The Code – Part 5

1. Do whatever it takes to win
2. Be respectul to your opponent
3. Game balance is irrelevant
4. Stats are irrelevant
5. Approach your game without emotion
   Yeah, it is almost like these get harder and harder to follow right and this one seems almost insurmountable. Now remember that the idea behind outlining a “code” like this is not to set up a list of things I think a Starcraft 2 players should do perfectly. The reason why I drew a line between this and the Bushido of ancient Japanese warrior culture is how the Bushido is nothing that you learn and then just do, it is a lifelong process of constantly improving on each aspect of it and the same goes for this code. You should strive to follow these steps, and to get better at better at following them for every day. This one is a particularly difficult one.
   I have already covered some of the reasons for you to be emotionally neutral in other earlier steps of the code. Like how being mannered and not raging over balance is an important move to not open the floodgates of emotions. Because floodgates is a very fitting word. When you start raging over balance it is really hard to stop, you will start doing it every time you lose and you will start to look to balance all the time. Not venting your emotions through balance rage or bad mannering or what not is an important first step to not let your emotions sweep you away, but that is only superficial, the important thing is to deal with the inside.
   There is never a situation where emotions will improve your capability to play Starcraft. The game is based on mathematics and logic and the only way to deduce the correct moves is with reason and emotions invariably clouds your reason and makes you take incorrect decisions. Fear is perhaps the most devastating because it will manifest in ladder anxiety where you don’t dare to play games which obviously limits your progress but when in games fear makes you hesitate. You should always respect your opponents capabilities but never fear them, if you fear your opponent you are going to overcompensate for things and you are not going to be swift and decisive enough when you need to make a move. Fear might cause you to hesitate and delay a push that you thought were rationally correct, then when you finally go for the push the timing has changed and you get crushed and you wrongfully interpret the push as being bad when in fact it would had worked perfectly if you had just gone for it straight away.
   Anger will cause you to rationalize your mistakes and blame it on outside factors, when you are angry you also become defensive. Not only may you make the wrong decisions in game because you want to punish your opponent but most importantly anger does it’s damage when you are not playing games, it incapacitates your ability to analyze your games and to learn from your mistakes. Unless you fight to control your anger you are not going to be able to improve efficiently because you will overlook mistakes in your own game.
   Frustration or annoyance is a manifestation of anger but has different impacts on your game, especially it causes you to lose focus and to hurry things. When in a game being frustrated by an opponent who harasses often and well is going to cause you to make mistakes, the harass itself will cause you to make mistakes because you physically have to deal with it but it is the frustration that does most of the damage, it is also likely to cause you to overreact and put way more defense than you need to thwart off the next harass just to avoid that frustration. In between games frustration leads you to feel an urge to get back in game and get revenge, get a win or whatever making you leap into a new ladder game with your head still in the previous game and then you mess up your build because you were thinking about the last game, or you skip analyzing your replay because you are in too much of a hurry to move onto the next game.
   Pride and all kinds of positive emotions we feel when we win games are just as problematic because they will make you overconfident and again distract you from learning from your mistakes. If you crushed your opponent you are probably going to go and watch the replay as a spectator rather than an analyst, looking at all the awesome moves you did and miss your mistakes, mistakes that might get your crushed in the next game. Building up pride and too much positive emotion when you are winning is also to blow up a bubble that will inevitably pop when you go on that losing streak.
   Despair or desperation is the worst because it will completely unravel your game and almost make you incapable of playing, making you mess your builds up and gg prematurely and just flat out skip important steps in your game.
   All of these emotions feed into one another which is why it matters if you ragequit games or not, because it is all a storm of emotions that is hard to stop once you get it started.
   Now just being aware of all of this and being mindful of it is a good step towards controlling emotions in games better, but to improve from there you might have to set up your own rituals. Maybe when you are at the end of a game don’t gg but sit for a while and just spectate your own emotions if you will. If you are angry, sit back and experience what that anger feels like, try to deconstruct it and ask yourself why you are angry and just use your reason to pick it apart. Don’t leave the game until you have cooled off. If you start to feel yourself going off on an emotional spree just step away from the game and go and do something that helps you, get fresh air, drink water, bash your head against the wall, listen to a song that is calming to you. It will be individual to everyone, just find ways to untangle your emotions and then go back and analyze your loss.