StarCraft is Underrated as a Mental Gym
It's hard to think of better alternatives
A few months back, I ran the New York City marathon. It was a major milestone in what’s now become a three-year journey in distance running. At the tail end of 2019, when I first started out, I couldn’t have imagined running twenty-six straight miles; I could barely run for fifteen minutes.
I started running in part thanks to the work of David Goggins, a former US Navy SEAL and current ultra-marathon runner. You can read his story in his first book, but to briefly summarize, he promotes pushing yourself to do hard things in order to maximally reach your potential. One of the benefits of this philosophy is a “callousing of the brain”, a toughening up of your mental spirit, that makes you stronger and more resilient towards life’s challenges.
I was receptive to this idea when I read his book, because I’m a believer in the Buddhist notion that life is suffering; that regardless of your circumstances, the difficulties and hardships of life will inevitably find you because such things are part of the human condition. The Buddha, in several of his metaphorical stories, emphasized that this is a universal truth, partly because suffering is relative: a well-off person with good personal circumstances will nonetheless experience outsized pain from otherwise minor difficulties, because their good situation leads them to be sensitive to even small burdens.
(I am by no means a Buddhist scholar, so my apologies for any misrepresentations of Mr. Buddha. The above is my own interpretation.)
Goggins’ philosophy, from my perspective, is a natural extension of that - if the human condition implies suffering, why not spend a little time toughening yourself up to make that suffering more bearable?
I wrote a bit about this six months after I started:
Another thing I started to do, inspired by David Goggins, was “embrace the suck” of running and pay attention to my body as I ran. Previously I had always tried to ignore the pain in my shins or the stitch in my side by listening to music or watching videos. This time around I flipped my perspective around and actively focused on any aches or pains I experienced as I ran.
When people ask how I can run for hours without getting bored, I tell them that the boredom is the point. I don’t run in spite of it, I run because of it. The moment-to-moment suffering - whether it’s the tail end of a long race, or taking those first few steps of a groggy morning run - is training me to better tackle the ups and downs of life.
Not surprisingly, I got used to it pretty fast. Nowadays, I don’t feel bored at all on long runs. The brain is a magical thing!
I get that this is a little contrived - you can suffer a lot more efficiently by just stubbing your toe, right? But like any other problem, there’s a wide range of solutions and the solution that gives you better physical health, more energy, a fun hobby, races to look forward to, and a sense of achievement seems like a much better solution than just kicking your own ass. And the prolonged suffering of running, compared to more time-efficient activities, has plenty of merit in building a deeper sense of patience, a deep-down sort of “I bet I can do that” vibe when going through life. And if you’re going to subject yourself to hours of suffering, again, feel free to rank the choices and their trade-offs; I think running will come out near the top.
StarCraft Can Do That, Too
StarCraft is a video game, so it unfortunately gets typecast as primarily being for entertainment. I think that’s a a shame. The idea of StarCraft as a mental gymnasium doesn’t get enough attention. If I told you I plan to do the New York Times crossword everyday for the rest of my life because I enjoy it and it keeps me sharp, you would probably find that unremarkable. But if I told you the same thing about StarCraft, you’d probably think I was crazy - at least, a mainstream observer would.
But let’s sit and think about it. If you were to evaluate StarCraft as an exercise machine for building mental strength, how would it fare?
Complexity - it’s endlessly complex and difficult to understand. It’s constantly challenging your assumptions and pushing you to re-interpret your knowledge in different ways.
Variety - there’s numerous valid and different ways of playing the game, from aggressive to defensive, cheesy to standard, across three different races. You’ll never master all of it.
Practicality - it provides built-in, easy-to-use mechanisms for grinding - a ranked ladder, a rating system, a replay system, etc. It’s also free to play.
Popularity - it features a large community of players; at every level, there’s always someone a little bit better than you and someone a little bit worse. Plus, there’s lot of chances to make friends in a large and diverse community.
Difficulty - it’s a really hard game to play well and win at consistently. You’ll be regularly pushed out of your comfort zone.
Ownership - it’s a well-balanced 1v1 game wherein your failures cannot be blamed on anyone else but yourself.
Efficiency - games are relatively short; you can pack in a whole lot of StarCraft in not too much time.
