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Masters of Control: Behavioral Patterns of Simultaneous Unit Group Manipulation in StarCraft 2

Published: 18 April 2015 Publication History

Abstract

Most user interfaces require the user to focus on one element at a time, but StarCraft 2 is a game where players often control more than a hundred units simultaneously. The game interface provides an optional mechanism called "control groups" that allows players to select multiple units and assign them to a group in order to quickly recall previous selections of units. From an analysis of over 3,000 replays, we show that the usage of control groups is a key differentiator of individual players as well as players of different skill levels---novice users rarely use control groups while experts nearly always do. But players also behave differently in how they use their control groups, especially in time-pressured situations. While certain control group behaviors are common across all skill levels, expert players appear to be better at remaining composed and sustaining control group use in battle. We also qualitatively analyze discussions on web forums from players about how they use control groups to provide context about how such a simple interface mechanic has produced numerous ways of optimizing unit control.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    CHI '15: Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
    April 2015
    4290 pages
    ISBN:9781450331456
    DOI:10.1145/2702123
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Published: 18 April 2015

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    Author Tags

    1. control groups
    2. player behavior
    3. skill
    4. video games

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    April 18 - 23, 2015
    Seoul, Republic of Korea

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    CHI '15 Paper Acceptance Rate 486 of 2,120 submissions, 23%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 6,199 of 26,314 submissions, 24%

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    • (2022)Definitions of Esports: A Systematic Review and Thematic AnalysisProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/35494906:CHI PLAY(1-45)Online publication date: 31-Oct-2022
    • (2022)A Novel Ping-pong Task Strategy Based on Model-free Multi-dimensional Q-function Deep Reinforcement Learning2022 8th International Conference on Systems and Informatics (ICSAI)10.1109/ICSAI57119.2022.10005466(1-6)Online publication date: 10-Dec-2022
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    • (2017)Sentiment analysis of player chat messaging in the video game StarCraft 2Knowledge-Based Systems10.1016/j.knosys.2017.09.022137:C(149-162)Online publication date: 1-Dec-2017
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