Sports commentary was never my thing. It's only when I started watching Starcraft 2 commentators a few months ago (mainly Day9, Force and Husky) that I've really started to find game commentary interesting.

Starcraft 2 is a competitive game that is played between people. In most professional games it is played 1 vs 1, and players aim to make the right choices between building up an economy and using that economy to build up different types of armies and air forces.

The game is pretty complex, and it's often difficult for someone who is watching a professional game to understand the full significance of the professional's actions. What the commentators do is to describe the game choices in the appropriate context, informing the viewer not only about the choice that was picked, but also the choices that were not picked.

In order for commentators to be able to do this, they need to have a certain depth of knowledge about the game themselves. The knowledge is necessary but not sufficient for someone to be a competitive player - it takes significant physical training and skill to execute some of the maneuvers, something which is measured in-game by the number of actions per minute (APM) the players are sending the game. I also imagine the type of insight needed to weave a good story is not the same as the type of insight needed to play well. For one thing, there are three species in Starcraft 2 and most professionals specialize to one, but commentators need to be familiar with all three.

At the end of the day, it's storytelling and analysis as entertainment. Day9 often pokes fun at the fact that a lot of the people watching his show probably don't play much Starcraft 2 at all. It's when he mentioned this that I realized it's really not that different from football commentary.

---

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vPrd73VvmKY#t=172s

So it's become this daily routine where I have a deadline for writing this blog post, and I procrastinate until about 1 hour before the deadline and then just throw topics on the screen until one that I don't hate sticks and I press "Publish."

It's slightly stressful, but that's okay. I certainly do not buy into the notion that I have to wait for some creative mood to strike me. The way I see it it's more like working out.

In fact, I'd be more worried if I were not feeling strain. Strain is the mark of effort, which is necessary - effortless practice doesn't build muscle.

Am I having fun yet?

Calvinism is a branch of Christian thought which subscribes to the concept of predestination. Predestination is the concept that one's actions do not influence whether one will go to heaven or not - all that has been predetermined. Now, you'd wonder how this could possibly work in a religion, since we normally think of the going to heaven as being determined by one's actions and thus serving as incentive to do good.

The way it works is that you merely reverse the arrow of causality. Instead of doing good leading to salvation, you state that those who are destined for heaven would inevitably behave in a good way. The idea is that a Calvinist would be hoping to discover himself to be one of the heaven-bound, and thus be convincing himself that he was indeed doing good deeds out of his very core. It's definitely plausible that this would be more powerful motivation, as someone would be thinking "I'm doing good because I am good" as opposed to "I'm doing good because I don't like lava". It seems to be a clever way to avoid motivational crowding and maximize intrinsic motivation.

---

There is a psychology phenomenon called the hedonic treadmill, which is the observation that people seem to revert to the same level of happiness regardless of what happens to them, be it winning a lottery or becoming paraplegic. Psychologists have observed that people are imbued with levels of happiness that are very difficult to change.

I've always thought that it was amusing how much this resembled predestination. I can imagine trying hard to convince myself that my hedonic set point was higher.