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"What I Miss About Counterstrike" - Blog authored by CSS legend JonMumm

339 points by janineyoong 15y ago

whunut 15y ago
Interesting. I thought this would be a critique of modern day first person shooters.
- cliftonk 15y ago
  Modern day first person shooters provide an immersive, story-driven single player experience, but have gameplay that cannot make for a decent competitive platform.
  - vl 15y ago
    Surely you are aware that Halo 3 with variants and COD:MW with variants are the most successful online FPSes of all time? Both were also criticized for shallow single player stories, not on par with previous versions.
    - aspensmonster 15y ago
      Well, to be fair, COD is an RPG. If you have to farm and craft for 20 hours to get a decent weapon, you're not playing an FPS. Halo on the other hand is a different story :D
    - btmorex 15y ago
      I wonder how you define successful. Microsoft doesn't seem to like releasing simultaneous player counts except on launch days and of course launch is almost always the highest count you'll find, but the Halo 3 launch day count (750k) I found isn't that impressive compared to run of the mill counter-strike numbers on steam (75k). Mind you, counter-strike at this point is 12 years old. I'm pretty sure that no one will be playing either of those games in 12 years.
    - cliftonk 15y ago
      Those games do not even come close to the competitive levels of CS for team-based FPS and Quake3 for dueling. Not by a long shot.
sev 15y ago
To be the best at anything, means that you must live abnormally and do abnormal things. This is why being the best at everything is nearly impossible, since each thing to master would require different kinds of abnormalities and different ways of living abnormally. This is why you find "geniuses" in a particular field, like math, or music, and they're usually not-so-genius in most other fields. "Genius" is attainable in my book, it's a matter of being focused and "putting your mind to it" as the article states, and this focus and "putting your mind to it" require being and doing abnormal things.
- jaggederest 15y ago
  That's what makes the old-school polymaths like Goethe and Von Neumann so amazing to me - they not only did it in a single field, but many, all relatively simultaneously.
  - sev 15y ago
    Many, which are very closely related. Computer science and mathematics are essentially one and the same, or maybe a subset of another (as an example)
    - kevinalexbrown 15y ago
      Goethe did more than math or CS.
- sliverstorm 15y ago
  This is why I abandoned the desire to be the #1 best at something. This isn't to say I can't strive to be exceptionally good, but being the best is such a great cost. I haven't yet found something where I feel the payoff of being THE best is worth it. This doesn't really jive with conventional worldviews, and I feel like I should be ashamed for "giving up", but honestly it seems like a destructive behavior/goal.
- dominostars 15y ago
  According to a lot of research, it isn't that the person does abnormal things, it's that the person invests an abnormal amount of time into practicing his skill. It's an important distinction, because it illustrates that 'being the best' is more of a decision than an abnormality.
windsurfer 15y ago
CSS being counter strike: source, though he may be talented at using cascading style sheets as well.
- janineyoong 15y ago
  confirmed jon is pretty awesome at cascading style sheets, also, yes.
- yahelc 15y ago
  Ahh. The whole time I was wondering: "How is this guy a legend at both counterstrike and cascading stylesheets?"
- benatkin 15y ago
  I thought it was DVD Jon, because of DeCSS.
- hkmurakami 15y ago
  Title should then be CS:S if I remember the acronym correctly?
cdk 15y ago
Thanks for the great article. Counter Strike was the game that really got me interested in programming. I got introduced to it in early 2000 and was blown away that this game was made by hobbyists who created a mod (expansion package) for Half Life which in itself was revolutionary at the time. Eventually Valve acquired Counter Strike and the rest is history. I still think fondly of the many hours spent on de_dust and cs_assault.
- potatolicious 15y ago
  Counter-Strike had a similar effect on me. I'd be coding since long before CS, but most were small, simple hacks. Seeing the success of Counter-Strike, and the mod-mania of that era, got me interested in modding, where I was first exposed to the complexities (and math!) that "real" software entailed. From there I went on to write some standalone, small games, then went deeper down the C++ rabbit hole which helped me get my first software internship. The rest is, as they say, history.
  - trafficlight 15y ago
    I remember trying out tons of mods for Half Life and Quake around '99-2000. That's all but disappeared now. Are there still active modscenes for newer games? Minecraft is the only one that really comes to mind.
    - potatolicious 15y ago
      Nothing has been as easily moddable as Half-Life, with the same install-base. I suspect there's another problem with mods today: asset production. In Half-Life's day even I could hack out a semi-passable player model in a day or two. Nowadays, producing assets for games has been made dramatically more complex. In short, you really can't find a lot of people willing to produce that quality and complexity of art for free. The size of teams required to put anything together, as a result of this, has also put a lot of things beyond a mod team's modest reaches. I think that's why a lot of the indie excitement is around casual and "low-fi" games like Minecraft. Assets have always been a major blocker, and when you embrace the fact that you're not AAA, you have a better experience with it.
bprater 15y ago
League of Legends has become my modern-day Counter-Strike. The buzz the author mentions is exactly the buzz I get playing the game over hundreds of hours. The rules of the game are fairly simple -- and inside of that simplicity a desire for perfection emerges. It's fun and challenging -- likely why I'm a programmer, too.
- baby 15y ago
  I think a lot of ex pro counter strike players are playing LoL right now.
- dingfeng_quek 15y ago
