How a Computer Game Is Reinventing the Science of Expertise

An anonymous reader writes "Cognitive scientists at Simon Fraser University and UCSD are beginning to use StarCraft 2 replays to study the development of expertise and the cognitive mechanisms of multitasking. Unlike similar expertise studies in chess that consider roughly a dozen players, these studies include thousands of players of all skill levels — providing an unprecedented amount of data on how players move from 'chumps to champions.'"

Comments

As a fellow cognitive scientist...

[Anonymous Coward]

Let me be the first to explain "why Starcraft 2?"

The answer lies in the oft-cited measure of player skill at the game: actions per minute. This is an unprecedented numerical measure of expertise that lends itself well to the study of "expertise" -- a term which means something different in the study of the brain than it does to the everyday person. Expertise is nothing less than a figurative rewiring of your brain in order to better excel at a chosen repetitive task. You can check out Wikipedia if you want to read more about it.

Re:As a fellow cognitive scientist...

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, APM has a lot to do with skill. But it's important to differentiate between raw APM and effective APM.

Raw APM is literally how many clicks and keystrokes you execute per minute. Effective APM is how many of those keystrokes were meaningful (repeatedly clicking the same move command over and over has no effect on the game and is thus not meaningful). The trick here is that the game obviously measures raw APM, and it's difficult for the game to discern exactly what separates meaningful clicks from meaningless ones, although Blizzard recently implemented an algorithm to try. If someone is just spamming the keyboard and mouse, they may have a high raw APM, but their effective APM is still low.

Anyway, effective APM measures your ability to multitask and effectively control your army and base. It doesn't have anything to do with high-level strategy, except that more APM allows you to execute on strategies more effectively; indeed, there are many strategies that are more or less impossible without having a high APM. It's also not a perfect measure, since it doesn't calculate how intelligent each move was in the context of the given strategy. But, it's better than nothing, and you can't play at a pro or even semi-pro level without being able to get your APM high.

Re:"micromanagement, not strategy"

[ultranova]

How did that work out for him in Russia?

He reached Moscow. So I'd say it worked for him far better than most "conquer Russia" strategies have.