Лекция по "Психологии"

What enables the wise sovereign and the good general to strike and conquer, and achieve things beyond the reach of ordinary men, is foreknowledge. This foreknowledge cannot be elicited from spirits; it cannot be obtained inductively from experience, nor by any deductive calculation . . . the dispositions of the enemy are ascertainable through spies and spies alone.

—Sun Tzu, The Art of War

Sun Tzu held spies in the highest regard, saying that they should be rewarded more liberally than any other relation in war because the foreknowledge they can provide is more valuable than any other commodity in war. When one knows where the enemy will strike, one doesn’t need to spread his forces thin protecting a dozen possible targets. When one knows when the enemy is unprepared, one can strike and be assured of victory. When one knows the habits of the enemy general, those habits can be turned against him. The use of spies to gain foreknowledge is like being able to see into the future.

I see only one move ahead, but it is always the correct one.

—Jose Raoul Capablanca, 3^rdWorld Chess Champion

Yomi

In competitive games, there is little more valuable than knowing the mind of the opponent, which the Japanese call “yomi.” All the complicated decisions in game theory go away if you know exactly what the opponent will do next. Sun Tzu says that reading minds is for the spirit world, and on that I cannot comment, but I have witnessed firsthand the ability of some players to “achieve things beyond the reach of ordinary men” through eerily powerful yomi. Perhaps these players are simply adept at “studying the details of the enemy,” but it seems to go far beyond that in some. There is one player who I would even say has a supernatural ability to spy on the minds of others, knowing which moves they will next make—if it weren’t such an absurd thing to say. But believe me, those who have witnessed Japan’s fighting game player Daigo Umehara do speak of these things in hushed tones, fancying that they might be true.

As a side note, I would even argue that the “strategic depth” of a game should be defined almost entirely on its ability to support and reward yomi. For a silly example, consider tic-tac-toe. There are only nine opening moves, and only three of them are functionally different. Even if through some witchcraft you know the move the opponent will make next, it doesn’t really matter. The game is so constrained that the opponent is forced to make certain moves, so the novice player along with the master of divination will be on basically the same footing. There is no room to develop “tendencies” or a certain “personality” or style of play in tic-tac-toe. There is only a simple algorithm at work and no room for yomi at all.

Yomi Layers

Any decent competitive game needs to allow you to counter the opponent if you know what he will do. What happens, though, when your enemy knows that you know what he will do? He needs a way to counter you. He’s said to be on another level than you, or another “yomi layer.” You knew what he would do (yomi), but he knew that you knew (yomi layer 2). What happens when you know that he knows that you know what he will do (yomi layer 3)? You’ll need a way to counter his counter. And what happens when he knows that you know . . .

I’ll nip that in the bud: there need only be support up to yomi layer 3, as yomi layer 4 loops back around to layer 0. Let’s say I have a move (we’ll call it “m”) that’s really, really good. I want to do it all the time. (Here’s where the inequality of risk/reward comes in. If all my moves are equally good, this whole thing falls apart.) The “level 0” case here is discovering how good that move is and doing it all the time. Then, you will catch on and know that I’m likely to do that move a lot (yomi layer 1), so you’ll need a counter move (we’ll call it “c1”). You’ve stopped me from doing m. You’ve shut me down. I need a way to stop you from doing c1. I need a counter to your counter, or “c2.”

Now you don’t know what to expect from me anymore. I might do m or I might do c2. Interestingly, I probably want to do m, but I just do c2 to scare you into not doing c1 anymore. Then I can sneak in more m.

You don’t have adequate choices yet. I can alternate between m and c2, but all you have is c1. You need a counter to c2, which we’ll call c3. Now we each have two moves.

Me: m, c2 You: c1, c3.

Now I need a counter to c3. The tendency for game designers might be to create a c4 move, but it’s not necessary. The move m can serve as my c4. Basically, if you expect me to do my counter to your counter (rather than my original good move m), then I don’t need a counter for that; I can just do go ahead and do the original move—if the game is designed that way. Basically, supporting moves up to yomi layer 3 is the minimum set of counters needed to have a complete set of options, assuming yomi layer 4 wraps around back to layer 0.

