TERRAN
Flexible. Buildings lift off and fly. Marines are cheap. But slow to rebuild, and every unit is just a person.
STEP ZERO
What done looks like
It's Friday. Your whole faction is standing up front. Not three people while the rest hide in their chairs: everyone.
Behind you is one deck with one slide per person, and every slide has a name on it. When your slide comes up, you talk for about a minute, in your own words. You don't read it, because there's barely anything on it to read.
You're making one argument: your race is the best in StarCraft. You make it six times, once for each of the game's big design systems. For each one, the first speaker says how your race does it better and what that costs. The second speaker proves it with a screenshot from your own Thursday game.
When your faction sits down, the room believes your race is the best and understands why Blizzard kept it fair. That's balance. That's the lesson.
Then the other faction runs the same six systems with their race, everybody takes the test, and Sensei crowns the winner.
✓ THIS IS A FINISHED SLIDE
THE PLAN
Three days to make the case
WEDNESDAY 10/7 · ASSIGNED
- AFTER PRACTICERace pick. The faction that's behind on the war scoreboard picks first: Terran, Protoss or Zerg. The other faction picks a different one.
- BEFORE BELLCaptains make the faction deck in Google Slides, share it with the whole faction, and assign every slide to a name.
- TONIGHTWrite your CLAIM slide, or plan exactly what your PROOF screenshot has to show.
THURSDAY 10/8 · THE WAR
- IN GAMEPlay your faction's race. Get the screenshot your slide needs: Win+Shift+S, or Win+G to clip it.
- TONIGHTFinish your slide. Run your minute out loud once. Time it.
FRIDAY 10/9 · GG
- 1Sega presents. About 12 minutes.
- 2Nintendo presents. About 12 minutes.
- 3The test. StarCraft and Steam videos, about 15 minutes. Always last. Higher faction average takes 128.
- AFTERThe crown. Sensei scores both decks on the rubric. The winner takes 256.
BOTH FACTIONS · SAME SIX · SAME ORDER
The six systems
Each system is one design system Blizzard built into StarCraft. Your race handles each one differently, and that's the whole point.
1
ECONOMY
How your race gets workers and minerals.
THE SCIENCE: Delayed gratification
2
SUPPLY
How your race raises its army cap: Depots, Pylons or Overlords.
THE SCIENCE: Negative reinforcement
3
BUILDINGS
What's special about how your race builds.
THE SCIENCE: Commitment and sunk cost
4
ARMY
Your best unit, and the counter it fears.
THE SCIENCE: Loss aversion
5
SCOUTING
How your race sees through the fog of war.
THE SCIENCE: Ambiguity aversion
6
THE MAP
How your race plays Big Game Hunters.
THE SCIENCE: Risk and expected value
PROTOSS
The strongest single units, with shields that regenerate. But everything is expensive, and buildings die without Pylon power.
ZERG
Fast, cheap, everywhere. But every building eats a worker, and the units are fragile.
COLLEGE-LEVEL · THIS IS HOW UNIVERSITIES TEACH IT
The science: psychology through mechanics
Every rule in a game quietly trains how the player thinks and feels. Game designers have a framework for that, and it's the most cited paper in the field: MDA, from Robin Hunicke, Marc LeBlanc and Robert Zubek, 2004. You're going to use it.
M
MECHANICS
The rules and pieces the designer builds. What the game is: costs, units, timers, limits.
D
DYNAMICS
How players behave because of those rules once the game is running. Nobody writes these down. They happen.
A
AESTHETICS
What the player feels. Tension, greed, panic, pride. The reason anyone plays at all.
THE MDA CHAIN, A FINISHED EXAMPLE.
M: Zerg drones turn into buildings, and a drone that becomes a building is gone for good.
D: Zerg players commit to their plan early and can't back out.
A: Every build feels like a gamble.
THE SCIENCE: commitment and sunk cost.
The vocab bank
Every CLAIM slide names one of these terms and uses it correctly. "It feels bad" isn't analysis. "Loss aversion" is.
| TERM | WHAT IT MEANS | WHERE IT SHOWS UP | SOURCE |
|---|---|---|---|
| Delayed gratification | Giving up a reward now for a bigger reward later. Hard for humans, and it's a skill you can train. | ECONOMY: every worker is a Marine you didn't build yet. | Walter Mischel, the Stanford marshmallow studies |
| Negative reinforcement | A behavior gets stronger because it makes something unpleasant go away. Not punishment: relief. | SUPPLY: getting blocked hurts, so you learn to build supply early to make the pain stop. | B.F. Skinner, operant conditioning |
| Commitment and sunk cost | Once you've invested in something, you keep going with it, even when switching would be smarter. | BUILDINGS: a Zerg drone that became a building is gone. A Terran building can lift off and leave. | Hal Arkes and Catherine Blumer, 1985 |
| Loss aversion | Losing something hurts about twice as much as gaining the same thing feels good. | ARMY: cheap Zerglings make you reckless. Expensive Protoss units make you play scared. | Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, prospect theory |
| Ambiguity aversion | People fear an unknown risk more than a known one, even when the known one is worse. | SCOUTING: the fog of war makes you fear what you can't see. Scouting buys peace of mind. | Daniel Ellsberg, 1961 |
| Risk and expected value | Expected value is what a bet pays on average if you made it over and over. People don't actually decide that way: we overreact to big losses and long shots. | THE MAP: taking a second base is a bet. More money, more to defend. | Kahneman and Tversky, prospect theory |
| Self-determination theory | People stay motivated when they feel three things: competence (I'm good at this), autonomy (I chose this) and relatedness (I belong here). | THE CLOSER: why players stay loyal to one race for twenty years. | Edward Deci and Richard Ryan |
ONE SLIDE PER PERSON
Your slide
Every system gets two players. You claim one slide and put your name on it. Six systems times two players is 12 slides.
