How StarCraft II made me a Stragetic Marketer

On Friday night I was watching the GSL — the Global StarCraft II League — played out of their studio in Seoul, South Korea, with English commentary from the legendary esports casting duo, Tasteless and Artosis.

I have done this on and off for the past 10 years. StarCraft II has had a huge impact on me, and it was my introduction to esports. It is still the esport that I watch the most, and it has been there for me in some dark periods of my life, as well fundamentally transforming me into a competitive person and a strategic thinker.

This week marks the 10th anniversary of StarCraft II, and for this occasion I want to explain to you the key lessons I learnt from StarCraft. I think about what StarCraft taught me almost every day, both in my personal and professional life — especially in my role as a strategically minded social media marketer. I spend a lot of time researching and preparing strategic recommendations using the skills I learned from StarCraft.

So let’s get into it.

Know your Strategy before you play

The game loads. Your workers start to mine minerals. The match has begun.

The first thought into your head cannot be “What am I going to do this game?”

The quickest way to have your plans fail is to hesitate, and the easiest way to hesitate is to not have a plan in the first place.

You should already know what it is you want to do, before you need to start doing it — that strategy can change, but you should come with something ready. Any time lost to uncertainty, is time given to your opponent and now they already have an advantage over you.

And that’s super important in my marketing work. People often overlook that their competitors are trying just as hard as they are to gain an advantage.

Whether you like it or not, Capitalism is inherently competitive, and so I believe a lot of competitive gaming logic applies. You can’t give time to the opposition by simply hesitating on a decision, you give them an advantage without them having to do anyhting.

So come with a game plan, and make your decisions quickly.

Commit to your strategy

So you’ve decided to go for an aggressive Zergling Rush. We’re going to make a lot of Zerglings and get on their side of the map, as quick as we can, and apply pressure to our opponent.

Great. If that’s the plan, we have to commit to it. We can’t deviate from it otherwise it won’t succeed. We’re not going for a long game here, we’re not going for upgrades and an economic advantage, we are going for the kill.

Again hesitating is the fastest way to have a strategy fail. We can’t afford to star second guessing ourselves. Quite simply, you don’t have the resources, time and mental agility to do several straegities at once, you end up failing at multiple ideas you half comitted to. Maybe it turns out to be a bad plan, but you’ll never know if it was a good one if you didn’t put everything you had behind it.

Take a lesson from StarCraft: commit.

Always be working on your transition

So this is really at the core of thinking strategically, for me. You’re applying pressure, your zerglings are in their base dealing damage…but you’re not winning. You can see it quickly, that you don’t have enough to close this fight out. You feel victory slipping between your fingers, and you know its too late to start the next phase.

You’ve lost.

What you should’ve done is started a transition.

Whether your plan goes well or doesn’t, you need to start cooking up the next phase of your strategy on the back burner, so that whatever the outcome is you can slide the next stage into place and there is no break in your strategy.

Again, this fits marketing well, but I use it in my career and personal life too.

Where do you want to be in a year and how are you going to get there? It’s probably not just one strategy or one thing, that will get you there. The first phase sets up the next, and so on. It’d be foolish to sit back and hope the same thing that worked yesterday is going to keep working out for you tomorrow.

Always be asking yourself: While this strategy is in motion, what’s the next strategy I need to be ready to execute, regardless of whether this plan works or not.

You lost when you didn’t scout

So in StarCraft II you have this thing called Fog of War. Basically, you can only see a certain distance away from your own units and buildings — you can’t see what your enemy is doing unless you go look.

And it’s really easy, it’s so freaking easy, it is the easiest thing in StarCraft — to see that enemy deathball of lasers and plasma cannons coming out of the fog and think:

“Oh no, I’ve lost”

There’s that moment of defeat, of resignation. A sigh. You know you cannot beat their army with the composition and number of units you have. It’s game over.

Except, that’s not what really happened. You didn’t lose when the enemy army entered your base, you lost 7 minutes ago when you didn’t scout their base.

If you had scouted their base, you would’ve seen what your opponent was building. You would’ve known what to expect, and you’d have been ready for it. If you scout your opponent often enough, they should never be able to surprise you.

