A Love Letter For Dota

24-08-31

I love Dota.

It’s hard to understate this.

Having had “video games” as a hobby since age 6 or so, there’s one type of game that has stuck with me from age 15-30 – MOBA (Multiplayer Online Battle Arena).

I play enough that a part of me genuinely feels embarrassed that I “only” logged 2,000 hours on Dota 2. I try to explain to myself: “That number is underestimating a lot. I’m not even counting all the hours of Dota on Warcraft 3, that’s like at least 500-1,000 hours more! Not to mention, if we assume MOBA overall, then we have to count League, HOTS, right?”

It’s a weird sentiment, but compared to people who dump 5,000-10,000 hours or even more, I feel like I can’t really call myself a “hardcore player”. (How many hours verify love anyways 🤷‍♂️)

In my understanding, this kind of experience is a phenomenon common to dedicated amateurs. Those who have devoted enough to know just how far there is still to go.

But first, what even is Dota?

Dota, or “Defense of the Ancients”, is a game that puts 5 players against 5 players, each controlling a hero, working together to destroy the base (“ancient”) of the other team, over ~30-60 minutes. Here’s a two-minute explainer that covers the basics.

Notably, Dota is arguably one of the most complex games in the world. With 124 (now 125 as of the 7.37 update) heroes to choose from, there are quite literally millions (230M to be more precise) of combinations for each team. Each hero on average has 4 unique abilities (except that one hero with 10 abilities), which means to have a general sense of the game, one would need to remember 500 different abilities. For an average game then, with 10 unique heroes, we need to keep in mind 40 different abilities and their interactions with each other. Did I mention there are also 208 items that heroes can buy to augment their character to suit the circumstances of each game? We haven’t even started on mechanics yet, this is just the raw knowledge one should learn to be familiar with.¹

When fights in a game can look like this, it’s no wonder Dota is one of the most intimidating games to get started in. There is basically no way for an average person to even have an idea of what’s going on, never mind a nuanced sense of what exactly is happening, what could instead be happening, and where mistakes are made.

Outside of the depth of the game, two additional and very different dimensions make Dota a world-class phenomenon.

The first is Dota is/was the biggest e-sports game with respect to prize money. In 2021, its biggest year in prize pool, the winner of The International (annual championship) took home $18M out of a $40M prize pool. To give a bit of contrast: The Wimbledon men’s singles took home £1.7M out of £35M. Yes, that’s an order of magnitude difference (ignoring exchange rates). This isn’t the 90s with parents saying video games go nowhere anymore. It is mainstream in its own right.²

The second is with respect to its strategic and mechanical complexity being a top contender for testing AI models’ abilities to complete human-realm tasks. While in the 80s, the grail for AI models was to achieve super-human performance for Chess, in the past decade, the bars to beat have become Go, StarCraft 2, and also Dota 2. These games contain an extraordinary degree of depth, breadth, and interconnectivity, requiring any agent (human or otherwise) to consider tactical and strategic implications under time constraints. Notably, if I’m not mistaken, I believe all three games here contain enough depth that it’s not feasible to compute all possible branches (unlike chess), and so an AI model also needs to operate with incomplete information and develop “intuition” as part of its decision making. As of now, AI has become super-human in all three games (within some definition of what counts). It always makes me feel weird/sorrowful to watch AI exceed humans in another realm – and the same was the case when I watched OpenAI’s models beat one of the top Dota teams.³

Interestingly, like most mainstream, definitive things, Dota started from the fringes. It was originally a custom map made in the map maker of Warcraft 3 by some guy named Ice Frog. The popularity of the custom map led to it being iterated over and over, eventually acquired by Valve (which became Dota 2) as well as becoming the template for all subsequent MOBA games like League of Legends.

Dota is quite a phenomenon!

