Some study in words

Following up my sort of introduction from the last post, I wanted to examine a bit more what this blog will be about by examining what exactly strategy and tactics are. What makes them different? What makes them similar? Being the era that it is, Wikipedia of course assists in setting us along the proper path to begin.

"In military terms, tactics is concerned with the conduct of an engagement while strategy is concerned with how different engagements are linked. In other words, how a battle is fought is a matter of tactics: whether it should be fought at all is a matter of strategy."-Wikipedia

And so, we see that the idea of strategy and tactics began with military campaigns, not that this is surprising - war, or at least conflict, is an inherent part of humanity ever since we organized into tribes millennia ago. It is easy to see how the above definition could be applied to game theory, where we see the following definition given to strategy.

"In game theory, a strategy refers to one of the options that a player can choose. That is, every player in a non-cooperative game has a set of possible strategies, and must choose one of them." -Wikipedia

There are, of course, many disambiguations of strategy which are now applied to various interactions which occur in our society, all quite valid in my eyes. Strategy covers a wide array of human interactions, and through being applied to things such as game theory it has, in part, taken on the definition of tactics as well - since they are sometimes used interchangeably to refer to a plan of action in a game. This is because people tend to use both strategy or tactics to refer to both "how the battle is fought" and "why the battle is fought."

Hopefully this has given some idea of what I'll be covering. I will probably fall into the group of people who tend to use the terms strategy and tactics interchangeably, and thus incorrectly, but I will try my best not to. Nevertheless, I do want to cover both the how and the why of the plans of action which I use in gaming and life, and that brings us to the reasoning of the title to this blog.

Hoping to have some more articles up soon before my final projects begin swamping me for a couple weeks, so stay tuned.

I hate introductions

I find introductions something that is very hard to do. It's better, I've found, to get to know someone over time rather than take in a bunch of (often) random information about a person when you first encounter them - that's not how people process information. Never the less, I will give a bit of info about myself and, moreso, what the contents of this blog are going to be.

I'm an IT student, focusing on system and network management. I'm also the co-leader and raid leader of a small-time World of Warcraft guild, and have been leading guilds and raids in that game for about three years now - as a protection-specced warrior. Previously, I was also an officer in a guild in EQ1, but quit playing that shortly before Omens of War was released. As you can tell, I'm a pretty big gamer - I enjoy being a part of a group of individuals in MMO's, and it's the primary reason I play them. I do enjoy a lot of single player games also though, but mostly on consoles (360 and a bit of Wii). I've also recently rejoined the hobby of Warhammer 40k, and hope to have my Blood Angels army finished in the next few months. I've never played a game of it however, mostly due to not having lived around anyone that played before - but that has changed, hence my rejoining the hobby.

So as you can tell by that above paragraph and the title/description of this blog, I'm going to be focusing on strategy and tactics employed in the games I play. But, I also want to post some entries about strategies used with people - which, in general, while mostly applied to guild leading can also be applied to any type of team. I've a fair interest in how people interact, both in a normal social atmosphere but also how they interact when working together toward a common goal (or not, in some unfortunate cases).

So that's my introduction, hopefully you stick around to read more. Comments will be welcome, of course.