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UC Berkeley Offering Starcraft Course
The Tumeroks blog reports that the University of California, Berkeley is now offering a class on Blizzard's Starcraft real-time strategy game. "This course will go in-depth in the theory of how war is conducted within the confines of the game Starcraft. There will be lecture on various aspects of the game, from the viewpoint of pure theory to the more computational aspects of how exactly battles are conducted. Calculus and Differential Equations are highly recommended for full understanding of the course. Furthermore, the class will take the theoretical into the practical world by analyzing games and replays to reinforce decision-making skills and advanced Starcraft theory."
Who ever would have thought that the words "Zerg Rush" would have a legitimate chance of showing up on a final?
Do you think the students will rush this course ?
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They decided to open a Porn Appreciation Course, citied in TFA http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_3158640.html?menu=news.quirkies
The greatest good of man is daily to converse about virtue - Socrates
It's a "DeCal" class run by students. Although a decal class requires a sponsorship from a professor, it is neither taught nor closely supervised by a professor.
In starcraft, you often have to make complex decisions: getting cheaper units quickly, or more expensive units later, or some combination of the two.
By breaking down and analysing the simultaneous equations involved in these decisions, voila, they make math "cool" and students actually want to go to class. Win-win.
If conducted at the same level of depth as TFA, a course on spreading butter on bread could well be a quite tricky one. Doing an analysis of how an irregular mixed water/lipid substance(whose properties change rapidly with temperature) behaves when applied to an irregular heated surface could be pretty hairy.
starcraft has been patched and refined so many times since 1998 that it is a near perfect example of balanced strategy which requires long term planning as well as short term planning, instant decisions and twitch.
there is no 'annihilation' mode in starcraft. you have to carefully craft your strategy.
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Poor choice?
Starcraft is over 10 years old and is still one of the most popular online games in the world. Starcraft is still the most popular game at the world cyber games (professional online gamer Olympics). The game has set 4 Guinness records, including "Best Selling PC Strategy Game". Korea has three tv channels that broadcast nothing but Starcraft games 24/7.
All RTS games have balance issues when they start, and over time they are resolved. If you check out the top players in the world, you will notice that the spread for what race they use is pretty even. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StarCraft_professional_competition
Say what you will, but in my opinion, teaching a class like this with any game other than Starcraft would be insanity.
I don't see how it's any different from say studying the theory of chess
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Protoss, please.
And the guys who steal other guys are Dark Archons.
In tetris, you often have to make complex decisions: getting single lines quickly or more lines later on.
Should you create a 'bad' line (piece does not fit)(to fill in later) or make future shapes less likey to fit.
ERR 411[Max number of witty sigs reached]
Not to mention having to do that research paper on dropping toast.....does it always land butter side down? What if both sides are buttered? What if neither side is buttered? Can you create some weird perpetual motion machine by buttering half of each side?
The Knight and Rook pieces don't have frikkin' laser beams.
Pew pew!
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
Can you create some weird perpetual motion machine by buttering half of each side?
To achieve that, you need to attach the piece of buttered toast (buttered side up) to the back of a cat: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buttered_cat_paradox
they make math "cool" and students actually want to go to class.
Keep in mind that it's at a university, not high school. The students are there because they chose to be there, and they're free to leave at any time they want to.
I'm not saying "don't make the subject matter fun": please do that. But say I were to hire you based on your understanding of game theory; would I rather have one who spent half a year on doing the math, do you think, or one who spent half a year on doing some of the math and another part just playing games?
Unless I want you as my StarCraft coach, you, as a student, will have better marketable value by doing the math.
And hey, for my Algorithmic Game Theory course, I presented a paper showing how employing a tit-for-tat strategy in bittorrent leads to a market equilibrium. So it's not like you're forced to do dull stuff.
[full disclosure about my biases: I think math is "cool" in its own right. Finite fields kick ass, Lagrange interpolation is awesome and solving linear recurrence relations using matrix exponentiation (yay, Fibonacci) is a really neat idea. Almost---but not quite entirely---unlike digital watches]
Summary: make the math as fun and cool as you want, but don't make it fun by taking out the math part of it.
