Honers and Innovators

The concept behind this blog post was taken from a lecture given by the creator of Magic: The Gathering, Richard Garfield. I don't remember exactly where it's from, but I'm pretty sure it's from this video: Dr. Richard Garfield on "Luck vs. Skill"

In a nutshell, there are two types of gamers, honers and innovators, and I think that this concept can be applied to people in general as well. The names are pretty intuitive and it isn't hard to figure out exactly what these names refer to, but for the sake of this post, I am going to lay them out.

Honers are people who learn a certain skill set or process and spend a ton of time perfecting it (a.k.a. honing). Innovators are people who come up new things (a.k.a. innovating). Honers are always going through trial and error. Innovators are always thinking. Of course, the two categories can mix (there are definitely people who spend lots of time coming up with new ideas while refining old ones), but from my experience, the two don't mix very often. In order to make this article related to Halo because most of the people who come here are probably Halo-ers, I am going to apply the concept of honers and innovators to Halo montage clips.

To better illustrate the concept, I am going to come up a good example of a honer in the Halo community and a good example of an innovator. I think the best example of a honer in the Halo community is Kampy. It's pretty obvious that Kampy is ridiculously good at the game and that's because he's honed the process of being a monstrous killing machine to godly levels. However, if you watch his videos, it's easy to see that, for the most part, he isn't coming up with any new processes or ideas in his montage footage; he's taking what other people have done and doing it a million times better. The "montage kid" idea of taking a sniper to the top of the tower overlooking beach spawns and just blaining everybody was pretty well-known prior to Kampy's fourth Halo 3 montage; it's just that he was the first one to get a no scope killimanjaro extermination using this process. Kampy took this process, honed his ability to execute it to near-perfection levels, and was rewarded with an iconic montage clip.

On the other hand, Salaya perfectly encapsulates the concept of an innovator in the Halo community. The entertainment value of Salaya's footage heavily depends on the fact that it's stuff that people have actually never seen before or have only seen in controlled situations (tutorials, random customs, etc). For example, let's take a look at a Halo: Reach clip where Salaya simply grenades the rocket carrier on Reflection (don't exactly remember when it was and what video it was from). Salaya spawned underneath the rocket level/top mid and threw a grenade through a crack in the ceiling/floor to take out the guy who went straight for rockets. While this process took very little honing (he was simply throwing a grenade through a crack), the clip has substantial entertainment value because he took a unique way of using the map's physical structure and applied it in a practical situation (matchmaking).

Montage footage in Halo can be split using these categories. There's honer material and innovator material. Honer material is your "traditional" montage footage (multikills, sweet snipes, etc), while innovator material is your Salaya-ey footage (trick jumping, using items in the game in an unconventional manner, taking advantage of glitches, etc). Also, even though a lot of funtage clips are completely accidental, I consider funtage footage as innovator material. An important difference between the two types of material that comes into play in montage making is how the clips from these two categories age.

Honer material generally ages better than innovator material, because in the end, everyone has some sort of respect for the process, which is what honer material focuses on. How many times have you seen an MLG Onslaught BR overkill where the guy was just moving from side to side in the enemy base, picking people off their spawn? If you're anything like me, the answer should be several dozen, if not hundreds. Even though countless people have gotten their own incarnation of this clip and used it, the community is, for the most part, ok with that. They're actually not as common anymore, but my point still stands. Even though all of these incarnations are essentially the same clip, people are fine with watching it over and over again because they recognize the amount of time, skill, and effort that went into it. It took a long, long time for the standard for Onslaught multikills to move to killtaculars and above and eventually fall out of favor.

Innovator material, on the other hand, ages incredibly quickly. Since innovator material focuses on ingenuity rather than the process, the near-universal respect for the process doesn't really apply. Innovator material relies heavily on its freshness for its entertainment value, which is why an innovator clip becomes exponentially less and less entertaining with each new incarnation. An example would be Construct lift sticks in Halo 3. In the beginning, single and double kill lift sticks (mainly up Gold) were everywhere, but after a few months, they were non-existent in Halo videos. Similarly, copying something like PianoFrenzy's health pack would become old incredibly quickly; personally, I would become bored with it after seeing it for second or third time in a montage. However, a different innovator clip like Salaya's grenade launcher jump on Powerhouse, which is a more difficult process that subsequently requires more honing, would probably last a lot longer in montages (could be done with different spots to different maps to prolong its lifespan).

Anyways, I know that this post doesn't have a lot of information that can be applied, but I really enjoyed Richard Garfield's lecture and these concepts he introduced, so I thought I would write about them. Thanks for reading and take care.