Jake

The Idle Thumbs Podcast Episode 5: His Cyborg Familiar

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Its all down to randomness and there isn't really a discernible pattern.

You're not really saying that stress has no effect on performance in a skill based game and that the outcome is entirely a 50/50 chance like a coin flip are you?

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That man's name? Marek Bronstring.
Don't you mean... Bronstring "Marek" B.M. Bronstring Marek Bronstring ?

:getmecoat

P.S. Great episode as usual!

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great podcast, i lol'd hard @ the tangent with nicholas cage/bruckheimer douche story & THATS THE SAME GUY!

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I don't know anything about Flow but what Chris Remo was talking about sounded suspiciously like baloney. Your previous wins/losses don't affect the probability that you'll win the next game! When you examine such a small subset of data its easy to jump to conclusions about performance anxiety affecting player skill, but its entirely possible to have a night where you might feel incredibly anxious yet win every game. Its all down to randomness and there isn't really a discernible pattern.

Radio Lab does a really nice job about explaining this stuff but I realize I might be gettin' mad based on some stray comment so sorry in advance if thats the case! I was too outraged about some dumb thing I perceived that may or may not be the real deal but either way doesn't mean anything in the grand scheme of things. Wizard.

How does randomness have anything to do with it? What specific elements are random? As far as I'm aware, there is no randomness in StarCraft 2, except when an opponent chooses a random race. You win or lose based on the quality of your play; that's it. And the quality of your play is affected by how confident and prepared you are. And your concentration and preparedness is affected by your stress levels. Which part of this do you disagree with?

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Thank you for doing a quick history of Idle Thumbs at the end of this podcast.

You mentioned AdventureGamer.com as an ancestor of Idle Thumbs. I had forgotten about that site---and I contributed a review to it!

It's http://adventuregamers.com/ since 2001'ish.

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Towards the end of the pod, you guys were rambling about a Space Marine throne. I, being a huge 40k nerd, immediately remembered this.

2b.jpg

It's Marneus Calgar, the head of the Ultramarines. The Ultramarines are a division of the Space Marines.

Epic lord.

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Hi Mike! That's AMAZING. Your name is one that will always vaguely ring a bell because I'd see it anytime when I'd be moving articles around in the site admin and things like that.

I will never forgive you for those shitty screenshots though.

Looking at that archive.org link I just saw an interview I did gleefully about 11 years ago (when I was 16) with someone who's now a direct colleague of mine. So weird.

Edited by Marek

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I just google searched wizaaaaaaaaaaaard and whataya know?

ultrapimp.jpg

An ultrapimp version of Jake's "Epic Lord"

So it's a gone gold epic lord ultra pimp forward ford force marine.

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Well, I guess the internet knows my real name now. I forgot that my email address says that :shifty:.

Oh well. Thanks for reading my mail, Thumbs (even if you did read it at hyper-speed and mispronounce my name). Also, for linking my remix! (at the time of this writing, that hasn't happened yet, but hopefully it will).

I'm guessing that my email was only read because the subject line was "Chris Remo arrested for excessive hyperbole, Jake Rodkin launched into sun mistakenly by anti-Big Bird insurgents."

I like that you either couldn't remember my name (or didn't even know it) when you mentioned the remix, even though you read a mail from me earlier in the show.

I'm guessing all of you didn't get enough sleep; you were all snapping at each other and acting very strangely.

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Don't you mean... Bronstring "Marek" B.M. Bronstring Marek Bronstring ?

:getmecoat

P.S. Great episode as usual!

I never understood the sensationalism around Marek, other then the name; could someone provide some history on this?

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I never understood the sensationalism around Marek, other then the name; could someone provide some history on this?

The sensationalism? He's MAREK BRONSTRING. That's all he needs!

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I loved this episode. Very good stuff. And its not just because yours is the only podcast that I listened to this week that didn't have excerpts of

in it, but that certainly helped. I listened to the whole thing on youtube, and while its good, I'm kind of tired of it now.

