Mind: The ability of a gamer to understand a game and its systems, options, and common tactics, and use them to their advantage.
Where the body is all about execution, the mind is all about decision making. Mind takes the form of knowledge about the game on every level. Competitive gaming is often reduced to competitive decision-making when two players are evenly matched in raw skill. Mind is all about knowledge and asking questions such as: “how much damage do I do?”, “what happens if I ___?”, “what options do my opponent and myself have in this situation?”.
In order to train the mind, gamers should do research and learn how to review themselves to help make better decisions going forward. Gamers should also be unafraid to try new things and experiment since innovation can happen from seemingly out of nowhere. Good gamers are great at assessing the potential risks and rewards of different actions. By taking actions that have lower risk and higher reward, a gamer can consistently perform well without having to rely too heavily on outplaying their opponent through their body.
To win a game, you must know the game. When you’re starting out, it’s often best to figure out something called the META, or Most Efficient Tactics Available. The META of a game will always be whatever strategy is the strongest at the current time and whatever strategy can counter that strongest strategy (if a counter exists at all).
Oftentimes, pro players will have entire teams of coaches and analysts devoted to figuring out what the META is and how to best capitalize on it. When you watch the pros play, they will most likely be utilizing META strategies, so a good way to learn what the META looks like is to watch pro players play in their respective league or tournaments, or even to watch them practice via livestream. Video games are constantly evolving, whether through the game developers releasing a new update of the game, commonly called a patch, or by the discovery of new techniques and strategies.
Let’s compare gaming to basketball for a second. The first way a META can change is through patches, which would be like if the NBA announced one year that the three-point shot was being removed and that dunking a basketball gave you four points. That kind of change would cause the entire league to scramble to change how they play things out. The second way a META changes is through innovation, like how the Golden State Warriors changed basketball by having a plethora of three-point shooting threats and bombed their opponents to death. When this happens, the rest of the gaming landscape will warp around that strategy as people try to imitate it to find success.
Fortunately, there are plenty of resources for gamers to use to improve their knowledge. You can use the internet to find wikis and other databases, so you can learn about various in-game concepts. Some of these concepts include, but are not limited to: hitboxes, which are the physical spaces something takes up in-game that you need to hit in order for an attack or ability to connect; frames, or the specific part of an animation where an ability or action takes place; and DPS, or Damage-Per-Second, a statistic where you can measure damage output. Some games have the data readily available, others do not. Again, make sure you thoroughly investigate your chosen game for information.
There are plenty of other things you can look up as well, but the relevant information tends to be different from game-to-game. With your chosen game in mind, try looking up information about your favorite character and see how much you knew or didn’t know. Just like we discussed when talking about the body, there might be details about your favorite game that you don’t even know exist until you discover them through research.
Regardless of whether you’re a professional or an amateur, players who want to use their minds to help them win are required to remember textbooks worth of data. Some of this data is more useful than other facts, though, so it’s important for players to figure out what’s important. The player should think of the game like a puzzle, and that all of the systems and pieces inside the game are answers to questions the game presents you. In this way, the best players don’t just rely on their physical ability to play to win games but combine their bodies with their minds and find ways to put themselves in good positions to win.
Video games, especially multiplayer games where you compete against other players, are too random for someone to be in complete control. There is a certain amount of chaos that is simply unavoidable in games, so how do great players deal with that? Where good players might just rely on instinct or aim, great players use their knowledge of the game to put themselves in the best situation to win. Great players don’t leave things up to chance; they refuse to give the game or opposing players opportunities to ruin their game plan.
The question now becomes: “How can I put myself in the best situation to win?” This is a tricky question since there’s rarely a 100% “correct” answer. We’ll go over how you can make these decisions in the next section when talking about the heart, but first, you must arm yourself with all the information you can. It might seem boring to look things up instead of actually playing the game, but if you really want to be competitive, you owe it to yourself to do the research, so you have an edge over your competition. There is, of course, a limit to how much you can know, but getting the basic information in your head is a great place to start.
LA Gladiators “Great Bamboozle”
Complete with a look at professional team communication, this clip shows a trick play from the LA Gladiators where the team takes advantage of game mechanics and the opponent’s perception to win a fight. The Gladiators route out of spawn forced their opponents into a position where DPS player Lane “Surefour” Roberts could easily click on them from the safety of his spawn, where he was hiding the whole time.
How Mew2King became one of the “Smash gods,” or one of the top 4 Super Smash Bros players of all time. Mew2King, or M2K for short, is one of the best mind players in professional gaming history.
Content Warning: Although these videos are great visual examples of using the mind to win, this resource is only being put within teacher materials because of some language/images which may be inappropriate for younger audiences. Use this content at your discretion.