Week 3 Lab: Lab 1 — Eight matches

Three hours of ranked play with a thirty-second note between games. The point is the notes; the matches are how you get them

10 March 2027

Three hours, machines provided, in the lab. Bring headphones.

Before you arrive#

Have an account that can queue into games where people are trying. If you have never played, say so when you sign up and you will be put in the beginners’ queue with an experienced player in voice — you are not going to learn anything from three hours of confusion, and nobody expects you to be good.

What happens#

You play. Between every pair of games you write the three notes from the week 3 lecture:

1. The last moment you knew exactly what you should be doing.
2. Your longest stretch with no goal — roughly how long, and what ended it.
3. What told you that you were winning.

Thirty seconds. On paper, next to the keyboard, before you re-queue. Writing them at the end of the session from memory produces a different and much less useful document, because by then you have replaced what happened with a story about what happened.

Kelsen will interrupt occasionally and ask what the next ninety seconds are for. Not being able to answer is the interesting case, and it is not a telling-off — it is the data.

Two warnings#

Don’t tilt-queue. If you go four losses down, stop and read your own notes for five minutes. The session is not a climb.

Don’t play a mode where losing is free. Casual modes with strangers who don’t mind losing produce none of the pressure we are examining. If your only option is a casual mode, play it with someone from your tutorial group who will be annoyed if you throw.

Afterwards#

Eight sets of three lines, minimum, brought to week 4. Line 2 across eight games is the raw material for the mechanism you build next week — the dead stretches are the thing being designed away, and you cannot design away a stretch you never measured.