Fun fact: when I first started blogging on my own domain, around 2010 or so, I felt a compulsion to do a series of blogposts about video games and gamification. I still have a few posts in my archives about them. It’s interesting to look back on them now. I was a little too ambitious in scope – I wanted to break down every single thing about games and write 30-50 blogposts about them. I managed a few. But looking back, those blogposts were a little too tedious and complicated. Which is a metaphor for how my life has been so far, I think. Overly ambitious scopes, excessively tedious and ornate steps…

Fast forward to today: I’ve been a free agent for over a month, and I’ve had a lot of time to just sit around and do nothing. And in that nothing-doing, I’ve drifted back to video games. I’ve been playing video games, and I’ve been watching other people play video games.

There are two games that are on my mind right now: Doom and Diablo 2. And I’m thinking about them particularly because I’ve played them myself, AND I’ve seen some really amazing youtube videos of people playing those games at the highest level. 

Watching Llama play Diablo 2 was particularly mind-expanding for me. I watched him do speedruns both as a Sorceress (which seems to allow the fastest runs, because of teleport) and a Barbarian (which is relevant to me, because I have the most experience myself playing as one).

I want to make a list of the things that he does differently than I do.

The first parts of what he did seemed pretty much identical to what I do, and what everybody has to do when starting out – you need to run out into the world and kill whatever mobs you encounter, so you can gain experience, which lets you level and gain skill points.

But this is where things get more interesting – he knows that you get much more experience from miniboss characters and their minions, so he focuses his time and energy almost exclusively on killing those, while running away and around non-boss mobs.

He has a very intuitive sense of how the maps in the game work, so he wastes very little time exploring and meandering around. The maps are partially random-generated, but they have certain predictable patterns, which he is very attuned to. Watching him navigate the maps is mind-expanding. He just flies through the maps. What this means is that, in the time it takes me to meander around one region, killing all the mobs, he has already blazed through multiple regions and killed all of the miniboss mobs and minions – so he gains more experience than I do, in the same amount of time.

He buys lots of potions, including stamina potions. Stamina potions stack (I didn’t know this!), meaning you can drink dozens of them at a time and have effectively ‘infinite’ stamina. His inventory is practically always full of potions – both health and mana potions – which allows him to constantly be taking damage, and constantly be dealing damage. This makes so much sense, and yet I never considered it. Before watching him, I’d have thought that it would be a waste of money. But he’s basically optimizing for “how can I spend as little time as possible getting as much experience as possible?” and that means fighting miniboss mobs as much as possible, which in turn means fighting them and taking damage.

I’m thinking again about my own play style – by the time I’ve killed Diablo, for instance, I typically have a fat stash of gold – if memory serves me correct, I’d have like 40,000 gold(?) sitting around. Maybe 20,000 lowest, 60,000 highest, I can’t remember – but let’s assume 40k. A greater health potion costs about 250 gold. That’s 160 health potions I could have bought, but didn’t. That’s 160 health potions worth of health I could have afforded to lose while fighting mobs, that I didn’t! So I have this huge safety buffer that I don’t realize I have, and I don’t know what to do with – but MrLlamaSC is comfortably spending that health, spending that gold on health potions, and converting that gold and health into experience – which is facilitating his speedrun.

There are other things he does that’s really smart. He knows, for example, that The Countess in the Tower in Act 1 reliably drops runes. So he plays that Countess multiple times and collects all the runes he needs to make the runewords he wants. These would take a long time to get from “natural” play, but by getting them early, he becomes hideously overpowered relative to what I would assume is possible, and can deal much heavier damage at lower levels than me.

He has a good sense of the stats that he wants to have – IIRC he wanted lightning resistance for Act 2, when he’s fighting the lightning beetles (which definitely killed me several times, despite being higher levelled than him at that point), he wants fast run/walk for his boots so he can get away from mobs better (and run faster through the game). He knows that he wants to concentrate on maces, I think because they’re likelier to have sockets(?) that let him put his desired runewords in. He’s very quick to buy and sell new items when he needs them, not second-guessing them at all.

I can’t possibly get into every single detail of what he does; but I think my big takeaway is that he has this really clear mental model of how the game works, what the mechanics are, what he can mess around with, and what he’s optimizing for. I don’t think I had any of that when I was playing – I was mostly just slowly tinkering my way through the game (which is pleasurable in its own way, but limiting). When you play the way I do, naturally, you sort of find an early equilibrium that works, and then mostly stick with that, maybe experimenting some little facet from time to time. What MrLlamaSC does is first principles thinking – getting a higher class of performance and enjoyment out of his experience by being very clear about what he’s trying to do.

So what are my takeaways? How do I get better at speedrunning my own life? (The idea isn’t to rush in a way that is sloppy and costly – the idea is to be, like MrLlama is compared to me in Diablo 2, more effective at achieving desired end-states in a shorter amount of time). I’ve talked about this before in other contexts. Like, yeah, duh, I need to think and work from first principles and be more effective to get what I want. I suppose I just like the idea now of having MrLlama’s Diablo 2 playthrough to keep in mind as I playthrough my own life.

So there are some simple questions to ask, and I already know them – what are the desired end-states? How do we prioritize? Should I speedrun these vomits? It’s an option. I think I should take it. I don’t feel strongly about it. But I think I never will, so I have to decide and commit.

More notes from Llama

Firas Zahabi on working out smart – it’s about pushing yourself the right amount