  LOL is many more times more complex than CS. If you are weird, try running game-theory and stochastic simulation models. Try to optimize things like item builds, team-movement/formation, engagement sequence, allocation of champions to lanes at various times, allocation of gold/farm to champions. And then to apply it.
taylorfausak 15y ago
Based on the title, I expected Jon to explain the things he missed about Counter-Strike, the game, with respect to Counter-Strike: Source (CSS), the sequel. That's not what this is about. It's a retrospective on his career as a professional CS player. I then wondered why he didn't pick up another game or hobby. Turns out, he did. "Earlier this year I stumbled my way in to the world of tech startups."
cliftonk 15y ago
I played with and against him for years. His old teammate n0it was chatting with me on facebook for a while about my start-up-turned-company as he uses our software on his campus. I had not talked to either of them for a few years at minimum. Jon's a great guy. Good read. Very surprised I saw something like this on HN. Small world, eh?
rkon 15y ago
Cliff notes: being great at something requires spending a lot of time on it. Not exactly groundbreaking insight, and I disagree entirely with the assertion that such dedication makes one "weird". Any sane person would be jealous of someone who's so passionate about their career that they gladly dedicate signifant effort to mastering it. The fact that he chose to spend 10,000+ hours mastering Counter Strike is the "weird" part, although I'd personally love to see gaming become more accepted here as a professional sport.
- sray 15y ago
  I think you're missing the point. It's not about becoming great at something. It's about being exceptional at one thing. It's about spending every moment of your life either practicing or thinking about that thing, to the detriment of everything and everyone else. It's about being possessed with the desire to be the best. And that is weird, by definition - only a small fraction of people have such dedication to one pursuit. It's not just passion - it's obsession. And, in the end, it's the feeling you get when you've attained that level of mastery, and the hollowness you feel when you give it up to focus on a more balanced life. Many people would be jealous of someone with such skill, but few would envy the work and the exclusionary lifestyle required to get there.
  - deleted 15y ago
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- dorian-graph 15y ago
  Most people are always 'jealous' whether it be of people who are great at singing, playing an instrument, videogames, or something, yet they really don't seem to care or desire that and often they feel negative towards those people. It seems everything in their lives revolves around watching others do things (Reality TV shows, magazines, news stories, etc) and little to do with their actual selves. They don't want to be in a good conversation, they want to have an average conversation where everyone agrees on some average opinion or every now and then someone will be 'edgy' to give it a bit of flair. They don't want to understand good art they simply want to say that one of their kids once went to an art gallery and that they saw know that Picasso has weird/funny looking paintings. This sounds elitist yet it's not. From school age and possibly even before the majority latches onto the dumb notion that if a kid studies well he's a teacher's pet and weird or some other term and they never let go of this idea. Ever. At university one of the subjects was systems analysis and design which came with a huge textbook. I read some of it each week that aligned with that week's lecture/tutorial content and people said that's weird. .. but all this is like endlessly driving on a roundabout because what it means to be weird and normal differs though does have a common understanding. A common understanding is that 'normal' is not being the best or putting in the best effort. They should just start saying average instead of normal. For me, all those people they call weird are the normals ones as they're doing it right. The ones who exercise are normal and the ones who sit around are weird. The ones who do the homework are normal and the ones who don't are ridiculously weird. It's like they want to ignore cause and effect and modify the universe to suit their quick whims for instant desires. What a bunch of weirdos.
muffs 15y ago
Wow. It's a great feeling, being the 'best' or better than the majority. I've also experienced the void created after deciding to move on. I still feel as though I'm on an endless search to find something that I can be as passionate about. Thanks for the great read!
baby 15y ago
I think I'm also very close to those 10.000 hours in cs 1.6. I can really relate to this guy story. I don't think many people will ever experience that adrenaline you get when you're in high level competition. That is sport or esport. It's like a first girl friend, I will never experience that feeling again and that kind of makes me sad. I know I've wasted a big part of my life playing this game, but I don't regret because of that competition feeling, that stress, that happiness when you win a tournament, that solidarity between players of the same team, the nights spend training and practicing...
- WALoeIII 15y ago
  Pick up a new sport/hobby/game. Practice.
- mattbot5000 15y ago
  If you enjoyed the time, did you really waste it?
tsotha 15y ago
tl;dr: You can do anything you want to do, but you can't do everything you want to do.
robbiet480 15y ago
Oh Janine, you so funny.
- janineyoong 15y ago
  Not trying to be funny. I posted this because this is the best thing I've read of Jon's - and I felt there was something universally resonant about the sweet pain of aspiring to greatness. What I didn't expect were the multiple comments from those who play or used to play CS and draw lessons that apply to programming and teamwork. If CS produces colleagues like Jon, then more please.
mafro 15y ago
"all of a sudden I'm in a de_dust pub server and I just picked up my first mp5" Ahh the memories..
jiggy2011 15y ago
