Gaming

Huh. An interesting perspective. Quite an obvious one for a StarCraft player, where everybody talk about macro, micro and mindgames, but an interesting one nonetheless.

The issue with this system is that these categories are way too broad. Taking micro as an example, my reaction times are usually good, but I'm not that fluent with execution. And even subdividing execution itself, with things like aiming, I'm usually accurate, but not precise.

It also misses the points of some games. With rhythm games like Osu!, especially when you first encounter a map, you rely heavily on patterns you already know and "where would I place a note if I was the mapper" kind of feeling.

But yea, more than anything, it gives a bunch of food for thought.

I disagree with their definition of "meso". I think they're throwing everything probability related into that pot but really it's at the very least two distinctly different concepts. The first concept is effectively entropy of the game. It's the random chance inherent to the game, something you can't really control and you just have to work around. The best example of that are rogue-lites because in those games runs are largely defined by the random choice of tools the game gives you for that specific run. But if you want a more competitive game related example it's Magic the gathering. Competitive decks are built around reducing the randomness by stacking different but similar effects, but none of it matters if you just draw a dead hand. And for clarity sake, all games where you're dealing with fog of war or limited information about what your opponent is doing I'd put under entropy because the lack of information injects chaos into the system.

The second concept I'd call expression. Expression is what the author of the video use to put competitive chess into macro and meso. I think chess is a fully macro game and I'll get into why it's not meso. I use the word expression because games are a form of self-expression and how you express yourself translates into your gameplay including all the natural tendencies you might have as a player. When the author talks about optimizing against your opponents habits that's learning and adjusting to how your opponent expresses themselves within the game. That is not the same thing as entropy, it's not inherent to the game. If we were to tie the two concepts together entropy is the inherent randomness within the game and expression is how an individual will skew that randomness in their favor.

In the context of competitive games I'd say "meso" should be entropy and expression shouldn't even be a factor because I think your ability to express yourself through a game is on a different axis because self-expression is inherent to every game. If you have a jack of all trades competitive gamer who can play everything from Quake champions to chess to among us but they're naturally an aggressive player, do you think that player would switch up their playstyle depending on the game? I think they'd be aggressive in quake, choose sharp openings in chess and be always confrontational in Among us. It's just how that player would play games.

And another point I disagree with is that CS is low macro (at least based on the graph they showed). It's definitely lower than micro and entropy so relatively speaking he's right, but it's still high macro game. The author views only the economy aspect of CS and establishes that because rounds are short and execution is key the economy plays a role only in the context of giving you the tools to execute. But it's so much more. Almost every site execution in CS is dependent on the macro knowledge of smoke, molly and flash lineups. Those are not things you can just learn on the fly as you play. You either know them or you don't. Anyone who has played (or viewed) Mirage on a competitive level knows how important is it for T-s to nail the window smoke because if you miss it you're almost definitely losing mid control, it it's too slow you're probably going to lose mid control. That is such a vital smoke pros have spent years refining it to a point. Lineups are something almost every pro has to learn. And those are per map. In fact lineups are only a part of the map macro that every pro team has to learn. There's a reason pro teams tend to have a perma-ban map, because there's only so much you can learn and the team with the better map knowledge usually wins the map so you focus on a set of maps instead of every map. And the team with the better map knowledge winning literally happened yesterday when Fut (a bunch of very promising rookies) beat Vitality (currently solidifying themselves as the greatest CS team of all time) on Anubis (the least popular map in the pool that is a permaban for a lot of teams). Vitality floated the map and Fut took the opportunity and straight up schooled one the best teams in competitive CS. Vitality still won the maps because they have an 80+% winrate on every other map they play but even the best team in the world can be beaten on map they're not all that familiar with.