I love the flow theory stuff. I wonder if it relates at all to that weird phenomenon that occurs when you're stuck at a part in a game. You get to this one part and keep trying and failing until you put it down. You come back to it after some time away and just breeze through it.

It may only be tangentially related to flow, in that you're so worked up with frustration that your performance is affected. I've found recently that the Virtual Console has a neat way to avoid this. If I get to a point and I start doing poorly I just hit the home button and suspend the game at that point, indefinitely, until I can come back fresh and cool.

I may be totally wrong with what I've said, I take it Flow Theory is more based on multiplayer competition than single player games where you run into rough spots, but maybe some of you can see where I'm coming from.

EDIT:

This is what I immediately saw when I gazed upon that awesome space marine image above.

picture.php?albumid=4&pictureid=26

Peyton Manning of the Indianapolis Space Colts

Edited by Chuckpebble

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I never understood the sensationalism around Marek, other then the name; could someone provide some history on this?
I just thought it was hilarious that the other thread now ranks on the first page of Google for his name after typing it like that. But aside from having a cool name I don't know if there is anything behind saying it multiple times, that is before my thumbs time, I just go with it.

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I'm guessing all of you didn't get enough sleep; you were all snapping at each other and acting very strangely.

We just don't pay attention to things or care about them.

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We just don't pay attention to things or care about them.

You and Jake should just fight already,

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How does randomness have anything to do with it? What specific elements are random? As far as I'm aware, there is no randomness in StarCraft 2, except when an opponent chooses a random race. You win or lose based on the quality of your play; that's it. And the quality of your play is affected by how confident and prepared you are. And your concentration and preparedness is affected by your stress levels. Which part of this do you disagree with?

Ah I'm sorry for explaining this terribly. When you were hitting find game to get ranked in 1v1 you were getting matched up against random players. Thus the idea that you have to lose your next game because you've won the previous ones is fallacious. I'm saying having confidence that you'll know the outcome of the random matched game before actually playing it isn't logically sound. If you were playing like 10 games of 1v1 versus Nick Breckon then I'd be saying nonsense and your loss of confidence would be justifiable.

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Ah I'm sorry for explaining this terribly. When you were hitting find game to get ranked in 1v1 you were getting matched up against random players. Thus the idea that you have to lose your next game because you've won the previous ones is fallacious. I'm saying having confidence that you'll know the outcome of the random matched game before actually playing it isn't logically sound. If you were playing like 10 games of 1v1 versus Nick Breckon then I'd be saying nonsense and your loss of confidence would be justifiable.

The idea isn't "you have to lose your next game because you've won the previous ones." The point is "you're stressed out because you've won a bunch of games, and the pressure to keep up a winning streak is overwhelming, and as a result you are nervous and you play worse." I think you're completely missing the actual point we're making here. This is absolutely real, in a physical sense. I'm not talking about some cosmic destiny here. When I win a bunch of games, I get physically nervous because of the pressure of the ladder system, and because your match is not random (well, it's random within a specific set of constraints). The more you win, the better the players you go up against. That's how matchmaking and ladders work. You don't just get matched up with any random person from the entire pool of StarCraft II players. If you win a bunch of games, the matchmaking system ranks you up higher, and you play against better players.

But even if it weren't for that matchmaking system, playing StarCraft competitively is a stressful, high-pressure task, and the longer your continuous play session, the more subject you are to physical and mental fatigue, and all kinds of other psychological factors are borne out of that.

These are not random factors. Your claim that there are no discernible patterns when it comes to this kind of thing is demonstrably untrue when you look at the play habits of pro gamers over long tournament play sessions or long periods of time.

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Ah I'm sorry for explaining this terribly. When you were hitting find game to get ranked in 1v1 you were getting matched up against random players. Thus the idea that you have to lose your next game because you've won the previous ones is fallacious. I'm saying having confidence that you'll know the outcome of the random matched game before actually playing it isn't logically sound. If you were playing like 10 games of 1v1 versus Nick Breckon then I'd be saying nonsense and your loss of confidence would be justifiable.