I spent a fair amount of my youth playing counterstrike and still have fond memories of it. I also learned to program roughly around the same time and found the later far more fulfilling in the long run. I learned skills in programming in those years that I still use today, but whenever I even touch a public counter strike (source) server these days I get hopelessly owned by a new generation. I now see video games as pure downtime in the same way as watching a movie or something, I used to be very competitive and my scores in public servers and clan matches deeply mattered, despite all of this I really wish I had spent more of my CS time learning programming or taking up a completely different hobby (e.g real sport or music). I sometimes wonder where I would be now if I had spent that time doing something else. The problem with video games is that you are spending your time perfecting something that is useful only in a very specific virtual world which can be radically changed or even destroyed at any time. A very small minority of people may become "professional gamers" but for the most part it feels like almost completely wasted time in hindsight. Will it make you money? No Will it get you laid? No Will it help you express yourself? No Will it make you healthy and fit? No Will it better mankind in some manner? No I'm not hating on video games, just if you are going to spend that amount of time becoming awesome at something it does seem like a very poor choice.
- ricardobeat 15y ago
  Spot on. But oh, the feeling of a well-placed deagle headshot through the wall corner...
- gabaix 15y ago
  The choice is hardly one after 10,000 hours. Video games are addictive and satisfy short-term pleasure. My guess is that becoming awesome is sometimes just a matter of "addictiveness".
  - kejadlen 15y ago
    There's probably some correlation/causation in there - I imagine that you would tend to become "addicted" to things that you're naturally good at.
gwern 15y ago
If I may, David Foster Wallace (as so often) said it better: > “But it’s better for us not to know the kinds of sacrifices the professional-grade athlete has made to get so very good at one particular thing…the actual facts of the sacrifices repel us when we see them: basketball geniuses who cannot read, sprinters who dope themselves, defensive tackles who shoot up with bovine hormones until they collapse or explode. We prefer not to consider closely the shockingly vapid and primitive comments uttered by athletes in postcontest interviews or to consider what impoverishments in one’s mental life would allow people actually to think the way great athletes seem to think. Note the way”up close and personal" profiles of professional athletes strain so hard to find evidence of a rounded human life — outside interests and activities, values beyond the sport. We ignore what’s obvious, that most of this straining is farce. It’s farce because the realities of top-level athletics today require an early and total commitment to one area of excellence. An ascetic focus. A subsumption of almost all other features of human life to one chosen talent and pursuit. A consent to live in a world that, like a child’s world, is very small…[Tennis player Michael] Joyce is, in other words, a complete man, though in a grotesquely limited way…Already, for Joyce, at twenty-two, it’s too late for anything else; he’s invested too much, is in too deep. I think he’s both lucky and unlucky. He will say he is happy and mean it. Wish him well." http://www.esquire.com/print-this/the-string-theory-0796?page=all http://www.esquire.com/print-this/the-string-theory-0796?pag... (A quote I come back to on occasion, thinking about my essay http://www.gwern.net/The%20Melancholy%20of%20Subculture%20Society http://www.gwern.net/The%20Melancholy%20of%20Subculture%20So... )
- kevinalexbrown 15y ago
  I think the DFW was a little melodramatic here. I don't think the commitment to true excellence necessarily detracts from other possible commitments in the long run. E.g. DFW was a writer of singular ability, and he was, at various points in his life, dedicated to tennis, philosophy, and mathematics. More to the point, the time spent being great at CS doesn't seem to have limited this guy's future ability to do things like work at a startup. While I'm sure it was an unbalanced life during the period of dedication, suggesting that it's the dedication itself which reduces athletes to "shockingly vapid and primitive comments" goes a little far.
DutGRIFF33 15y ago
Wow. Nicely said. I help out with Ninja Girl's party in D2 which is a Counter Strike Source server and I never hear anything about Counter Strike outside of the server anymore. I am curious to see what Counter Strike Global Offensive will be like. Our server is the most popular in the US and I am pretty sure we can keep that status in CS:GO. I am kinda hoping it brings the spotlight back to CS.
deepkut 15y ago
Few news articles (even on HN) 'move' me, but this one did. To all those whom were among the best at a popular game, you understand. Some interesting comments: like whether playing CS, or any other game, is "worth it." I agree with kejadlen, "does it make you happy?" Though heroin, at some point in time, makes addicts "happy." One thing is for certain though, the feeling of mastery gets harder and harder to find later in life, at least with regards to professions or wealth.
kaichanvong 15y ago
Having read this, there are so many skills you can pick up from the gaming culture that helps you integrate with working as a programmer. He probably knows how to do scripting from IRC... maybe he's written a bot or knows how a bot works from IRC. I remember lots of bots that work in different way and what you can learn from watching it run. At 16 I remember seeing my very first bot and being amazed by it. The problem was that I was on a Windows box and everyone around me was on Linux. Then the problem was which language did I pick. Then the problem was that the most popular language was a bitch to install... then there was the problem I had no idea what the error was and if it was something I had done. Oh the list goes on. What I'm trying to say is, not everything is a waste. Knowing when something is valuable enough to spend time of is a skill in its self. +1 procrastination proclaimer
- littledude 15y ago