THE CLAIM
How your race does this system better than the others, and the WORTH IT? line: what your race gives up, and what it gets for it. Plus your MDA chain: the mechanic, what it makes players do, what it makes them feel, and the vocab-bank term that names it.
THE PROOF
Your screenshot from Thursday showing that exact thing happening, what happened in that moment, and one game people play today that still uses the same idea.
Extra players?
Add an OPENER (your race and why it's the pick) or a CLOSER (who picks your race and why they stay loyal, using self-determination theory, plus which system you'd steal for your own Base Game). Still more? Extra PROOF slides, each a different moment.
Fewer players?
The captain gives someone a CLAIM and a PROOF in the same system. Every system still gets covered.
HOW IT SHOULD LOOK
Good slide, bad slide
The slide is the picture. You are the talking. If the slide says everything, you have nothing left to say.
✓ ONE IDEA · YOUR SCREENSHOT · UNDER 25 WORDS · YOUR NAME
✗ A WALL YOU'LL READ OUT LOUD · NO SCREENSHOT · NO NAME · NO COST
DO
- Put the system and your role at the top: "SYSTEM 2 · SUPPLY · THE CLAIM"
- CLAIM slides: put your MDA chain and your vocab term on it, short
- Write a headline that's an argument, like "Pylons are a weapon," not just a topic like "Supply"
- Use your own screenshot from Thursday, big
- Keep it under 25 words on the slide
- Put your name and faction in the corner
- Use your faction color: Sega blue, Nintendo red
DON'T
- Paste paragraphs and read them out loud
- Use a screenshot from Google
- Say "it's the best because it's cool"
- Skip the cost. Every advantage has one, and finding it is the assignment
- Go over a minute. Your teammates need their time too
THE SAME RACE, TWO DECKS
A 20 vs a 5
Same race. Same system. Same four slides: the opener, a CLAIM, its PROOF, and the closer. One faction walks away with the crown, and the other walks away with a 5 out of 20. These are just four slides of each deck. Your real deck has twelve or more.
✓ THE 20 / 20 DECK
20 / 20A headline that argues. One line, and you already know the case. The speaker fills in the rest out loud.
Strength, cost, MDA, term. All four on one slide, short enough to read in five seconds. The speaker explains each one.
Their own screenshot, the exact moment the CLAIM promised. Game number and minute. A real legacy game.
Self-determination theory, used right, plus a real answer for the Base Game. It ends on an idea, not "thank you."
✗ THE 5 / 20 DECK
5 / 20A topic, not an argument. Lore nobody asked for. No names on any slide, so who presented it?
A definition, not a claim. No cost, no MDA, no term. The speaker reads it word for word.
Google image. Not their game, not a moment, and it doesn't prove anything.
"Because it's cool." No closer, no self-determination theory, no Base Game answer.
Same race. Same game.Fifteen points apart.
SEE BOTH WHOLE PRESENTATIONS ▶ Every slide of the 20/20 deck with exactly what each presenter says, and every slide of the 5/20 deck with what goes wrong.HOW IT'S SCORED
The rubric
Your faction gets one group score out of 20, and everyone who presents gets it. Each category is scored 1 to 5. This is also the score that decides who wins the crown, so both factions are judged on exactly the same thing.
| 1 LOOKS LIKE | 3 LOOKS LIKE | 5 LOOKS LIKE | |
|---|---|---|---|
| The case | "We're best because we're cool." No real reasons. | Real strengths, but some systems are vague or repeat each other. | All six systems make a real, specific argument for your race, and each one is different. |
| The cost + MDA | No weaknesses named, no MDA chains, no vocab terms. It's a sales pitch. | Some costs and some MDA chains, but terms are missing or used wrong. | Every strength comes with the cost that pays for it, every CLAIM has a full MDA chain, and every vocab term is used correctly. The room can see why it's fair. |
| The proof | Google images, or no screenshots at all. | Some of your own screenshots, but not matched to the claims. | Every PROOF slide is your own Thursday screenshot of the exact thing its CLAIM promised. |
| Delivery | Reading walls of text. People skipped. Way over time. | Mostly talking, some reading. A little messy between speakers. | Everyone talks in their own words, hands off cleanly, and the faction finishes on time. |
READ THIS TWICE
The zero rule
DO NOTHING, GET NOTHING.
If you don't make your slide, or you don't present it, you get a zero. Not a low score. A zero. Your faction's group score doesn't count for you.
And your whole faction pays for it. For every player who doesn't make a slide or doesn't present, your faction's group score drops 2 points, and your faction loses 32 points on the war scoreboard.
Absent Friday with an excused absence? Your slide still has to be in the deck by Thursday night, and a teammate presents it for you. Then you're covered, and so is your faction.
THE WAR
Who wins
Sensei crowns the winner. No popularity vote. Both factions are scored on the exact same rubric above, out of 20, after penalties. Higher score takes the crown.
Fair by design
Bigger faction, smaller faction: it doesn't matter. The rubric scores the argument, not the headcount. Twelve slides beat twenty if the twelve make the better case.
Tied?
The tiebreaker is The cost + MDA score. The faction that was more honest about its race's weaknesses wins, because that's the lesson. Still tied? Sensei's call.
256
the faction Sensei crowns
128
the faction with the higher test average
-32
per player who didn't make a slide or present
Good game.Now say why.