This is surely sounding much more confusing than it is, so let’s look at an actual example from Virtua Fighter 3 (which will almost certainly confuse you even more).

Example of Yomi Layer 3 from Virtua Fighter 3

Let’s say Akira knocks down Pai. As Pai gets up, she can either do a rising attack (these attacks have the absolute highest priority in the game) or she can do nothing. A high rising attack will stop any attack that Akira does as she gets up, but if Akira expects this, he can block and retaliate with a guaranteed throw. Pai does the rising kick and Akira predicts this and blocks. Now the guessing game begins.

Akira would like to do his most damaging throw (that’s his m), and be done with it. Even though the throw is guaranteed here, all throws can be escaped for zero damage if the defender expects the throw and enters the throw reverse command. The throw is guaranteed to “start” but Pai might reverse it. In fact, Pai is well aware that a throw is guaranteed here (it’s common knowledge), and it’s only obvious that Akria will do his most damaging throw. After all, this situation has happened a hundred times before against a hundred Akiras and they all do the same thing. It’s really conditioning, not strategy, that tells Pai she needs to do a throw escape here (that’s her c1). In fact, it will become her natural, unthinking reaction after a while.

Akira is tired of having his throw escaped again and again. He decides to be tricky by doing one of his very slow, powerful moves such as a double palm, a reverse body check, a two-fisted strike, or a shoulder ram (we’ll just lump all those into c2). Why does a big, slow move work in this situation? First of all, if Pai does her throw escape and there is no throw to escape, the escape becomes a throw attempt. If her opponent is out of range or otherwise unthrowable for some reason, her throw attempt becomes a throw whiff. She grabs the air and is vulnerable for a moment. One important rule in VF is that you cannot throw an opponent during the startup phase or the hitting phase of a move. So if Akira does a big, powerful move, he is totally unthrowable until after the hitting phase of the move is over and he enters recovery (retracting his arm or leg).

Back to our story. Akira is tired of getting his throw escaped all day, so he does the standard counter to any throw: a big, powerful move. This c2 move does a decent amount of damage, by the way. The next time this whole situation arises, Pai doesn’t know what to do. Her instincts tell her to reverse the throw, but if she does, she is vulnerable to Akira’s slow, powerful move. Rather than go for the standard reverse, Pai does her c3 move: she simply blocks. By blocking, she’ll take no damage from Akira’s powerful move, and depending on exactly which move it was, she’ll probably be able to retaliate.

So what does Akira do if he expects this? In fact, he needs no c4 move since his original throw (m) is the natural counter to a blocking opponent. A throw is a special kind of move that grabs an enemy and does damage regardless of whether they are blocking. It’s specifically designed to be used against an opponent in block who is afraid of an attack.

In summary,

Akira has throw and powerful, slow move.

Pai has throw escape and block.

As I tried to show, it’s actually pretty reasonable to expect players to be thinking on yomi layer 3, 4 or even higher. It’s because conditioning makes doing the throw escape an unthinking, natural reaction. But against a clever opponent, you’ll have to think twice about doing a standard throw escape or blocking. The Akira player will do the occasional powerful, slow move just to put his enemy off balance and abandon his instinct to escape the throw. Then Akira can go back to his original goal: land the throw.

Another very interesting property is “beginner’s luck.” Notice that a beginner Akira in this situation will go for the throw, since that works on other beginners who haven’t learned to throw escape. The beginner Akira will never land the throw on an intermediate player, though, since the intermediate player knows to always throw escape. But strangely, the beginner will sometimes land the throw on the expert because the expert is aware of the whole guessing game and might block rather than throw escape. Of course, the expert will soon learn that the beginner is, in fact, a beginner and then he’ll be able to yomi almost every move.