  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BAx7Npsrin4&t=4m30s http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BAx7Npsrin4&t=4m30s same for designers as well lol
kang 15y ago
There is a place called Kota in India. It is a hub of coaching institutes trying to assist highschool students get admission into top engineering and medical colleges(IIT,AIIMS) of India. >5000 hours of counterstrike is pretty common game-time that students living there spend and you would easily find >25000 kids of age 15-16 such types. Millions of students go there each year. Competition is so tough that hardly top 2% get admissions into IITs. As a result, >90% do not study. You see them playing they are experts! Most of them don't even know how to log into a server. The cybercafe would set up the LAN for them. All they do is play, all the time. As per rule the shops are supposed to close after 11 pm. But these shops have eating/smoking and toilet arrangements inside. They pull down the shutter, as if the shop is closed from 11 to 6. Students stay 'voluntarily trapped' inside for a LAN party at a discounted rate of 1-2$ for the whole night. Once the course is over, the gig is too. they go back to their hometowns, never playing again. I work in Delhi and I see clans participating and even winning international competitions like WCG. But even the gameplay of the best, is only at par average as per Kota standards. All this time spent for happiness, curing boredom. Rajasthan would be the biggest consumer of CS, DoTA, Tekken, AoE if pirated stuff is counted for.
- manish_gill 15y ago
  Wow, never knew that about Kota. Had a friend who lived there for a year for IIT studies. He himself admits that he never once attended a single class and was mostly just having fun. Counter Strike in India is certainly big. I only wish Starcraft 2 was as well. Oh, and can you tell me where in Delhi do these tournaments happen? I don't play much CS but earlier on in school, all I could think about was being a pro-gamer!
intended 15y ago
Gaming taught me a lot and made my life better. I was depressed and with few positive catalysts. Warcraft 3 made me play with other people, meet people who I am friends with today and also taught me to be excellent. I got to compete, set up a clan which trained other people, and held tournaments, and taught me how to take responsibility for my team. Like someone else mentioned, I learnt how to maintain morale, how to take on the jobs no one liked and to excel at them. Having people have faith in your strategy, making people follow your plan, knowing how important it is to even have one, no matter how bad, I learnt that from gaming. But above all, like the OP, i learnt what it means to be the best at something. I look back at that time and am glad I did it. It helped me start building myself back up and taught me the basics of team work which I use everyday.
noobface 15y ago
I started competitive play at 15, eventually peaking at 18 with 2 CPL showings. I probably played vs. juan at a couple LANs. The amount of focus, time, and sheer mental fortitude required showed me what it took to truly master something. When I could drop 35 kills in a half in a tournament, or kill 10 people in a round in a pub, I understood my level of commitment had led to that success. I spent the past few years at a telecom/networking company doing sales as an engineer. Multi-million dollar deals, complex designs and high-stress situations. Learning to communicate only what was relevant and necessary, eliminating all extraneous information, was essential to success. My co-workers looked to me to quickly prioritize targets, shift strategy, and keep morale high as we focused on the end goal of closing. Counter-strike taught me that. No other "group project" or random nonsense in college prepared me to work with the most highly regarded and ardent professionals in the world. My team would put egos aside, drop all sense of the individual, and focus on beating an enemy that was composed of the very same caliber. It taught me the value of "ideal scenarios" or "how it's supposed to work". The immaculate plans leading up to a meeting, that required innumerable changes during practical execution. Without the ability to communicate as fluidly as possible between individuals any slight shift in the plan would create utter confusion and chaos, quickly exploited by a foe just begging for you to make a mistake. I'd like to grab a beer with JonMumm. There's just something about the high-level Counter-Strike people that has reassured me that there are others out there can place so much of themselves into something that it doesn't become second nature, it becomes you.
junto 15y ago
Looking back to a few years ago, I would actually say that I was addicted to CS. Playing matches in a clan is a sure fire way to drive the addiction because it becomes hard to leave without letting your teammates down. Luckily, due to Steam's awful user account tools via the client and the website, I am unable to recover my Steam password. The only way to recover it is to deface the CD box by writing the support ticket number on it, taking a photograph of that defacement and the product key and then sending that photo to their support email address. Then they will reset your password. You know what, I'm really not that bothered!
ggwicz 15y ago
"When you pursue something difficult, eventually you have to make a choice between being balanced, normal, and conventional, and being different, weird, and exceptional. I chose the latter." Wow. You are not a normal writer. More writing needs to come from the heart like this. I don't even care about video games and loved this article.
erikb 15y ago
What is a stratcaller?
- Simucal 15y ago
  The equivalent of a team captain or quarterback. As the situation of a match unfolds the stratcaller will do just that, call out different strategies and make decisions about what the other members should do.
deleted 15y ago
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kgosser 15y ago
Love the shoutout to Aaron Rodgers! lol But seriously, as a former Cal-I vet myself, I know exactly what he's talking about. And I can relate to how it feels like that in the world of start-ups. In my opinion, a lot of it has to do with the book "FLOW". We should all go read it. Good stuff!