My not-so-unique Dota experience

It was around 2008. The internet was still relatively young and Warcraft 3 was in its heyday. ~13-year-old David who loved Real Time Strategy (RTS) games also got into it.⁴

Warcraft 3 was a relatively early and certainly one of the most popular examples of community-enabled creativity. By offering a map creator mode, players can create their custom maps with their own rules using the assets of the game. Warcraft 3 especially had a Cambrian explosion of custom maps made by players, comparable probably to what some Zoomers and Alphas are experiencing through Roblox.⁵ Along came this custom game called Dota All Stars, with really cool loading screens and more choices than I knew what to do with, and since I had plenty of time to kill back in those days, the natural conclusion was to learn more.

The first thing I learned entering the game was: “Wow, there are a lot of things to read here. Ok, so this 1k gold item gives you 5hp/sec regen, and my ability does 150 damage with a 1-second stun, and …”⁶

The second thing I learned was: “I’m a fucking idiot for not moving my hero and having already bought the right items”.

And so, I have entered the wonderful world of Dota. 😇

While stereotypically, games like Call of Duty have the greatest reputation for alluding to the promiscuity of each other’s mothers, Dota was my entry into the notoriously toxic gamer culture. Today, there are some moderation mechanics to help with this: reporting people, censoring profanity (not that this helps much), and muting other players (this does in fact help very much). Back in Warcraft 3, these didn’t exist, and so it was a free-for-all of online abuse.⁷

After 100 hours or so (the kind of upfront investment only a teenager can casually drop), I seem to sufficiently understand the basics, including the nice generally good skill of how to tune out the vitriol. There are a few heroes I’m familiar with, and can sometimes even do well in. It was a more Wild West era. Since game lobbies are more or less randomly assembled, skill levels vary wildly and the meta hasn’t been set as concretely. I vaguely recall there was the idea of supports vs carries, but it was more a suggestion than a core component of gameplay.

All things considered though, I was a relatively slow learner. Like my experience with tennis, I didn’t play Dota to get better, it was closer to a mix of fun and disassociation from my everyday experience.

The definitive Dota experience

Like many players, I also have a love-hate relationship with the game. One goes through cycles of playing for a while, then quitting, then picking it up again, etc.

I remember vividly a case of quitting Dota, sometime in 2018. I had just entered a new bracket (Legend/3k MMR). It was the highest I ever ranked up until that point. Almost immediately after I ranked up, I lost ~10 games in a row, and then a new season of the game dropped and reset everyone’s ranking. When the game recalibrated my rank, I was lower than a few months prior. The rage I felt was so distinct, and on the spot, I uninstalled the game. This is what’s commonly called rage quitting – in this case, not just a round of Dota, I was done with suffering with the whole game.

This is where we should take a small detour on game design. By matching players with similar skills, the system is designed to keep all players at approximately a 50/50 win rate. One would be correct to draw the parallel of casino psychology, where a 50/50 rate of reward is the most addictive set point for the animal brain. We then couple two elements to make suffering a guaranteed experience for the typical player.

1. Statistically speaking, for a 50/50 win rate, suppose we played 20 games (the amount one might play in a week), the likelihood of a 3-game streak (win or lose) is 98.4%. A 5-game streak is 67.2% and An 8-game streak is 10.9%. What this shows is that streaks are guaranteed, and even long streaks are expectable over a week of playing.

2. Psychologically speaking, we set the amount of happiness gained for winning to be less than the amount of happiness lost for losing. That is, when I win, I think to myself “Of course I should win. I’m a good and growing player after all. It’s also why I’m playing”. When I lose, however, I think to myself “I shouldn’t have lost, that was a waste of time. If only they (or I) played better”. If we also assume that streaks compound the happiness/grief of win/lose, then over time, grief outstrips happiness exponentially.

   1. Worst yet, this mindset sets the basis for the psychological phenomenon known to gamers as “Tilt”. Existing in all competitive games (and sports), tilting is when a player cycles on one’s own frustration, becoming increasingly upset and dysregulated such that their performance progressively drops. This becomes a vicious cycle that begets more losing, which leads to more tilting. This is also when teenagers like to throw their controllers at the screen and yell obscenity or grief/troll (which begets tilting in others).⁸

I use suffering very intentionally here because this is not only a bad utilitarian scheme, it’s also the definition of suffering in Buddhism. I am attached to the idea of winning (as well as numbers go up, w.r.t rank), I am identified with the notion that I should be a “winner” and not a “loser”, and on some emotional level I am profoundly ignorant of the underlying statistical game I choose to play.

