It's not unrealistic to say that anyone who spends much time doing something hopes to become good at it. However, many people have played a specific game for many years and have never been able to improve at it. That doesn't always mean they don't want to be good at it, but sometimes it's hard to know what we're doing wrong. This isn't helped by the multitude of online guides which gives people builds and rotations to follow and very few resources on the fundamentals of how to approach playing games in general.

So here we are, with some guidelines and ideas I've come up with following my decades of experience gaming and also in watching and talking to others. Fundamentals are always important regardless of what we're working on, and I try to teach from that perspective whenever I can, whether teaching people a programming language, another language, or even how to play a game.

Fear not the mistakes

Developing humility is a fundamental characteristic that can help accelerate our learning process — it is the most significant way to unblock our progress towards advancement. It is essential to acknowledge that mastering a new skill or knowledge is not an overnight process but a journey involving time, experience, and concerted effort. Therefore, humility allows us to recognise that we are not perfect and have room for growth and improvement. It encourages us to be open to feedback and embrace challenges as opportunities.

Seriously. Don't be that person who constantly complains that they're doing everything right, but things aren't going well for them, and it's unfair. We're talking about games here, not our ridiculously competitive economic system that benefits those already winning. It's entertainment — albeit one of the more mentally stimulating forms of entertainment, but no one is entitled to being the best from day one.

Read the tooltips

If you're bothering to read this, you have no excuse to not have read the information provided to you in a game. This includes the tooltips or other such explanations for what your skills, abilities, attacks, and so on in the game do. This is an essential task no matter what game you are playing; even if you've already played it for 1,000 hours without reading them, it's time to finally read them.

Once you've done that, read the tooltips for everything else. Even if we aren't going to play other characters, factions, races, or whatever the game entails, it's really beneficial to know what our opponents or even teammates are capable of. Many people don't do this, so with this one simple undertaking, we can elevate our games. It will take time, and you won't remember everything straight away, of course, but what's the rush? Games are ultimately a collection of interesting decisions to be made, and how can we make good decisions if we don't know the details of the various options?

All according to keikaku

Translator's note: keikaku means plan.

First of all, throw your preconceived notions and plans out the window. This can be difficult, but it's necessary as it limits our ability to do well.

It seems strange, but you will win against many players in many games because they are too focused on playing in a manner that feels aesthetically right to them. This attitude appears in many forms.

For example, one might believe using items or spells in a game is cheating and, therefore, never use them. This puts them at a disadvantage against other players utilising all the tools at their disposal.

Another might be attached to an idea of how a class might play due to experience with one game and try to force that style into a completely different game. While it's understandable to want to stick with what's familiar, this limits the player's ability to adapt.

To increase our chances of success in various games, we need to open ourselves up to new possibilities and use the mechanics the game's designers and developers provide. It's essential to approach each game with an open mind and be willing to try new strategies and techniques.

Empty your mind. Be formless. Shapeless. Like water. You put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle, it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Water can flow, or it can crash. Be water, my friend. - Bruce Lee

This famous quote by Bruce Lee is a powerful message that can be applied to many areas of our lives, not just games.

Visualise your opponent's moves

Sometimes people become so focused on their own plans and desires that they fail to consider the potential reactions of others, particularly their opponents. This narrow-minded approach can result in unexpected and unfavourable outcomes. When individuals forget to consider how their opponent(s) may respond and potentially disrupt or foil their plans, they expose themselves to unnecessary frustration and losses.

How often have you heard someone express annoyance when their fantastic plan was instantly foiled? The response or outcome is rarely unprecedented or impossible — it's just that the player hasn't thought beyond the immediate. It's crucial to engage in forward thinking and carefully evaluate all possible outcomes, including unfavourable ones, to be prepared for potential disruptions or setbacks. Failure to do so may result in a situation where an opponent can easily thwart one's plans. It's not always enough to have a great plan; one must also consider the possible reactions of others and plan accordingly to ensure success.

Already, we have a strong example of why knowledge of the game is important. It's easier to imagine how an opponent might respond if we know how what they're using works, what options they might have at their disposal, and so on.

Managing resources

While using all available resources in a game might sound simple in theory, it can be challenging to execute in practice, and many people struggle with it. One crucial aspect to remember when playing almost any game is that every resource at your disposal, including your health, should be utilised.

Although avoiding damage completely may seem like an exciting challenge, it's not always the best strategy if it leads to the depletion of other resources and ultimately results in a loss. This is important regardless of whether we're playing a real-time competitive game or a turn-based strategy game against AI opponents. Maintaining a balance between using your resources effectively and minimising unnecessary loss is vital to increase your chances of winning.

