0.3 Getting good at games
This section isn’t essential to the rest of the guide, but it’s something I wanted to note down my thoughts on for a while and since this is my website I can do whatever I want.
“How we get good at strategy games” is a complicated question - by strategy game here I mean, broadly speaking, games that involve a lot of strategic and tactical thinking, which tends to be more important than elements like physical dexterity: games like Netrunner, but also Dominion or Spirit Island or SpyParty or Into the Breach or Slay the Spire, or Chess! These are the games that excite me, because even though they are very different from each other, all of them tingle a specific part of my brain; and it kind of feels like that part goes about learning these in similar ways, every time. This is a model that maybe explains some of it:
The skill tree
Deep, rewarding strategy games tend to be very complex. As a consequence, “skill” in playing such a game is a complex thing as well, branching into many different aspects, that we can call subskills. In Netrunner, subskills may be evaluating your tempo relative to your opponent correctly, spotting a scoring window, figuring out whether your opponent is on a fast advance deck in the first three turns of the game, playing with Paladin Poemu and The Twinning efficiently.
As you can see, these example skills can be very broad or very specific, and can be things you start acquiring and working on as you start playing the game, or things that you develop much later on. Subskills in a complex activity aren’t all equal: some are obvious and found out about early on, while even understanding that some others exists already requires some level of competence. I like picturing the “skill tree” of a strategy game like a talent tree in an RPG video game, with chains of dependence and affinity linking one thing to the other.
An important thing to realize is that subskills that are present in a game can be present in another, often in a very similar form. This is why skill in a game can sometimes translate very well to another, and why if you’re getting stuck and finding yourself unable to improve in a game, after picking up a completely different game and practicing that you may go back to the former and find yourself much more able to “get” some things than you were before.
Four stages
There is a well known model of how we learn things in general, called the “conscious competence learning model”, and according to this model there are four stages to learning. Let’s say that all of our skills are in one of the following four categories, and can move from one to the other:
- Unconscious incompetence
- Conscious incompetence
- Conscious competence
- Unconscious competence
Let’s see how this maps to a strategy game like Netrunner:
Stage 1 is where all subskills relevant to a game start. You don’t even know what you need to learn, or that you need to learn something specific. Perhaps you don’t know that Archer is a card in the game, so you have never spent time wondering how to best play around it.
You move from Stage 1 to Stage 2 when you figure out that something exists, and getting better at the game probably entails learning more about that thing. This is when you get wrecked by Archer (maybe seeing it for the first time) and understand that it’s a card that can completely turn a game around if you don’t pay attention to it and learn what to do about it. The move from 1 to 2 is painful, because it’s the one where you recognize the mistakes you’re making and the knowledge you’re lacking; however, it’s necessary to go through it in order to be able to do something about those things.
The move from Stage 2 to Stage 3 is what we usually clearly notice as “learning”. We are moving from incompetence to competence: learning how to deal with Archer properly. We don’t quite learn this automatically by just playing, but by actively thinking hard about the way we play, which takes conscious effort on our part. There is a limit to how many things we can actively focus on at a given time, because our attention is a finite resource. So there’s a cap to how many things we can actively be learning about at once.
But as we keep practicing that specific skill, we start moving from Stage 3 to Stage 4: dealing with Archer gets easier and easier, until doing the right thing becomes second nature at some point. This frees up some of our precious attention! And that’s important, because as we get some of that back, we can suddenly start noticing mistakes we’re making. That’s right: putting some things we know in the unconscious box allows us to find out about things we had never noticed before, and put them in the conscious box where we can look at them accurately. The cycle repeats again, for new, often narrower and more specific subskills; and if the game is good and complex and interesting, probably never ends.
This model has some not-so-obvious consequences. One of them is that while in the long-term you notice that you got better at the game, you go through cycles of forgetting that you learned things and constantly catching yourself making mistakes you never noticed before, and this actually makes you feel like you’re getting worse at the game. Learn to recognize this feeling, and remind yourself that it’s probably a good sign.
Ways to learn
Another consequence of this way to look at learning is that since learning comprises very different processes, it’s probably very helpful to practice and train in different ways to make sure all the processes get their fair share of work. I think there are three main ways that I practice games, and I call them casual play, deliberate play, and deliberate analysis.
Casual play is exactly what you imagine. It’s about playing a lot of games, without thinking too hard and without taking too many intermissions to reflect on how you’re playing. Casual play helps you solidify some of the knowledge that is already on its way to unconscious competence (going from Stage 3 to Stage 4), and will sometimes allow you to spot a mistake or a weakness that you may need to think more about later on. Good casual play is about repeating a lot of the same thing until you just “have the hang of it”, so that you don’t need to think hard about it anymore.
Deliberate play is very different from casual play. You play at a much slower pace, think really hard about your lines, and take all the time you may need to do math. You can pull out a calculator or a spreadsheet if the situation calls for it. If you’re just practicing and there are no stakes on winning or losing, it feels normal to ask your opponent for help or advice. If you make a mistake, it may be best to rewind just to see how things go when you really do your best, or you may carry on to try and find out how to recover from a bad position. You’re playing against someone who is at a similar skill level to yours, or maybe significantly higher. Deliberate play is where you work on the move from Stage 2 to Stage 3: figuring out what the right line is in a given situation, and taking all the time you need to understand a problem in its proper context.
Deliberate analysis can look like a lot of things, but most importantly, it does not involve playing the game. It can be looking at a replay or a recording and figuring out what you did wrong, or having a long talk with your opponent about why you won or lost that last game, or having an experienced player from your local meta explain to you how a deck works and how its matchups look. It can just be random people on Discord giving you frustrating beginner tips. Do these things feel more boring and tedious than actually playing Netrunner? That’s because you’re working on the progression from Stage 1 to Stage 2: discovering that you’ve been playing all wrong and that you suck, and there are a million things that you have to go through and learn all over again. Not only it’s sometimes not fun because you’re not actively playing a game, it can also be annoying because it’s often the part that makes you feel like you’re getting worse.
So, do you need all three of these to get better at the game? Probably not: just playing games will slowly make you a little better, at least up to a certain point, especially when you’re an absolute beginner and you’re mostly worried about what cards exist in the game and what they actually do. But you can get only so far by just jamming games, and you certainly go faster by also doing other things. Similarly, you can’t just sit and theorize on how matchups work: sometimes you need to play games to see if those ideas work in context, and then play more to commit that knowledge to memory.
It’s hard to tell what the best “mix” of these is: it’s probably extremely variable depending on the player (consider that the whole experience has to be fun for you as well!). However, most players I see dedicate themselves to casual play exclusively, often believing that playing more will simply make you better. If that’s the way you are practicing or testing, I suggest that you try to diversify your practice time a little by doing at least a tiny bit of the other things.
Also, remember what I said about different games having overlapping skillsets? Sometimes it’s good to take a break from Netrunner. Go play Poker, or a German board game, or whatever you think you could be interested in getting good at, and do some of that for a while! Then come back and marvel at how good you suddenly got at calculating probabilities, or bluffing, or being efficient with your actions. Netrunner is definitely a “lifestyle game”, but that doesn’t mean it has to be the only game you play.