Suppose also that humans were static beings too, we’d then effectively created a proper close-looped hell, doomed to chase the marginal dopamine high of short-term gratification and long-term degeneration.

What I’ve described is quite the hellscape. Everyone is spiraling down a pit of anguish, emanating their blame and irritation onto others, dragging them into the cyclone, and devolving all dialogue into seething conflict. At least Dota is probably the only thing in the world that has this dynamic, so it’s not a metaphor for anything.

Fortunately, we most certainly are not static. Even in the small world of Dota, with even a bit of curiosity and interest in the game itself, we improve. Improvement is what shifts the 50/50 balance slightly in our favor, which also happens to result in a climb in ranks over time. Learning as a function generates a counter-acting dynamic that reverses the hell loop. To the extent that I secretly want to climb ranks and learning is only instrumental though, I fall back into hell again – a second-order hell loop that is less shackling, but tricky to navigate nonetheless.

It is in this complex (yet remarkably common) psychological context that my current arc of Dota builds from.

My perhaps-more-unique relationship to Dota

For the past two years, I’ve been using Dota as a curious meditation object. Having had some experience in meditation and various introspection practices, Dota is one place where I can still routinely get triggered. That gives it a particular kind of value – a reliable way to trigger oneself that doesn’t require much setup, while broadly not involving people close by. It’s become a great way to get a higher-resolution view into my anger and irritation, as well as how I react to my anger and irritation.

As far as I can tell, people around me would probably be surprised if I yelled at someone. Yet in Dota, I still can spiral into an experience of frustration, leading to active put-down of others, out of meanness. Since this is fairly uncommon in my experience of myself too, it’s helpful to watch the internal experience develop. There’s a Buddhist line that I quite like: “Holding on to anger is like grasping feces with the intent of throwing it at someone else. Regardless of the results, you are the one dirtied.” It is not my wish to participate in a dynamic that deepens my suffering while also drawing others into shame and resentment. Getting closer looks at my internal experience has helped a lot in identifying where exactly in my cognition the flips occur and compound. This can range from a building sense of “tunnel vision” with each mistake made by self or others, an internal conflict of picking the hero that I’m more likely to win with vs. the hero I’d enjoy playing, and constructive feedback containing increasingly coercive undertones.

Here’s one example expanded. As described above with a psyche that treats winning as normal and losing as not, I’ve noticed how much my mind assumes winning as part of playing. I don’t mean in the sense of a professional athlete envisioning winning to align their performance and goals. I mean when I launch the game, the intent is not to “Play Dota”, but rather to “Win Dota”. In other words, my conception of “I will play some Dota today”, implies that ~50% of the time (that is for every loss), I’m upset that I’ve “failed” to “Play Dota”. This is especially highlighted when I get tilted. The qualia of clicking to queue up for the next game after losing is one of exceptional narrow-mindedness. In words, it might sound like “I failed to ‘play Dota’ and wasted my time, so I need to play (or roll the dice) again for the chance at ‘playing Dota’ and I better get it this time!” It’s a process difficult to extract oneself from.

The conventional (and quite good) heuristic for playing is to simply quit when you’ve lost two games in a row. In my perhaps masochistic case, one of my “meta” goals of playing is to actually get tilted so I can better understand what’s going on. I’ve noticed that it helps to better identify what exactly is upsetting. This could be another player who consistently makes mistakes or because my team is uncoordinated. Once causes are identified, I try my best to highlight micro-moments when the specific thing that is going poorly is instead going well. This is easier said than done of course. There’s nothing quite like the wish to instead point out in these mental states “There again! See how you are still being an idiot!?” To help get to a place where I can even notice these improvements, I focus on finding my next moment of joy. This is different from simply searching for what I am doing well despite the game doing poorly, which helps too. By joy here, I’m trying to look for the moment that would make me laugh (and Dota is actually full of these – a big reason why we even play). This might be noticing that a mistake I made is less bad but more silly. It might even mean “Sacred Insulting”⁹ of the other team. Bit by bit, I’d try climbing out of the pit and attempt to draw the rest of the team out of their respective pit too.