Just as a final note on Virtua Fighter to further demonstrate the complexity of its guessing games, I actually greatly simplified the example above. I left out, for example, that Pai could attack with a fast move rather than block. And Akira has another c2 move besides a slow, powerful move. He can also do what’s called a “kick-guard cancel” or “kg.” This means he can press kick, which will make him unthrowable until his kick reaches recovery phase. If Pai tries to throw, she’ll whiff. But then Akira can cancel the kick before it even gets to the hitting phase. Now he’s free to act and take advantage of Pai’s whiffed throw vulnerability. Now, Akira has a guaranteed throw, putting him back in the exact same situation he began in. The catch is that if Akira does kg-cancel and then goes for the throw he originally wanted to do, Pai will probably not have time to react with a throw escape. It’s just too fast. She’d have to be on the next yomi layer. She’d have to expect Akira to throw, enter a throw escape, see the kg-cancel, then immediately enter her next guess (probably an attack or throw escape). Any hesitation and she’d be thrown.

The point I’m making here is that despite Virtua Fighter’s absurd complexity, players really are able to think on the levels I’m hinting at. While having a mental mastery of the structure and payoffs of these guessing games is important, the master of yomi can cut to the chase by guessing correctly in a particular situation, rather than merely following a theoretically good rule of thumb for similar situations.

8) Critical Points

by Sirlin

There are often “critical moments” in a game, moments when the outcome of the game is really decided, or at least moments that hugely shift momentum and advantages. You might be carefully eking out small advantages over the course of 90% of a game, but a critical moment can blow the game wide open and cause fortunes to change.

After ten hands of low bets in a game of no limit poker, it can all come down to that one big bet your opponent makes—and how you react to it. In a fighting game, you can slowly build yourself a healthy lead, but one misjudged move that leaves you open can allow that huge combo your opponent needs to even things up. In chess, lots of careful moves that develop and support your pieces don’t count for much if you are caught off guard by a bold brilliancy that steals your mate. And in StarCraft, that army of units that took twenty minutes to amass can be wiped out in a mere second if you were distracted right when those enemy Templars psi-stormed everything.

I put this chapter near the end of the “Art of War” section because it cuts across so many topics already covered. If the entire outcome of a game can be determined by just one or two key moments, then deception becomes all the more powerful. Perhaps you can hide from your opponent when those moments arise. Discipline in execution and mental toughness also come to the forefront. Sure you can execute moves well, but can you come through at the critical moment when it counts? These moments can occur late in a game when your concentration is waning, possibly after you’re already fatigued from playing matches all day in a tournament. Your mental alertness and tenacity resources are tapped, but do you have the discipline to maintain your mental toughness when the critical moment presents itself? Have you studied the details of the enemy to guess how he might react in this game-defining moment? And most of all, through whatever divination powers you possess, can you yomi what your enemy will do during this critical moment, so that you can dictate its outcome?

Critical moments are what you need to create and take advantage of when you’re losing. They are what you need to suppress and avoid when you are winning. When you’re winning, the last thing you need to do is entangle yourself in a situation where if you guess wrong, you lose your lead. You need to create safe situations that allow you to keep that lead, and force the enemy to take bad risks (which you are waiting for) in a vain attempt to get back into the game.

For example, consider “knock downs” in fighting games. When you knock your opponent down in pretty much any fighting game, he gains many protections (often total invulnerability) until he gets back up. Even with these protections, the attacker always has the advantage because at that critical first moment when the defender is fully standing up, the attacker can force a guessing game he controls. The defender might get up inside a move that must be blocked high or low, or in Street Fighter a “crossup attack” that might have to be blocked left or right. The attacker can do nothing at all, hoping the defender will attack at that critical moment—and be countered. The attacker calls the shots, and the attacker has the advantage. But this is a guessing game. It’s possible that the defender will guess right or get lucky and hit the attacker with a combo or super move or whatever. Most of the time, you should play the odds and force that guessing game since there’s more upside to you than downside when you force it. But what if you are winning? Even the most aggressive players know that aggressive play is about attacking safely and taking calculated risks. At the beginning of a round, creating that critical moment is what they want to do to gain the lead and rattle the enemy. But what if you are already winning by a large margin? It is possible that the calculated risk is worth it and that yomi fairy on your shoulder is telling you exactly how the enemy is going to act, but it’s usually not worth it. If you simply back off, you have a 100% chance of not creating that critical moment the enemy needs.

