Nomenclature in RTS - by brownbear
READ IT HERE:
https://illiteracyhasdownsides.com/2016/08/21/the-professionalization-of-real-time-strategy-games/
Artosis thoughts on article (read if you like it):
Another fantastic piece of content by brownbear. Definitely read it. It will make you smarter. Follow him here on twitter: https://twitter.com/brownbear_47
I love the whole article, and it really reminds me of something that I read many many years ago, (I think in “Rich Dad, Poor Dad” by Robert Kiyosaki) about learning something new. The jist of it was to study the vocabulary first. When you know and understand the vocabulary, learning the new topic becomes a lot easier. I’ve used this tactic ever since.
For instance, when I decided to start casting Heroes of the Storm, I had never played a MOBA style game before. All together I may have half-watched a couple of DOTA games from The International, and about 2 minutes of League of Legends or so. When I turned on a stream, watched a casted game, or tried to read an article, it was as if it was in a different language. So what I did was, I wrote down every single word that I was not 100% sure of the definition of (things like CC, split push, stun, root, and soooooooo many more), and then asked for friends and progamers to define them. (Thanks Sheth! S2). This greatly sped up my learning in the game, as I could actually have conversations, and break down what professionals were saying. I’ve used this same method when studying other things like financial stuff as well. Definitely would recommend using this approach to anyone.
brownbear touches upon some good points about missing vocabulary within StarCraft. For instance, there is no good way to describe the frustration of having to deal with something like a Liberator, where the Terran player just shift clicks it in to siege, and then is done with it. Of course, the defending player must actually move the Probes/Drones/SCVs, and then bring units over to kill it. Upon reading this I tried to think of my own commentary and what I normally say about this exact situation. Some of the ways I describe it normally are terms such as “taxing his multitasking” or “trading army for economy” or maybe I even sometimes say something about the tempo or time gains of the situation. Definitely it’s mentioned as harassment and taking control of the game, forcing your opponent to react, using active units, etc. But there is no specific word. Am I just dancing around this specific move with concepts? Is that wrong or is that a good thing? Now I’m not saying that we should just go out and name this type of move. Just some stuff the article definitely made me think about.
One last thing that he kinda brought up, about the difficulty of the phrases used and who knows/understands them. I think that obviously this is an issue for new people entering the scene. I think it’s an issue everywhere, though. As an example, I recently became quite interested in Tennis. I was reading some stuff about it and had to look up things like “second serve” and a few others. I guess growing up I just wasn’t subjected to enough of the sport as a kid to have the built in knowledge of all the lingo, whereas I definitely was subjected to enough in Basketball, and would never have to look up a word or phrase. Esports is kind of similar. If you’ve played and watched some StarCraft, you are going to understand the lingo. If not, it’s going to be a lot harder. But what about the fact that we just don’t have words for everything yet? I guess as new technologies and feats of skill occur in sports, they occasionally have to add a word or phrase to the vocabulary of the game. Meanwhile over here in esports, we started from scratch much more recently. As understanding deepens, as concepts are discussed, we are slowly but surely filling in these holes with words.
A very well thought out and written article. Very much looking forward to the next one. Again, we need more really well made content like this within this beautiful genre :D