focused on the task at hand and stop pointing fingers, in order to have any level of success in your group's tasks.

Mid-fight in a game of Dota 2

These are just 4 of the more common examples, there are probably others more trivial cases which you can easily draw a gaming parallel as well. I think this will suffice to prove my theory though.

Life is a video game.

Teaching The GF How To Cycle

Today me and szehong went to East Coast Park to... cycle! Well not quite, because she can't cycle! So today was basically me teaching her how to cycle!

I have not taught anyone how to cycle before, so this would be good warmup/experience for me to teach my kids in the future hehe. I will just recap the experience here, so if you want to teach your friends next time you can.. learn from my mistakes!

When we first started off, with virtually no prior experience, I didn't quite know how to teach her how to cycle. I tried holding her handlebars to steady her but she said I was making her more off-balance so that didn't work.
I then tried to hold the back of her seat but somehow I wasn't doing it right and was making her off-balance or something!

Thus, we started off with me asking her to coast -  basically push herself forward and try to lift her feet off the ground. (We were at east COAST park after all.. hur hur. ok ignore this sorry)

After a while of this it seemed pretty pointless as she wasn't really making progress, so I told her to try pedalling. (The idea of coasting came from a website I was researching the night before, which said the best newbie technique was to coast down a gentle slope to develop balance)

I went back to trying to hold her seat or handlebar or even her body to steady her, but I was somehow off-balancing her according to her. Thus I just resorted to yapping words of encouragement, trying to motivate her to keep going.

This went on for quite a while, with me continually telling her she's doing a good job and that it was awesomeee. I mean, you have to motivate the student regardless because chances are he/she is going to be even more frustrated than you!

We tried a new strategy too, basically for her to complete a complete 'pedal-cycle' - basically start with a pedal higher than the other, step on that to pedal forward, then step on the other pedal.
She kept losing her balance after just the first pedal though, so this went on for quite a while, interspersed with a few occurrences of her succeeding in this pedal cycle once, even 3 times.

After some time of little progress, I decided to go back to giving her support by holding on to her seat and her shoulder. I began to get the hang of how to help and feel her balance and providing the right balance-support for her.

With this technique, she managed to pedal for a few metres before losing her balance or swerving wildly to the side and I have to basically catch her or cushion her. Times like this I'm glad I don't have a hippo of a gf =X I know i know, so mean. But realistically, if she was like, my weight, I would probably not have been able to support her.

I felt that she was making progress (despite her saying that she hopes to finish learning by 3 days, I told her she was going to learn by TODAY!) so I just held the back of her seat as in the picture above.

This was because she was having problems with starting -

The first pedal is always the wobbliest as you have to get your balance, but once you establish it you can continue pedalling!

Thus I was stabilizing her by holding the back seat when she made the first few pedals, and when I felt that she had stabilized I released and let her go as far as she could. (I didn't tell her whether I was holding anot after awhile, I just continued running next to her as if I was :) )

Of course, at first she couldn't go far after that and wobbled and had to stop/fall so I had to run alongside her to catch her when she fell.

I repeated my advice to her to:
1) Just start pedalling (as mentioned, the wobbly start is scary to a beginner, and if he/she doesn't muster up the confidence to make a few pedals to get into a moderate pace, it's going to be very hard to pedal at a super slow pace)
2) To maintain a constant speed (she kept speeding up at first... which is bad as I have to run super fast to keep up and if she lost her balance it would be harder to stop) and to just keep pedalling!

And I kept holding the backseat to stabilize her start and would release it when I felt some semblance of balance. After repeated tries of unaided 5-10 metres, she actually managed to cycle for a good unaided 20 metres before feeling the jitters and losing her balance!

After this I got her to practise starting on her own without me holding the backseat - basically urging her to not be afraid of the initial wobble in the first few pedal cycles and just use her newfound balance to readjust and stay straight.
After some time, she managed to start on her own at about a 50% success rate :) (which went up as time passed)

One thing I realized was that her 'stop' was horrible - she was basically losing her balance and she would swerve wildly and I had to catch her. This meant I had to constantly run alongside which was damn tiring for me! And also very dangerous if she swerved off the path and fell on rocks.
(I think beginners don't know how to slow down, so naturally the bike stops when you swerve sideways so that's what you do? lol)

Thus the next thing I began training her was to stop properly - I got her to cycle for about 10 metres (unaided) and then begin coasting (not pedalling but keeping feet on the pedals) to slow down, and finally put both feet on the floor for friction to grind to a stop.
The first few attempts were bad with her being very jerky/sudden with the stop or swerving again, then after awhile I gave her the ultimate test - I stood in front of her 20 metres ahead and told her to slow to a halt right before me (otherwise she would hit me)

She did it :D (stop properly, not hit me)

Once she had the basics of starting, stopping, pedaling and balance there, I felt safe enough to let her cycle on her own without running along next to her to catch her if she fell.
By then I was pretty much exhausted at having spent the past 2 hours (she learn how to ride in about 1+ hours, but I still followed her closely for awhile after that to be sure) running next to her and supporting her whole bike/weight and motivating her and stuff, so I collapsed onto a seat and let her cycle on her own for awhile till the rental timing ran out.

Below are just some videos are took, they're really short, like 20 seconds each, so just have a look!

Ah, it was an exhausting but very satisfying experience. Nothing beats the feeling of her suddenly pedalling on her own for 5-10 metres even after I had released the backseat (she probably didn't know) and realizing she CAN cycle. Aiya basically every bit of progress was very exciting, my heart literally jumped the first time she went for like 10 metres on her own!