The art of the “set up” is the art of seizing the critical moment. When you feel that critical moment is upon you, and you don’t want to be in it, try every way possible to negate the entire situation rather than play the guessing game. In Street Fighter, a critical moment can occur right after your opponent just did some devastating thing to you, and you now have an opportunity to act. Most players are flustered in this situation and tend to do stupid or transparent things, and the clever attacker is waiting for this. Let the moment pass. Attacking at the very first moment you possibly can is a common, predictable thing to do. It’s often smart (and the “textbook” thing to do), but it creates a moment your opponent can count on. He knows it’s very likely you will do something during that moment. What if, instead, you do nothing for two seconds? In a fighting game, two seconds is a fistful of moments. If you didn’t attack during that first moment, will you attack just after it? Or just after that? Doing nothing can defuse the situation and bury the moment. It’s very hard for your opponent to do a split-second move (like a parry or a counter or a super) out of the blue; he is relying on predictable moments. If you’re winning, don’t let him have any.

On the other hand, if you are losing, you often need to spur the enemy into action so you can engage him. Hopefully you can create a messy, chaotic situation because at least that will give you a chance to come back from behind. In war games, it can mean “attacking by fire” to force an enemy out of his defensive position and into an engagement with you. Maybe you’ll lose that engagement, but at least you now have a shot. In poker, it can be threatening with your “all in” bet of everything you have. Does your opponent really want to take the chance that you have a good hand? If he’s wrong on that one guess, the entire momentum of the game could shift.

Although winning with the sheathed sword is always best, harnessing the power of the critical moment is the culmination of so many of these concepts. With everything from deception to yomi in play, the whole of winning and losing can come down to the blink of an eye: the critical moment.

9) Presence of Mind

by Sirlin

Presence of Mind is the ability to see all the moments of a short-lived situation as they go by, often accompanied by the sensation that time has slowed down. This is possible when the situation has grown familiar to you and your brain is able to filter out all the unnecessary elements leaving only a few simple cues.

When you step into a new, unfamiliar game, critical moments will pass you by in the blink of an eye. At first, you won’t even know that these moments mattered, that you were supposed to be paying attention during them. Even when you do know, a feeling of being overwhelmed by the millions of things that might occur can cause that moment to flicker by and you won’t have that feeling of total awareness. The change comes when your mind is fully ready to accept the moments ahead. You know they are coming (because you recognize the pattern of events leading to them), you know that only a very few things could possibly happen during them, and you are able to filter out everything except the one or two cues that you’re waiting for.

Let’s take the fighting game Guilty Gear XX as an example, using my character Chipp. I run at you and force you to block my attack sequence (you’ll block it crouching). One trick I can use is to sneak in an “overhead” kick that you’ll have to stand up to block. If you are unfamiliar with Chipp, then my whole attack sequence will go by in a flash. You will be waiting for it to be over so you can do something again, and you don’t even realize that a decision is required of you before my sequence ends.

Now let’s say I show you this so-called overhead kick beforehand so you know exactly what it looks like. Anytime you see it, I tell you to block high. We practice this and you are able to do it. Now we play a real game, and I can probably still hit you with it. It’s quite a task for you to sort through the chaos of a real match and actually see that kick. For all you know, it could come at any moment, which makes it difficult to mentally prepare for it. I think you probably could block this without trouble if you have good reaction times, but fighting games (and most competitive games) are not ultimately about reaction times, contrary to popular belief. One time they do come in handy, though, is when you are put in a situation where any of a thousand things could happen, and you have to detect a certain one and react to it instantly. Yomi is useful here (if you have some basis to predict which of the thousand things the opponent might do), but lacking that, you are left with reaction times.

