Egon Tanner

Surprisingly, a large number of people in the video games industry expressed ignorance on  the concept of micro vs. macro gameplay. If you’re not familiar, now’s your chance to learn.

It’s an important concept in video games and a concept that raises some interesting questions in the context of a mobile device.

Stop and think: Which kind of gameplay do you think works on mobile devices? Micro? Macro? Both? Why?

Really. Think about it before reading on…

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Let’s first start by explaining the concept for the non-RTS gamers out there:

Source: Warcraft 3 Screenshot

Micro (short for “micromanagement”) refers to the level of granular and specific control a user has over game units. See the Warcraft 3 example above. The user’s skill and ability to granularly control their hero and other game units define’s the user’s micro skill.

Macro (or “macro-management”) refers to higher level strategic game considerations. Macro skills therefore do not depend on granular twitch/reflex based control of game elements. Again, using the Warcraft 3 example above as a reference, good macro skill would involve:

A funny example of a player with poor micro ability:

Source: 9Gag.com

Now let’s consider micro vs. macro gameplay by platform. While many games on the PC platform can have a micro, macro, or dual focus (such as in PC RTS), other platforms support these types of gameplay to varying degrees.

Consider the following hypothesis of gameplay type support by platform:

Do you agree with this assessment? Let me know…

Assuming my thesis regarding micro vs. macro based gameplay type by platform is correct, then so what?

Well, if this view is correct then I posit the following conclusions:

A recent industry example of this concept can be seen in Zynga’s attempt to bring a MOBA/DOTA (e.g., League of Legends) type of game to mobile devices… which I just suggested above was a bad idea. 🙂

Based on the concept of micro vs. macro, I would conclude:

To date, Solstice Arena has not performed well which seems to corroborate the hypothesis of poor mobile platform fit for this kind of game:

However, as the user base for tablets grows and Zynga is able to better adapt the gameplay for tablet devices can this game make a comeback?

I believe the Solstice Arena team did a pretty good job of translating a MOBA type of game to mobile so would expect more success of the game at least eventually on tablet devices.

What do you think?

How important is the consideration of micro vs. macro based gameplay to you?

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