Now, in practice, I’m far from consistently being able to do this. However, there is one beautiful example of success that serves to illustrate. Some time ago, I had a game where we were getting crushed. I was also doing very poorly and so I was being flamed constantly by my team. Usually, muting here would be a good option, but apparently, I felt ambitious. I focused on how to stabilize my performance first and then proceeded to focus most of my attention on constructive feedback and positive encouragement. As pub Dota goes, comebacks are somewhat frequent – it’s helpful to remember that, winning or losing, the other team is almost always upset at each other too. In this particular game, we were starting to turn things around, and while winning was certainly great, what was magical was the change in team experience. The person most actively flaming me and was basically griefing the game actually started to join the encouragement (and to be very clear, it wasn’t because I suddenly played better). The whole team’s vibe started to shift towards a remarkable stability of organic coordination and effectiveness. We won, but more significantly, I not only effectively untilted myself, but my whole team!

This is more than simply “winning a game of Dota”, it’s winning at the “meta-game” of Dota. While I have only achieved a handful of such games, these represent the radical possibility of shifting the collaborative landscape of a given context, conditioned on hostile initial conditions. It’s meta in the sense that it’s agnostic to object level winning or losing the round – the players themselves all got more out of playing, both in their enjoyment as well as their conception of “what’s possible when playing a game like Dota”.

This is a triumph.

An approaching farewell

I don’t have many friends who game with me.

Over the course of my life, my schedules and social circles tend to trend away from gaming. This means my gaming experience has historically been a lonesome one. I fondly remember the few periods of my life when I got to game consistently and intensely with friends. Dota is far less of a cesspool of suffering when played with friends.

In the recent few weeks, I have had the blessing of a couple of intense losing streaks.

I was 5-10 wins away from the “Divine” bracket (~4k mmr). A bracket I currently define as “being satisfyingly good enough at Dota”; though I’d bet I’ll define differently once I get it (nothing like a moving goal post to keep suffering loops going). Naturally, since I was winning a lot up until then, in classic regression to the mean, RNG-esus decided to grant a massive losing spell that dropped me back to 3k.

Of course, I was quite upset. The “goal” that was so enticingly close eluded me. Yet, accompanied by evolving circumstances in my life overall, it made me evaluate more what an endpoint for playing Dota might look like.

The nature of the triumphs described above is that they are inherently ephemeral. I may be able to untilt myself and through me as a generator, untilt my team. However, to untilt the entire Dota sub-culture – that is, for most people to perceive the experience of playing something like Dota as a consistent place of sustainable joy, growth, and brilliant competition – requires a critical mass that’s beyond my current influence. I can imagine two routes to gaining such influence. I could be hired by Valve to work on their culture and community cultivating efforts for top-down change. I could also start an in-game guild and cultivate crews of “Culture Change Players” embedded into the game to create bottom-up change. Not that these two necessarily conflict, but it’s the latter that I’m more interested in.

It’s my current short to medium-term project to build a school-like context where being Culture Change Players in foreign contexts is the learning curriculum.¹⁰ While much more could be said in a different piece of writing, my solo playing of Dota is not very conducive to this goal. Putting another thousand hours into Dota to enact culture change isn’t a strong contender for a worthy synthesis of work and play for my life.

All of this suggests that I may stop playing Dota soon. In my understanding of how life can go, this also might mean I may never play Dota again. Not only do I have less time to play hours of Dota, unlike when I was a teenager, multiple games in a row can make my body feel bad lol.

Since these thoughts concretized a few weeks ago, I noticed the experience of losing has transformed too. It means something quite different when I think of winning or losing as “these may be the final games of my life”. “Playing Dota” means “Playing Dota” now.