339 points by janineyoong 15y ago

whunut 15y ago

Interesting. I thought this would be a critique of modern day first person shooters.

cliftonk 15y ago
Modern day first person shooters provide an immersive, story-driven single player experience, but have gameplay that cannot make for a decent competitive platform.
- vl 15y ago
  Surely you are aware that Halo 3 with variants and COD:MW with variants are the most successful online FPSes of all time? Both were also criticized for shallow single player stories, not on par with previous versions.
  - aspensmonster 15y ago
    Well, to be fair, COD is an RPG. If you have to farm and craft for 20 hours to get a decent weapon, you're not playing an FPS. Halo on the other hand is a different story :D
  - btmorex 15y ago
    I wonder how you define successful. Microsoft doesn't seem to like releasing simultaneous player counts except on launch days and of course launch is almost always the highest count you'll find, but the Halo 3 launch day count (750k) I found isn't that impressive compared to run of the mill counter-strike numbers on steam (75k). Mind you, counter-strike at this point is 12 years old. I'm pretty sure that no one will be playing either of those games in 12 years.
  - cliftonk 15y ago
    Those games do not even come close to the competitive levels of CS for team-based FPS and Quake3 for dueling. Not by a long shot.

sev 15y ago

To be the best at anything, means that you must live abnormally and do abnormal things. This is why being the best at everything is nearly impossible, since each thing to master would require different kinds of abnormalities and different ways of living abnormally. This is why you find "geniuses" in a particular field, like math, or music, and they're usually not-so-genius in most other fields. "Genius" is attainable in my book, it's a matter of being focused and "putting your mind to it" as the article states, and this focus and "putting your mind to it" require being and doing abnormal things.

jaggederest 15y ago
That's what makes the old-school polymaths like Goethe and Von Neumann so amazing to me - they not only did it in a single field, but many, all relatively simultaneously.
- sev 15y ago
  Many, which are very closely related. Computer science and mathematics are essentially one and the same, or maybe a subset of another (as an example)
  - kevinalexbrown 15y ago
    Goethe did more than math or CS.
sliverstorm 15y ago
This is why I abandoned the desire to be the #1 best at something. This isn't to say I can't strive to be exceptionally good, but being the best is such a great cost. I haven't yet found something where I feel the payoff of being THE best is worth it. This doesn't really jive with conventional worldviews, and I feel like I should be ashamed for "giving up", but honestly it seems like a destructive behavior/goal.
dominostars 15y ago
According to a lot of research, it isn't that the person does abnormal things, it's that the person invests an abnormal amount of time into practicing his skill. It's an important distinction, because it illustrates that 'being the best' is more of a decision than an abnormality.

windsurfer 15y ago

CSS being counter strike: source, though he may be talented at using cascading style sheets as well.

janineyoong 15y ago
confirmed jon is pretty awesome at cascading style sheets, also, yes.
yahelc 15y ago
Ahh. The whole time I was wondering: "How is this guy a legend at both counterstrike and cascading stylesheets?"
benatkin 15y ago
I thought it was DVD Jon, because of DeCSS.
hkmurakami 15y ago
Title should then be CS:S if I remember the acronym correctly?

cdk 15y ago

Thanks for the great article. Counter Strike was the game that really got me interested in programming. I got introduced to it in early 2000 and was blown away that this game was made by hobbyists who created a mod (expansion package) for Half Life which in itself was revolutionary at the time. Eventually Valve acquired Counter Strike and the rest is history. I still think fondly of the many hours spent on de_dust and cs_assault.

potatolicious 15y ago
Counter-Strike had a similar effect on me. I'd be coding since long before CS, but most were small, simple hacks. Seeing the success of Counter-Strike, and the mod-mania of that era, got me interested in modding, where I was first exposed to the complexities (and math!) that "real" software entailed. From there I went on to write some standalone, small games, then went deeper down the C++ rabbit hole which helped me get my first software internship. The rest is, as they say, history.
- trafficlight 15y ago
  I remember trying out tons of mods for Half Life and Quake around '99-2000. That's all but disappeared now. Are there still active modscenes for newer games? Minecraft is the only one that really comes to mind.
  - potatolicious 15y ago
    Nothing has been as easily moddable as Half-Life, with the same install-base. I suspect there's another problem with mods today: asset production. In Half-Life's day even I could hack out a semi-passable player model in a day or two. Nowadays, producing assets for games has been made dramatically more complex. In short, you really can't find a lot of people willing to produce that quality and complexity of art for free. The size of teams required to put anything together, as a result of this, has also put a lot of things beyond a mod team's modest reaches. I think that's why a lot of the indie excitement is around casual and "low-fi" games like Minecraft. Assets have always been a major blocker, and when you embrace the fact that you're not AAA, you have a better experience with it.

bprater 15y ago

League of Legends has become my modern-day Counter-Strike. The buzz the author mentions is exactly the buzz I get playing the game over hundreds of hours. The rules of the game are fairly simple -- and inside of that simplicity a desire for perfection emerges. It's fun and challenging -- likely why I'm a programmer, too.