Now I will tell you the crucial information you need to block the overhead kick. I cannot do it any time I want; there are only two ways I can do the kick. When I run at you, I will start with a few moves such as f+p, slash, slash, heavy slash. You don’t need to care about these, really, and if they seem to go by in a blur, that’s fine. At this point, my options become much more limited, and one of the few things I can do is my “fire punch” series. It starts off with a distinctive looking, well, “fire punch.” After that I have the option to do the overhead kick. If I don’t, I can instead do a low kick. After the low kick, I have another chance to do the overhead kick. Those are the only two times I can ever do the overhead kick.

Now you can develop your Presence of Mind in this situation. I run at you and do some punches you don’t really have to scrutinize. But you know that I usually do a fire punch after that. You are totally ready to see that fire punch and you already know it’s likely you’ll have to make a decision about blocking high or low soon. Ahh, there’s the fire punch, right on schedule. Now you know I have my first chance to do the overhead kick. For all practical purposes, I have only two options. Your mind isn’t spinning with the multitude of options you’re faced with. You are totally focused on this one upcoming moment. You’re waiting for it. You’re tuning out all the extraneous information on the screen. Forget our health meters. Forget our super meters. Forget the sound effects. Forget the fancy graphics of our characters, and the pretty backgrounds behind them. The only thing you need to see is the start of that overhead kick. In time, this situation becomes so familiar, and your ability to filter out the extraneous stimuli becomes so good that you can’t even imagine getting hit by this kick. The moment will seem to go by in slow motion, and it will even be amusing to you that the opponent could ever think he’d hit you with this move. Meanwhile, the beginner saw this moment go by in a flash and is oblivious to all these moments.

An analogy would be if I told you to clap your hands when you heard the voice of a certain person. I then put you in a room with thirty people all talking over each other. Every couple of seconds someone new is speaking, but it’s all a cacophony and you can’t imagine being able to make heads or tails of anything. Now, I give you the same task in a totally silent room with only the one particular person in it. Total silence . . . then the person speaks. You would think, “This is so easy, how could anyone possibly fail at this task?” You’d then clap your hands at the right time without any trouble. That is exactly how the expert player sees that 1/60^th of a second go by when he has total concentration on the moment and is able to filter out everything but the single relevant clue.

Another example. In Virtua Fighter 3, if Jeffry lands a “major counter” low kick on the opponent (meaning he knocks the opponent out of a move) then he can get a guaranteed throw on them. If the low kick doesn’t major counter, he can’t get a guaranteed throw. When I first asked other players how they know when they can get the throw, they told me, “Just listen for the sound of the major counter. If you hear it, then enter the throw command.” I thought they must be joking at first. It seemed too difficult to cut through all the chaos of a match and hear that one sound. But eventually, when I pressed the button to do the low kick, everything slowed down in anticipation of that one sound. When I heard it, I was so fully ready for it that entering the throw command in time was ridiculously easy.

The first thing to take away is that if you have command over seeing the moments in all sorts of situations that your opponents don’t, then you have a huge advantage. You’ll land your tricks on them all day, and you’ll start to believe that your tricks are good. When you finally meet an opponent who has the same Presence of Mind as you, he will think to himself “Who is this guy kidding with his obvious tricks?” You will feel a little silly, and your tricks might no longer work.

But there is a level of understanding even above that one. Once you meet the expert, can you no longer do your “Presence of Mind tricks?” I used to think that you basically couldn’t, and that you had to develop entirely different tactics. But then I noticed one player in particular who is unquestionably one of the best there is, and he often does things that are strictly terrible ideas in a textbook analysis. (His name is Alex Valle, and I’ll mention him again later.) He does sequence A when we all know that sequence B is strictly better. He does trick X when we all know that everyone decent can see trick X coming every time you do it, so it’s a waste of time to do it. But he does it, he hits with it, and he wins. Why?