(The points above are applicable to both StarCraft I and II, perhaps with the exception of average game length.)
StarCraft checks pretty much every conceivable box. And if you rank it against other activities the same way I suggested you do for running, I think you’ll find it comes out near the top.
So if you’re out there looking for an exercise routine to build mental strength, I think it’s worth giving StarCraft a shot. I really don’t think it’s that much different from many types of daily mental activities lots of people already partake in, like working through a Sudoku book. And I think the social, community, and esports-viewing aspects offer compelling advantages that many other types of activities do not.
Why do I need a mental gym, anyway?
I’ll be the first to admit that “mental strength” is a fuzzy concept. It’s got this conspiracy theory vibe to it where you point to a situation that you handled better thanks to stronger mental strength, but then realize there’s a million confounding factors and that most people would write this off as just generally becoming more mature. And it becomes hard to think of cases where you can definitively trace back a specific outcome to the act of playing StarCraft.
I’m going to talk about one example from my own personal experience, and I fully accept that some folks will just roll their eyes and move on with their day. And I think that’s not only totally fine, but comes with the territory. I’m not out here trying to create the CrossFit cult of esports; I just think this is a reasonable idea that has benefited my life, personally.
I kicked off a new ladder grind last December. The first big change I noticed was a healthier attitude about the game, which translated into a healthier attitude about a lot of things, which then reinforced my attitude about the game. I get that that was a hell of a sentence so let me try to explain.
Anytime I try to grind a new game, I go about it in a pretty organized way. This enables me to improve fast and efficiently; I grew into a solid top 1% player in Age of Empires II off the back of less than a thousand lifetime 1v1s. The downside of this approach is that it’s high-pressure to always go about things in the correct way, and therefore not very sustainable because it’s so draining.
This time around, I just YOLO’d onto the StarCraft II ladder. Even though I sucked, I played on my main account (not a barcode), I didn’t practice builds, and I did very limited mechanics practice. The most formal training I did was catch a couple uThermal tutorials to figure out how people are playing TvT and TvP nowadays.
This was surprisingly hard! Despite being a very small figure in the StarCraft scene, it’s still not uncommon for people on the ladder to recognize me and say hi. And getting your ass kicked in D2 while doing a build that doesn’t make any sense is… not a great feeling! But it was freeing, too. I felt like I had dropped all the constraints I had previously imposed on my grinds, and fully focused my energy into doing exactly what I wanted to do, which was grinding out some ladder games everyday.
There’s this really constraining thing that happens as you get older that I’d sum up with the phrase, “I ain’t as good as I once was”. It’s uncomfortable for me to get beat down in Diamond, knowing that four or five years ago I was a solid 5k MMR player. But that’s very limiting, too - if the choice is between doing what it takes to get back to where I was or just quitting, I would probably just quit, because I don’t have the time or the motivation anymore. But that would mean not playing a game I really enjoy.
And that’s crazy, right?
The same issue had been affecting my running. After the marathon, I took it easy for awhile, and my first runs back were a lot slower than I expected. It was demotivating. But my StarCraft grind reminded me - who says I have to be as good as I used to be? Maybe what matters is showing up today, doing my best, and accepting the outcome. And that motivated me to get back onto a solid running schedule which, ironically, has me back in good shape.
(Actually, this is turning into a great personal story. Look, I take it back. I do want to create the CrossFit cult of esports).
I think an important aspect of mental strength is the ability to get yourself to do things that you know are good for you. And the challenge that many of us don’t like to admit is that there’s usually more than just a plain lack of willpower at play - we don’t do the things that we should for a variety of practical reasons, most of which are not that great when examined more closely (like an unwillingness to accept we’re no longer at our peak). And I think exercising our minds through games like StarCraft can help break through those barriers.
A couple months in…
I’ve been doing this since mid-December and honestly, so far it’s been great. I run three times a week and play ladder on some of the other days. I recently took advantage of this routine to get back into Age of Empires IV, swapping that in for ladder practice, and I had a blast over there, too. Overall, I feel like it’s making my life better, but that’s purely my own personal experience. All I can say is that I think more people should try it!
Until next time,
brownbear
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