If you had four buddies colluding in a 3v3 then you weren't really playing the game, you were just being jerks. If you had three in a 3v3 (all on one team) then it is a valid strategy. But it should never work against non-newbies since the other team should outnumber your SCVs by the time you reach their bases. Or at least the third target should have real defenses and a strong economy by the time you reach him and be able to counter you easily.
I agree with the parent completely. There has not been a comparable RTS since Starcraft, and there most likely never will be. There are two main aspects of a player's actions that have an effect on the outcome of a competitive game: strategy and execution. A few genres will forgo one entirely for the sake of the other. Chess (or any TBS game), for example, removes all execution for the sake of creating a pure strategy game. Fighters remove all strategy for the sake of creating a pure execution game. RTS games are one of the few genres which embrace both aspects to the fullest extent.
Or, at least, that is what they claim to do.
Every RTS game that I have seen or heard of since Starcraft was released has sought to remove execution from the equation, and those which fail at balance inadvertently remove the strategy, as well. While lowering the execution bar makes the game more widely accessible for competitive play, the amount of depth in the game is lowered with it. Squad-based RTS are the most glaring example of this. In Starcraft, you could easily write entire books on each unit in the game and the various ways to micromanage them in nearly every situation in order to utilize them to their maximum effectiveness. To this day, people are still discovering small AI quirks which you can exploit to your advantage. In a squad-based RTS, however, this kind of control is removed from the player's hands. Units can only be given approximate orders, take cover on their own, are impossible (or incredibly difficult) to use individually, etc. Another major change is that the overall pace of combat in Starcraft is incredibly fast compared to most other RTS games since. In Blizzard's own WC3, for example, the unit health has been raised so high and the unit damage lowered so much that it takes an order of magnitude longer for units to be destroyed. Contrast this with Starcraft, for example, where the lowly zergling (when upgraded) is one of the highest DPS units in the game (and the highest by far when comparing by resource cost) and 2-4 of them can flatten almost any ground unit in a matter of seconds. You might argue that Starcraft has a relatively high unit count, which is why units in other RTS seem to die so much slower, and you'd be right. This is also yet another example of removing complexity and depth for the sake of accessibility.
Now, it's hard to fault game developers for these changes, though. The fact is that these days, the "hardcore" market is significantly smaller than the more casual market to which these games are catering to. Game companies are, in the end, looking to make money. Creating a game which can be played on a deep competitive level is either an afterthought at best, or more often, simply not considered. Starcraft is likely to be the last truly competitive RTS that we will ever see.
As a side note, if you're interested in the topic, I would recommend heading to http://www.sirlin.net/ and checking out their lengthy running discussion revolving around their hopes for Starcraft 2.
In unrelated news, admission applications to UC Berkeley from Korea have doubled. Admissions workers are puzzled by the number of students named "Kekekeke".
In pong... uh.. nevermind..
The class website has already posted the first three weeks of homework assignments, and the syllabus. There are sections for notes and for classwork, but they are blank. From the syllabus, this is the projected course load:
(Tentative) Course Outline:
Week 1: Orientation / Competitive Gaming Industry Overview / * StarCraft Boom in Korea
Week 2: Units, Strength, Weakness, Attributes, Stats
Week 3: Fighting Micro and Unit Use
Week 4: Army Movement and Positioning
Week 5: Expo and Macro
Week 6: Building Placement and Base Layout
Week 7: Scouting and Counters
Week 8: Harass
Week 9: Overloading the Enemy, Multi-plays
Week 10: Economic Basis, Micro vs Macro
Week 11: Timing and Evaluation of Resources
Week 12: Deception
Week 13: Mindset and Series Play
Week 14: Tournament
About the use of the campaign editor, I think it's likely that they will make use of it briefly to outline specific situations. However, there are third party starcraft map editors that are more powerful than the built-in one, and for any custom maps, it's likely that SCMdraft will be the map editor of choice. Based off of the course syllabs, my guess is that they will focus on pro maps both new and old, and all-time favorites.
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