baby 15y ago
I think a lot of ex pro counter strike players are playing LoL right now.
dingfeng_quek 15y ago
LOL is many more times more complex than CS. If you are weird, try running game-theory and stochastic simulation models. Try to optimize things like item builds, team-movement/formation, engagement sequence, allocation of champions to lanes at various times, allocation of gold/farm to champions. And then to apply it.

taylorfausak 15y ago

Based on the title, I expected Jon to explain the things he missed about Counter-Strike, the game, with respect to Counter-Strike: Source (CSS), the sequel. That's not what this is about. It's a retrospective on his career as a professional CS player. I then wondered why he didn't pick up another game or hobby. Turns out, he did. "Earlier this year I stumbled my way in to the world of tech startups."

cliftonk 15y ago

I played with and against him for years. His old teammate n0it was chatting with me on facebook for a while about my start-up-turned-company as he uses our software on his campus. I had not talked to either of them for a few years at minimum. Jon's a great guy. Good read. Very surprised I saw something like this on HN. Small world, eh?

rkon 15y ago

Cliff notes: being great at something requires spending a lot of time on it. Not exactly groundbreaking insight, and I disagree entirely with the assertion that such dedication makes one "weird". Any sane person would be jealous of someone who's so passionate about their career that they gladly dedicate signifant effort to mastering it. The fact that he chose to spend 10,000+ hours mastering Counter Strike is the "weird" part, although I'd personally love to see gaming become more accepted here as a professional sport.

sray 15y ago
I think you're missing the point. It's not about becoming great at something. It's about being exceptional at one thing. It's about spending every moment of your life either practicing or thinking about that thing, to the detriment of everything and everyone else. It's about being possessed with the desire to be the best. And that is weird, by definition - only a small fraction of people have such dedication to one pursuit. It's not just passion - it's obsession. And, in the end, it's the feeling you get when you've attained that level of mastery, and the hollowness you feel when you give it up to focus on a more balanced life. Many people would be jealous of someone with such skill, but few would envy the work and the exclusionary lifestyle required to get there.
- deleted 15y ago
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dorian-graph 15y ago
Most people are always 'jealous' whether it be of people who are great at singing, playing an instrument, videogames, or something, yet they really don't seem to care or desire that and often they feel negative towards those people. It seems everything in their lives revolves around watching others do things (Reality TV shows, magazines, news stories, etc) and little to do with their actual selves. They don't want to be in a good conversation, they want to have an average conversation where everyone agrees on some average opinion or every now and then someone will be 'edgy' to give it a bit of flair. They don't want to understand good art they simply want to say that one of their kids once went to an art gallery and that they saw know that Picasso has weird/funny looking paintings. This sounds elitist yet it's not. From school age and possibly even before the majority latches onto the dumb notion that if a kid studies well he's a teacher's pet and weird or some other term and they never let go of this idea. Ever. At university one of the subjects was systems analysis and design which came with a huge textbook. I read some of it each week that aligned with that week's lecture/tutorial content and people said that's weird. .. but all this is like endlessly driving on a roundabout because what it means to be weird and normal differs though does have a common understanding. A common understanding is that 'normal' is not being the best or putting in the best effort. They should just start saying average instead of normal. For me, all those people they call weird are the normals ones as they're doing it right. The ones who exercise are normal and the ones who sit around are weird. The ones who do the homework are normal and the ones who don't are ridiculously weird. It's like they want to ignore cause and effect and modify the universe to suit their quick whims for instant desires. What a bunch of weirdos.

muffs 15y ago

Wow. It's a great feeling, being the 'best' or better than the majority. I've also experienced the void created after deciding to move on. I still feel as though I'm on an endless search to find something that I can be as passionate about. Thanks for the great read!

baby 15y ago

I think I'm also very close to those 10.000 hours in cs 1.6. I can really relate to this guy story. I don't think many people will ever experience that adrenaline you get when you're in high level competition. That is sport or esport. It's like a first girl friend, I will never experience that feeling again and that kind of makes me sad. I know I've wasted a big part of my life playing this game, but I don't regret because of that competition feeling, that stress, that happiness when you win a tournament, that solidarity between players of the same team, the nights spend training and practicing...

WALoeIII 15y ago
Pick up a new sport/hobby/game. Practice.
mattbot5000 15y ago
If you enjoyed the time, did you really waste it?

tsotha 15y ago

tl;dr: You can do anything you want to do, but you can't do everything you want to do.

robbiet480 15y ago

Oh Janine, you so funny.

janineyoong 15y ago
Not trying to be funny. I posted this because this is the best thing I've read of Jon's - and I felt there was something universally resonant about the sweet pain of aspiring to greatness. What I didn't expect were the multiple comments from those who play or used to play CS and draw lessons that apply to programming and teamwork. If CS produces colleagues like Jon, then more please.

mafro 15y ago

"all of a sudden I'm in a de_dust pub server and I just picked up my first mp5" Ahh the memories..

