How Gamers Master Their Skills

Practice makes perfect, but what type of practice works best? One place that people are constantly putting more and more time into are online video games. The more people play, the better they get.

Source: flickr

What insights can be learned from this unlikely domain of online gaming to understand more about how people improve their skills?

Research into gaming mastery was published in the journal Topics in Cognitive Science. Data generated from thousands of games for Halo: Reach and StarCraft 2 were used to reveal how different patterns of play produce different rates of skill development.

Online gaming provides a rich dataset to measure the patterns of people over a long period of time. Gamers in the strategy game StarCraft 2 have unique and consistent behavior that contributes to repeated success that can be detected through such data.

One of the studies in the paper looked at the metric called TrueSkill in the game Halo: Reach. As someone plays matches and becomes more proficient at killing other players, their skill level changes. Analyzing this data allowed researchers to determine what kinds of playing habits influenced their ability to acquire better skills at winning.

The research confirms the importance of time in developing skills. Those who played the most matches each week (64+) had the largest increase in their skills. But playing a lot of games isn't the only factor to improve skill. Instead of looking at a larger span of time, looking at each match itself showed that those who played 4 to 8 matches per week gained more skill per match compared to those who played 8 to 16 matches per week.

Jeff Huang, lead author and computer science professor at Brown University, said:

"What this suggests is that if you want to improve the most efficiently, it's not about playing the most matches per week. You actually want to space out your activity a little bit and not play so intensively."

Playing too long and too intensely seems to have a negative impact compared to those who played less intensely but still frequently. Short breaks of 1 to 2 days and not a big deal, but long breaks have long-term effects in losing skill. After a 30 day break it takes about 10 matches to get back to the skill level they had previously achieved 30 days prior.

Moderation is good to maximize learning efficiency, as long as the moderation away from engaging in a skillset is not too long.

StarCraft is a whole other game compared to the more simple shoot-to-kill of Halo: Reach. Hundreds a game units need to be managed, along with building a base, managing economies and training soldiers with certain skill sets for combat or other strategic importance. In StarCraft speed is key, and those that use hotkeys set the gap between the skilled and the less skilled players. Less skilled players use more of a point-and-click command for individual units, but elite players use hotkeys to quickly command units in certain groups. The elite players get around 200 actions per minute (APM).

Hot keys aren't the only thing, but unique and consistent habits in using the hot key skills matter. Specific players could be identified through their behavior with a 90% accuracy just by looking at their hotkey patterns. Gaming behavior becomes almost second nature to easily be able to keep their cool and issue commands despite the increase in pressure as the game develops. Elite players use their hotkeys even at the beginning of the match when there are few units and play. They warm-up, prime and prep their minds and bodies to get into the routine that they need later in the game for peak performance.

Huang is helpful this work will shed light into how performance works in other domains. Perhaps warming up certain skill sets, like is done in StarCraft, would be helpful for people whose jobs require paying attention to many things which requires a certain multitasking ability.

For learning in general, this study shows what many people already know from their own experience: that cramming is usually less efficient than going through smaller bits of data throughout a longer time period. If you want to increase your skills in something, you generally have to practice consistently and also "stay warm" with those skills so that they don't fade away from your habitual behavior.

Consistency is key, but not so much that it's being done too much and crams our minds with too much data. We need some time to process and let it to sink in to become almost like second nature to us.

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References:

• New studies illustrate how gamers get good
• Jeff Huang et al, Master Maker: Understanding Gaming Skill Through Practice and Habit From Gameplay Behavior, Topics in Cognitive Science (2017). DOI: 10.1111/tops.12251

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2017-03-03, 12:02pm