A Corpus Analysis of Strategy Video Game Play in Starcraft: Brood War
Joshua M. Lewis, Patrick Trinh, David Kirsh · 2011
We present the first ever large scale analysis of actual strategy video game play. Using a corpus of over 2,000 Starcraft: Brood War games from international tournaments, we analyze every player’s actions to determine which of their capacities lead to success. We also tie these capacities to their likely cognitive underpinnings, showing that the ability to distribute attention is correlated with winning games. These results have implications for how we might train people to manage critical real world tasks, and for how we approach the project of studying this new medium.