jiggy2011 15y ago

I spent a fair amount of my youth playing counterstrike and still have fond memories of it. I also learned to program roughly around the same time and found the later far more fulfilling in the long run. I learned skills in programming in those years that I still use today, but whenever I even touch a public counter strike (source) server these days I get hopelessly owned by a new generation. I now see video games as pure downtime in the same way as watching a movie or something, I used to be very competitive and my scores in public servers and clan matches deeply mattered, despite all of this I really wish I had spent more of my CS time learning programming or taking up a completely different hobby (e.g real sport or music). I sometimes wonder where I would be now if I had spent that time doing something else. The problem with video games is that you are spending your time perfecting something that is useful only in a very specific virtual world which can be radically changed or even destroyed at any time. A very small minority of people may become "professional gamers" but for the most part it feels like almost completely wasted time in hindsight. Will it make you money? No Will it get you laid? No Will it help you express yourself? No Will it make you healthy and fit? No Will it better mankind in some manner? No I'm not hating on video games, just if you are going to spend that amount of time becoming awesome at something it does seem like a very poor choice.

ricardobeat 15y ago
Spot on. But oh, the feeling of a well-placed deagle headshot through the wall corner...
gabaix 15y ago
The choice is hardly one after 10,000 hours. Video games are addictive and satisfy short-term pleasure. My guess is that becoming awesome is sometimes just a matter of "addictiveness".
- kejadlen 15y ago
  There's probably some correlation/causation in there - I imagine that you would tend to become "addicted" to things that you're naturally good at.

gwern 15y ago

If I may, David Foster Wallace (as so often) said it better: > “But it’s better for us not to know the kinds of sacrifices the professional-grade athlete has made to get so very good at one particular thing…the actual facts of the sacrifices repel us when we see them: basketball geniuses who cannot read, sprinters who dope themselves, defensive tackles who shoot up with bovine hormones until they collapse or explode. We prefer not to consider closely the shockingly vapid and primitive comments uttered by athletes in postcontest interviews or to consider what impoverishments in one’s mental life would allow people actually to think the way great athletes seem to think. Note the way”up close and personal" profiles of professional athletes strain so hard to find evidence of a rounded human life — outside interests and activities, values beyond the sport. We ignore what’s obvious, that most of this straining is farce. It’s farce because the realities of top-level athletics today require an early and total commitment to one area of excellence. An ascetic focus. A subsumption of almost all other features of human life to one chosen talent and pursuit. A consent to live in a world that, like a child’s world, is very small…[Tennis player Michael] Joyce is, in other words, a complete man, though in a grotesquely limited way…Already, for Joyce, at twenty-two, it’s too late for anything else; he’s invested too much, is in too deep. I think he’s both lucky and unlucky. He will say he is happy and mean it. Wish him well." http://www.esquire.com/print-this/the-string-theory-0796?page=all http://www.esquire.com/print-this/the-string-theory-0796?pag... (A quote I come back to on occasion, thinking about my essay http://www.gwern.net/The%20Melancholy%20of%20Subculture%20Society http://www.gwern.net/The%20Melancholy%20of%20Subculture%20So... )

kevinalexbrown 15y ago
I think the DFW was a little melodramatic here. I don't think the commitment to true excellence necessarily detracts from other possible commitments in the long run. E.g. DFW was a writer of singular ability, and he was, at various points in his life, dedicated to tennis, philosophy, and mathematics. More to the point, the time spent being great at CS doesn't seem to have limited this guy's future ability to do things like work at a startup. While I'm sure it was an unbalanced life during the period of dedication, suggesting that it's the dedication itself which reduces athletes to "shockingly vapid and primitive comments" goes a little far.

DutGRIFF33 15y ago

Wow. Nicely said. I help out with Ninja Girl's party in D2 which is a Counter Strike Source server and I never hear anything about Counter Strike outside of the server anymore. I am curious to see what Counter Strike Global Offensive will be like. Our server is the most popular in the US and I am pretty sure we can keep that status in CS:GO. I am kinda hoping it brings the spotlight back to CS.

deepkut 15y ago

Few news articles (even on HN) 'move' me, but this one did. To all those whom were among the best at a popular game, you understand. Some interesting comments: like whether playing CS, or any other game, is "worth it." I agree with kejadlen, "does it make you happy?" Though heroin, at some point in time, makes addicts "happy." One thing is for certain though, the feeling of mastery gets harder and harder to find later in life, at least with regards to professions or wealth.