I'm not going to listen to the podcast again, but I don't think that anyone said anything like that. I have enough confidence in Chris to assume he knows even the most basic elements of Statistics 101. It was never claimed that one has the confidence to know the outcome of a game, rather that the psychological (read: not confidence levels, etc) confidence of winning a previous game might sabotage the next.

I don't think I'd listen to a podcast where a host thought the rule of averages could apply to two games of Starcraft.

Edit: Chris types much faster than me, apparently. :getmecoat

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The idea isn't "you have to lose your next game because you've won the previous ones." The point is "you're stressed out because you've won a bunch of games, and the pressure to keep up a winning streak is overwhelming, and as a result you are nervous and you play worse." I think you're completely missing the actual point we're making here. This is absolutely real, in a physical sense. I'm not talking about some cosmic destiny here. When I win a bunch of games, I get physically nervous because of the pressure of the ladder system, and because your match is not random (well, it's random within a specific set of constraints). The more you win, the better the players you go up against. That's how matchmaking and ladders work. You don't just get matched up with any random person from the entire pool of StarCraft II players. If you win a bunch of games, the matchmaking system ranks you up higher, and you play against better players.

But even if it weren't for that matchmaking system, playing StarCraft competitively is a stressful, high-pressure task, and the longer your continuous play session, the more subject you are to physical and mental fatigue, and all kinds of other psychological factors are borne out of that.

These are not random factors. Your claim that there are no discernible patterns when it comes to this kind of thing is demonstrably untrue when you look at the play habits of pro gamers over long tournament play sessions or long periods of time.

Oh ok, that makes a lot more sense now. Sorry for missing the point.

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I don't know anything about Flow but what Chris Remo was talking about sounded suspiciously like baloney. Your previous wins/losses don't affect the probability that you'll win the next game! When you examine such a small subset of data its easy to jump to conclusions about performance anxiety affecting player skill, but its entirely possible to have a night where you might feel incredibly anxious yet win every game. Its all down to randomness and there isn't really a discernible pattern.

Radio Lab does a really nice job about explaining this stuff but I realize I might be gettin' mad based on some stray comment so sorry in advance if thats the case! I was too outraged about some dumb thing I perceived that may or may not be the real deal but either way doesn't mean anything in the grand scheme of things. Wizard.

If it's done anyway similarly to other ranked systems it does affect the probability. Mostly I am going to use the Halo 3 model, which is the basis of most systems, at least the theory behind it. Firstly the skill distribution is a bell curve, so to maintain this if one is to increase his skill level, another has to decrease. So say I have a skill rank of 10 and I play against someone who is rank 11 I am more likely to go up than against a rank 9. With increasing ranks you are partied against stronger players. However you look at this, the best player is less likely to win against someone who is a rank 50 opposed to a 10, assuming they are all ranked accordingly. Though with Halo 3 this has been gamed and thus the system has been effectively broken.

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If it's done anyway similarly to other ranked systems it does affect the probability. Mostly I am going to use the Halo 3 model, which is the basis of most systems, at least the theory behind it. Firstly the skill distribution is a bell curve, so to maintain this if one is to increase his skill level, another has to decrease. So say I have a skill rank of 10 and I play against someone who is rank 11 I am more likely to go up than against a rank 9. With increasing ranks you are partied against stronger players. However you look at this, the best player is less likely to win against someone who is a rank 50 opposed to a 10, assuming they are all ranked accordingly. Though with Halo 3 this has been gamed and thus the system has been effectively broken.

Yeah I don't really remember what I was thinking. I had this sudden eureka moment that made me commit to a dumb conclusion without really bothering to think critically about it. Sorry for the verbal diarrhea!

edit: Actually I was thinking about "Hot Hands" in basketball. People erroneously believed that players would go on hot or cold streaks and that would affect their chances of success on the next shot. What was being described on the podcast though seems more like doing an easy shot and having the follow-up shots get progressively harder, and dreading the inevitable point where you screw up and lose that sense of perfection.

Edited by Joflar

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