Information is critical to strategic decision making. You can’t adjust your own strategy or implement a new one without information. You need to know what the competition is up to if you are going to be able to survive their strategy, as well as executing your own.

This is something I see often see in my work as well. Marketers come with their own plan of attack, but they haven’t prepared to endure what their competitors are planning.

Now, I am not advocating for corporate espionage here. Let’s be clear about that. But I do want to highlight how much information is freely available. What trends can you see in your opponents? What trends can you see in the industry? What roles are competitors hiring for? What audiences are they targeting and how are those audiences changing?

You don’t need to take it as seriously as hiring a “Competitive Intelligence Manager”, it can be as simple as reading what’s already out there. As a career community manager I’m plugged into a lot of communities, and I listen for those strands of my web vibrate, however faint they might be, for change on the horizon. I’m no oracle, but I have a decent sense of what to prepare for and at least I know what the latest memes are.

Concede Defeat Freely

When I first started watching competitive StarCraft, seeing the best players in the world battle it out in high-speed micro battles, having to make 100s of decisions every minute — I was in awe.

So I was stunned to see players surrender.

“Why’d he give up??” I shouted at my friend Jaime, who introduced me to esports over KFC while we watched one of the best Terran vs. Terran matches I’ve ever seen.

I didn’t understand it. Surely you should fight to the end? Fight to the last marine, zealot or zergling! StarCraft only declares a winner when someone loses all of their buildings, so why were these pros surrendering?

This lesson was the one that it took me the longest to understand.

What was happening is that the players got so good, so unbelievably in-tune with what certain combinations of units can and cannot do, so aware of the precise numbers of minerals they needed to construct what they needed at any given moment — that they knew, without a shadow of doubt, when they were beat.

To concede defeat freely is not shameful. I believe we should all be more comfortable admitting defeat, free of emotion.

This might sound similar to “Fail Fast” or “Kill your Darlings” as advice for letting go of anxiety and being comfortable with failures. But honestly, they don’t go far enough for me. There is still a touch of detachment to the real issue.

In my mind you need to admit, to yourself, that you were bested by someone better than you. You need to admit you failed, and that is entirely your failure to bear. No excuses, but also, no judgment.

This is the beautiful thing about StarCraft. It’s you against one other opponent. You have no team-mates to blame. You have the same starting resources that your opponent does, and the only thing to stop you from playing the world’s greatest game of StarCraft II right then and there is practice.

Take a Marie Kondo approach: if it does not spark joy, throw it into the fire!

Admit to yourself, freely and without emotion or arrogance, that your strategy just wasn’t working out. That’s okay. Yes, it’s on your shoulders, but that’s okay too. Concede that you were defeated, and queue up your next match.

Now, this might sound in conflict to Commit to a Strategy, but we’re talking about committing until we recognise — through our personal expertise — that failure is inevetiable.

Here it is as a process:

• Come with Strategy and Commit to it
• While that staregy is in motion, begin working on your Transition.
• Review the initial strategy, has it served its purpose of setting up your Strategy or is it failing?
• If you see your plan is failing. Admit your defeat without guilt or embarassment.
• Collect information from any available source that is relevant to your decision making, and make adjustments as needed.
• Start your Transition and move onto the next phase.
• Commit to it, and begin work on your next Transition.

I truly believe this works for my work in marketing, for what ever work you may do, for your career and where you want to take your life — and maybe it might even help you win a game of StarCraft.

I hope this helps you in someway and made a modicum of sense. Perhaps these lessons will be of help to you as you approach a strategic solution to a problem you face, or maybe it will seed the idea of giving a 10 year-old game a go.

So as we say at the beginning of each match of StarCraft:

GL HF

“Good Luck, and Have Fun!”

For me Day[9] has been at the centre of this journey, as someone who taught me StarCraft and taught me ways to learn and how to apply that learing. In particular, The Day[9] Daily got me through those really rough patches in my life and I could not conclude without acknowleding his impact on my life — So thank you Sean, so very much ❤

Addendum: By the time I finished writing this, more new broke around the low pay Blizzard employees have suffered under. I fully support their collective action, and their right to fair pay.