I would prefer not to take on people with history of being gold players because it seems like bad science. However, I don't have a ton of interest at the moment, so I might consider whether it's a good idea?
"Picking only smart people is like a school accepting only good students and then miraclously having good grades for their students." - I don't think this is true. Yes, if I picked a bunch of smart students and then my students all turned out to be good at mathematics or programming or Greek, it wouldn't be surprising. However, if I picked people purely on IQ and then it turned out they were all... (read 391 more words →)
Yeah, this definitely doesn't explain my gold players who spend hours every day in Kovaaks.
No, elo is not a flat distribution. Roughly 2-3% of accounts are in Grandmaster (4000+), the next 5% in master (3500-4000), the next ~10% in diamond (3000-3500), the next 30% in platinum (2500-3000), the next 30% in gold (2000-2500)... but this is skewed for a few reasons. Casual players are more likely to stick to Quick Play and not rank in Competitive, and higher-level players are significantly more likely to have multiple accounts, so the percentage of accounts in higher ranks represents a smaller percent of actual players. Sometimes the top 10 accounts in a region (Europe /... (read more)
Huh, my experience doesn't support this. I run an organization that has lower-ranked teams as well as higher-ranked teams. Many of my lower-ranked players have been attending scrims and reviews for years (definitely far more work than the equivalent of casting 100 games) and are still below average. I find that a lot of them don't have good mental tools for integrating information and applying it, or don't signal to me when they've fundamentally misunderstood something, or quickly forget things and reverse improvements, or aren't good at introspecting about how/why they make mistakes.
I think most-people-don't-try-very-hard explains why people are bad at many skills, but it struggles to explain why people are bad at video games. Video games are fun, so it's not difficult to find someone willing to put in 1000 hours. I know lots of people who have put in over 1000 hours and are still bad.
I am interested in conducting an experiment involving learning & teaching gaming. I am recruiting either 6 or 12 participants to attempt to learn a video game intensively for around 2 weeks. This is not paid either way (I am not paying for volunteers, and you are not paying for coaching) and far from a professional academic thing; more of a bet between friends. It's getting published to Twitter, not published to a journal. We'll be learning Overwatch because that's my personal area of expertise.
Conventional wisdom is that gamers take months or years of practise to get good - and that unchangeable factors like in-built 'reaction times', 'natural talent' or 'instincts' are... (read 1291 more words →)
If you can find any high-level coaches of 1v1 games who are interested in running experiments, that's great. I don't have the option of just becoming a pro Starcraft coach in order to run a 'better' experiment.
I'm also curious why you think this; skills of communication/teamwork are pretty central to what I'm thinking. We already have lots of information about how good smart people are at chess and how smart pro chess players are, too, so it's just a matter of figuring out where individual games lie on the spectrum from something like chess (very strategic) to something like Smash (very twitchy). We have much less information about FPS, so to me it's a much more interesting experiment.