Therefore, part of ensuring we're utilising our resources is ensuring that we use them — there's no point in saving them for an emergency because we usually end up hoarding them instead. This counts for almost everything from potions and materials to mana, energy, and even our own health or entire units. Unless we're playing a game where a loss of health makes us less effective (such as by reducing damage or accuracy per HP lost), there's no need to desperately preserve it as though losing any health is a failure.

Managing cost-effectiveness

Following the last point, using our resources as effectively as possible is always better. We'll get more into knowing and controlling value in a moment, but before that, we need to think about the available resources and how to use them effectively. So while the last point was about reminding ourselves to use them, the next step is to decide how to use them.

Most of us know this on a fundamental level. For example, if we need to heal 30 health, it's better to use a potion that heals 50 instead of 100 if we have to choose between them. But it gets more complex than that because we usually have many more options when selecting actions.

However, it's difficult to create a general rule for how and when to spend what and where because there are so many different types of games. For example, in games where our mana or energy replenishes quickly, we can afford to spend it more often. In a turn-based game, if it replenishes every turn, we should aim to spend as much of it as possible. In a game with really long cooldowns on abilities, we should be timing them for maximum effect. But that's about as generic as we can get without starting to talk about specific games.

The order of operations

In many games, the order in which we perform actions can significantly impact our success. This is different from the last point, which talks about which actions to take as we're now thinking about which order to take them. There are many decisions we make every single moment we play a game, aren't there?

One example of proper sequencing is ensuring we are in a good position before attacking. By doing so, we can maximise the effectiveness of our attack and avoid potential counterattacks from the enemy. Sometimes the result is the difference between players dying and one player taking out multiple opponents.

Similarly, how we use skills, abilities, and movement effects all impact the outcome of an encounter. For example, using a spell that utilises a debuff from another ability, using a movement ability to better position oneself, and timing the activation of a skill to follow a change in enemy behaviour all count. By using what we have at our disposal in an optimal order, we can amplify their effects and gain a strategic advantage over our opponents.

When playing a card game, players who hold more cards in their hand have a greater range of options available to them. This means you generally want to play any cards that draw cards from the deck first if you plan to do so, in case the new card changes the best strategy forward.

Know value and control it

The process of any game can be broken down into a simple cycle of trading value. Players engage in a back-and-forth exchange of various forms of value, such as taking out each other's units, getting kills, capturing resources, and so on.

We aim to take more value from these trades than we lose. Force the enemy to waste a high-value unit to take out a cheaper unit, force an enemy to overcommit their resources to keep up, and so on.

Card counting and its alternatives

While it's true that we often have limited information about the resources our opponent has at their disposal, there are ways to make educated guesses. This applies to many types of games — not just simple card games. Games often have various kinds of resources available, and many of these resources are universal within these games; that is, all players can access and use them, one way or another. Therefore, it's mostly a matter of understanding the costs associated with each resource. By paying attention to our opponent's moves, we can usually get a general idea of what resources they may have used, such as mana, materials, or even cooldowns.

For example, if we notice that our opponent just used a powerful skill, we can make an educated guess that there will be a long cooldown until they can use it again. By learning more about the game and the various resources available, we can become even better at making these educated guesses and ultimately improve our chances of winning. This is an example of how we can visualise our opponent's moves, and, as always, we're better at it when we know more.

Bait, but don't get baited

To control value, we need to know how to force our opponent's hands and therefore gain an understanding of our opponent's tendencies and how to manipulate them as we play. This involves a few things we've talked about already. We can factor in how the opponent might respond to each step we take and use that to help determine our order of operations.

One way to do this is by frontloading our high-value plays to force our opponent to respond early and use up their resources. This can create openings for us to make additional plays and gain an advantage. However, we must also be careful not to reveal too much of our strategy too early, as our opponent may catch on and adjust their strategy accordingly.

Another approach is to hold off on our high-value plays and make smaller, less threatening moves first. This can trick our opponents into expending their resources on these smaller plays, leaving them vulnerable to a big play later. By carefully timing our moves and analysing our opponent's response, we can effectively control the value of the game and come out on top.

Polymath this shit

There has been a bit of overlap and interconnectedness between these points, but hopefully, they have given some insight into improving one's strategy and tactics in playing games. After all, knowledge is knowledge — no, that's not a typo — and the more we have, the more confident we become in our abilities to tackle any challenges that come our way. The fundamentals we learn and the skills we acquire will not only help us perform better in one game but also in many other games, and help us build a strong foundation for other areas of our lives.

On that note, I will leave you with some classic Sun Zi's The Art of War wisdom:

Never attack uphill, nor defend downhill; do not be lured into attack by feigned flight, and do not attack an enemy who is rested and full of fight. Do not swallow the bait put out for you, and do not get in the way of an army that is homeward bound. - Sun Zi (孙子), The Art of War