So proud of her :) My amazing student! Learnt in only 1hour+ ! (ya ya if you learnt under that shut up i dont care she's still awesome)

And thank God for no accidents! I was quite concerned that she may fall and get a bad graze or something because the bicycle track was asphalt. The only injuries she sustained were some minor scratches from her bad 'stops' earlier on and thus her toes hitting the floor abit, the pedal hitting her legs abit, her hands gripping the handlebars too tightly, etc.

Great day today :D Love that girl!

My first Starcraft 2 LAN

Today was the first ever Singapore LAN and it was held at Mystery Box Gaming, organized by Frogmite! (and HDPhoenix)


Disclaimer: This blog post has no pictures so if just words aren't the kinda thing for you, you can stop reading. 

(If you went for the event and you're wondering who I was, I was wearing the black shirt with the big Zerg  insignia on the front)

Prelude 
I was pretty apprehensive about going for this event, as it would be the first time I'm meeting online friends/personas face to face! I even had dreams about it the night before >< Also, I didn't know how receptive the people would be, whether there would be much interaction, etc. 
And also, how the heck do you introduce yourself in these kinda things? Lolol. It feels weird to say 'hi, I am Crazerk' instead of my real name.


Three Random Thoughts From The Event 
1) People have cliques
It was odd being there as I had virtually no friends/cliques. I had one RL friend there but he was with his Eve clanmates, and then there was the 'top GM clique', basically the top players like Rev, Han, ice (can't recognize the rest) who know each other from playing together so much and from the many tournaments. There were also little congregations, like Drake and Proann from their iRL clan.

Thus I was just drifting around like a vagrant, spending the bulk of my standing-up time behind Revenant watching him play. He's always been my favourite SG player, just because he's very well-mannered, humble and he's Zerg! 
It was also a cool experience to have people standing behind ME watching me play, and you can hear them mutter-narrate stuff that's happening and you feel amazing when you do good stuff  


2) Offline Events Are Real Tough
I brought my own mouse and headphones just for the fun of it, not like I expected to beat those GMs in the tourney and hence need optimal performance or anything.

The first thing I realized was how difficult it was to get used to the new setup - the new scroll speed/sensitivity (have to basically go configure and unless you are a seasoned offline veteran who has memorized your settings, you're going to have to adapt to something slightly different) the bigger screen, the different keyboard.

THE KEYBOARD. It really makes a huge difference, maybe more so than the mouse! Why? Because mouse(s) don't really differ THAT much apart from those that have different ergonomic designs. (Ok I'm probably horribly wrong but who cares)
But the major differences between keyboards is - the Ctrl key and number keys seems to be at different places on different keyboards.
Thus I was having alot of trouble hotkeying stuff and kept messing up hotkeys because the keyboard was slightly different.

This experience made me realize that it is possible that players play like 10% worse at LAN events if they don't bring their own keyboard/mouse!
Well, of course there are those that practice on poorer platforms (e.g. ProAnn who told me he practised on laptop, so he played better there instead) so somehow perform better, but assuming someone who has a decent rig at home, spends hours practising and being so familiar with his own setup - he is likely to perform poorer in an entirely new environment.

- [Dont click this if you dont want to know a particular result from the tourney] -

3) Frogmite is a pretty big fella
Ok I couldn't think of a 3rd point so this is it. He's big! At one point he grabbed me by my shoulders and shook me for fun and I swore he could have lifted me and spun me on his finger as well.

My Games 
My first opponent was aLtHan, woopey doo. I obviously didn't expect to win and just was playing for the experience.
I still remember our conversation before the game:

crAzerk: "Hey ready for our game?"
aLtHan: 'Hang on, let me warm up '
crAzerk : "You can use our game as a warmup!"

In Game 1 I opened 15 hatch and he went 14/14, and I defended his early lings terribly and lost a few Drones. He expanded off that and after some trading of ling/banes he was magically 20 drones ahead or something like how GMs always are and then does a Roach timing. 
I defended it with spines and my own Roaches which popped, but he had a superior upgrade + economy advantage, so he just played around with me (for his warmup I guess) for awhile before killing me eventually.

In Game 2 I opened 15 hatch again and held off his early push much better. He went for 21 hatch with banes I believe, and after being a retard and running all my lings up his ramp for some unknown reason and losing them all to a baneling, he counterattacks and kills me.


In the loser's bracket, I faced Warfest, a Masters League Protoss. I tried out ling-infestor and with my amazing micro I more or less killed nothing when he pushed out finally after turtling on 3 bases with a +3 zealot heavy / archon / stalker/ sentry army. Forcefields + Zealot/archon = Zergling Bloodbath.
I silently cursed Protoss under my breath for being an A-move race as he marched on and I pitifully rallied some units to poke away at his Protoss ball and finally surrendered when I had let him kill enough buildings.
(On watching the replay my macro was terrible and inferior to his too so even if I had decent micro it wouldn't have made a difference)
(loser's brackets were Bo1)

Final Thoughts 
It was pretty fun seeing faces that I've only seen in photos, and putting a face to some names. Got to see ProAnn (who gave me some tips and played a game with me in which he crushed me with Mothership) , derpy (who more or less ignored me because he had his friends ;( ), Frogmite (who warmly shook my hand when he realized who I was when I introduced myself) 
Revenant probably looked at me several times but had no idea who I was so,  

Kudos to Frogmite for running this event!