A Starcraft 2 Gym: Snute's Click Game

Once upon a Thursday dreary, I was browsing weak and weary,
Searching many a long and angry reddit rant or forum boast,
While I shuddered, nearly weeping, suddenly there came a tweeting,
As of some one gently linking, linking to Team Liquid's post.

I am posting Snute's Click Game not because I expect everyone who reads this to play it but because I was startled to discover it earlier today. It's a training tool, for Starcraft 2 players, and it involves clicking on tiny little dots as quickly as possible. I've since learned that it's not the only trainer of its type, which makes sense. This is one of the tools for a complete Starcraft gym and trying it has helped my old man's brain better understand how e-sports folk break a game down into discrete skills and tasks. You will find my score below.

In my day, a trainer was something that gave you access to millions of cheat codes, or a shoe. Do any of our readers use this kind of thing to improve their skills? I could probably do with a good session on it.

I clicked 46 times right out of 49!

I think that's quite good, considering the state of my crusty old mouse and generally decrepit state. In the replies over at Team Liquid, people are posting scores in the sixties and seventies. That's not for me. I'll maybe progress to the fifties but that'll do me. Instead of improving myself in any way, I've started to think of other parts of play that could be improved through repetitive tasks like this. Hours and hours spent circle-strafing perhaps, and the knowledge of timing gained through repeated application of the same routine.

I'm reminded of learning Quake and Unreal Tournament maps, knowing precisely when weapons would respawn after a pickup and hearing the click as I passed by without even pausing to check that anything was there. And firing into the same corners when entering certain rooms every single time. If the odds were good that somebody might be there, it was worth the expenditure of ammo. The maps eventually became abstractions - I didn't see them anymore, I simply knew when and where things were likely to happen.

Over the last ten years, I've moved away from that kind of gaming altogether but some of those same impulses and rote techniques seem to be alive in Snute's Click Game. And, by extension, in Starcraft 2. It's oddly compelling.

I clicked 48 times right out of 60!

I'm getting worse. Unless accuracy is much more valuable than speed, in which case I've improved very slightly.

I'm going to do a test.

This is how well I do when listening to Daft Punk.

I clicked 47 times right out of 53!

I think I slowed down to click to the beat a little bit. That's not harder, better or faster.

Let's try...Milestones! Jazz hands at the ready.

I clicked 42 times right out of 71!

I got a bit too excited there.

Various other experiments saw me coming out in the mid-high forties and the only time I broke the fifty mark with a good degree of accuracy was here.

I clicked 54 times right out of 57!

I was listening to this.

Perhaps all pro players listen to Bach. It's certainly the music I will blast from the mighty speakers of the starship Notorious Drunkard when I finally wage my interstellar war.