kaichanvong 15y ago

Having read this, there are so many skills you can pick up from the gaming culture that helps you integrate with working as a programmer. He probably knows how to do scripting from IRC... maybe he's written a bot or knows how a bot works from IRC. I remember lots of bots that work in different way and what you can learn from watching it run. At 16 I remember seeing my very first bot and being amazed by it. The problem was that I was on a Windows box and everyone around me was on Linux. Then the problem was which language did I pick. Then the problem was that the most popular language was a bitch to install... then there was the problem I had no idea what the error was and if it was something I had done. Oh the list goes on. What I'm trying to say is, not everything is a waste. Knowing when something is valuable enough to spend time of is a skill in its self. +1 procrastination proclaimer

littledude 15y ago
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BAx7Npsrin4&t=4m30s http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BAx7Npsrin4&t=4m30s same for designers as well lol

kang 15y ago

There is a place called Kota in India. It is a hub of coaching institutes trying to assist highschool students get admission into top engineering and medical colleges(IIT,AIIMS) of India. >5000 hours of counterstrike is pretty common game-time that students living there spend and you would easily find >25000 kids of age 15-16 such types. Millions of students go there each year. Competition is so tough that hardly top 2% get admissions into IITs. As a result, >90% do not study. You see them playing they are experts! Most of them don't even know how to log into a server. The cybercafe would set up the LAN for them. All they do is play, all the time. As per rule the shops are supposed to close after 11 pm. But these shops have eating/smoking and toilet arrangements inside. They pull down the shutter, as if the shop is closed from 11 to 6. Students stay 'voluntarily trapped' inside for a LAN party at a discounted rate of 1-2$ for the whole night. Once the course is over, the gig is too. they go back to their hometowns, never playing again. I work in Delhi and I see clans participating and even winning international competitions like WCG. But even the gameplay of the best, is only at par average as per Kota standards. All this time spent for happiness, curing boredom. Rajasthan would be the biggest consumer of CS, DoTA, Tekken, AoE if pirated stuff is counted for.

manish_gill 15y ago
Wow, never knew that about Kota. Had a friend who lived there for a year for IIT studies. He himself admits that he never once attended a single class and was mostly just having fun. Counter Strike in India is certainly big. I only wish Starcraft 2 was as well. Oh, and can you tell me where in Delhi do these tournaments happen? I don't play much CS but earlier on in school, all I could think about was being a pro-gamer!

intended 15y ago

Gaming taught me a lot and made my life better. I was depressed and with few positive catalysts. Warcraft 3 made me play with other people, meet people who I am friends with today and also taught me to be excellent. I got to compete, set up a clan which trained other people, and held tournaments, and taught me how to take responsibility for my team. Like someone else mentioned, I learnt how to maintain morale, how to take on the jobs no one liked and to excel at them. Having people have faith in your strategy, making people follow your plan, knowing how important it is to even have one, no matter how bad, I learnt that from gaming. But above all, like the OP, i learnt what it means to be the best at something. I look back at that time and am glad I did it. It helped me start building myself back up and taught me the basics of team work which I use everyday.

noobface 15y ago

I started competitive play at 15, eventually peaking at 18 with 2 CPL showings. I probably played vs. juan at a couple LANs. The amount of focus, time, and sheer mental fortitude required showed me what it took to truly master something. When I could drop 35 kills in a half in a tournament, or kill 10 people in a round in a pub, I understood my level of commitment had led to that success. I spent the past few years at a telecom/networking company doing sales as an engineer. Multi-million dollar deals, complex designs and high-stress situations. Learning to communicate only what was relevant and necessary, eliminating all extraneous information, was essential to success. My co-workers looked to me to quickly prioritize targets, shift strategy, and keep morale high as we focused on the end goal of closing. Counter-strike taught me that. No other "group project" or random nonsense in college prepared me to work with the most highly regarded and ardent professionals in the world. My team would put egos aside, drop all sense of the individual, and focus on beating an enemy that was composed of the very same caliber. It taught me the value of "ideal scenarios" or "how it's supposed to work". The immaculate plans leading up to a meeting, that required innumerable changes during practical execution. Without the ability to communicate as fluidly as possible between individuals any slight shift in the plan would create utter confusion and chaos, quickly exploited by a foe just begging for you to make a mistake. I'd like to grab a beer with JonMumm. There's just something about the high-level Counter-Strike people that has reassured me that there are others out there can place so much of themselves into something that it doesn't become second nature, it becomes you.

junto 15y ago

Looking back to a few years ago, I would actually say that I was addicted to CS. Playing matches in a clan is a sure fire way to drive the addiction because it becomes hard to leave without letting your teammates down. Luckily, due to Steam's awful user account tools via the client and the website, I am unable to recover my Steam password. The only way to recover it is to deface the CD box by writing the support ticket number on it, taking a photograph of that defacement and the product key and then sending that photo to their support email address. Then they will reset your password. You know what, I'm really not that bothered!

ggwicz 15y ago

"When you pursue something difficult, eventually you have to make a choice between being balanced, normal, and conventional, and being different, weird, and exceptional. I chose the latter." Wow. You are not a normal writer. More writing needs to come from the heart like this. I don't even care about video games and loved this article.

erikb 15y ago

What is a stratcaller?

Simucal 15y ago
The equivalent of a team captain or quarterback. As the situation of a match unfolds the stratcaller will do just that, call out different strategies and make decisions about what the other members should do.

deleted 15y ago

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kgosser 15y ago

Love the shoutout to Aaron Rodgers! lol But seriously, as a former Cal-I vet myself, I know exactly what he's talking about. And I can relate to how it feels like that in the world of start-ups. In my opinion, a lot of it has to do with the book "FLOW". We should all go read it. Good stuff!