Sometimes, when a couple has finally reached agreement on separation, their relationship notably improves due to the new ease found through the agreement. In this case, I also think my relationship with Dota is heading towards a close. Perhaps it’s only a phasic end, and sometime in the future I may play again (and I hope it’d be more in the aforementioned school context). Regardless, I’m glad that as I quit this time, it wouldn’t be because of rage. That’s not how I want to wrap up a relationship with something I love.

I’ll miss it whenever I do stop, and it all becomes a part of learning How To Say Goodbye. My memory will remain entangled with the game. To this day, I can still quote character lines from Dota 1. The quality of play when it’s good can be truly magical. It captures some essence of competition that I value deeply.

In the meantime though, writing this post sure makes me want to play a couple more games.

1. For what it’s worth, while there are many heroes and abilities, there are categories to help understand things. Some heroes are good supports, some abilities are stuns, etc. That said, even at thousands of hours of play, there are still heroes and items that I don’t have a full understanding of. It’s especially challenging when the game updates with changes to heroes, items, or mechanics every couple of months. Usually, most people have 2-4 heroes they are very familiar with, and maybe 10 more they are decent with. Few players can play many heroes very well.

2. Dota has been on a decline with respect to this due to many reasons. The 2023 prize pool was only $3.3M. Times are-a-changing.

3. I actually cried the first time I watched the Deepmind documentary when AlphaGo beat Lee Sedol. Another post, for another time, on thoughts around what feels missing in our reflection on the development of superhuman AI, narrow or otherwise.

4. I remember first feasting my eyes on Red Alert 2 on my dad’s coworker’s computer. It was quite possibly the most beautiful thing 6-year-old David had laid eyes on.

5. Some of these game modes I dearly miss. My very first Diablo-like game was actually not even Diablo, but a WC3 mod (X-Hero Siege and some other RPGs like it). I remember there was a silly racing game where it kept playing a nightcore version of Linkin Park on repeat (to this day I still often hear Numb in my head as this nightcore version). I probably played more tower defense games within custom WC3 maps than actual tower defense games. One of my favorites that I miss most these days was a survival game called Vampirism, where many human players fight a few vampires by hiding and building bases. It was a time when people were still figuring out how most games worked, so games were played more whimsically. The possibility of friendship was always around the corner, as most of us were just teenagers who found more ease on the computer than socializing. Serendipity was a common occurrence, and my memory of it was filled with a great deal of delight. Unfortunately, at least for these games, while some modes are still available through Dota 2 or Starcraft 2’s custom modes, the vitality of those times has gone and passed.

6. By the way, in today’s convenient and coddled game interfaces, League or Dota kindly maps all heroes’ abilities to Q, W, E, and R for each hero’s 4 abilities. Back in my day, because abilities were ported over from Warcraft characters, their mapping also corresponded to weird keys. Imagine having your hand hovering over Z, W, T, U for your 4 abilities (and also every hero’s key mapping is different, so there’s another thing to remember). So as soon as you graduate from the amateur play style of using your mouse to click an ability and then click on the map to cast, you get the joy of accelerated arthritis.

7. It’s an interesting phenomenon. Are gamers just insensitive and hateful people? I think it’s both a general lack of education on regulating nervous systems in everyday life as well as game design that often incentivizes dysregulation. It can sure feel like the only way to influence anonymous teammates is by hurling every insult you can think of, in the vain hope that maybe they’ll finally realize what an idiot they have been so as to do the thing you think is right.

8. Or if you are like me, just radiate your irritation all over your loved ones. It’s a true mystery why my romantic partners don’t tend to like it when I game 🫠.

9. This is something I have been thinking a fair bit about, especially through Dota. While I think shaming is generally a pretty flawed social function, I think there’s a place for it within certain defined social contexts. A proper insult can enlighten all parties, and to do well requires great artistry.

10. Dota has ~500,000 concurrent monthly players. The critical mass needed for the number of games or players to untilt the culture as a whole would be somewhat infeasible to reach for a startup-sized crew(s). However, even sticking with Gaming as the domain, there exist many niche games with relatively small player-base, where one can essentially splice in new cultural patterns through a small group of agents to study its effects and potentially radically influence the game’s developmental trajectory.