A Lesson In Dotalinguistics August 6th, 2013 08:27 GMT Text by SirJolt Graphics by fusefuse For those of you preparing to watch The International 3 who haven’t yet had a chance to dig into Dota 2, there’s a chance that you’ll be put off by the plenitude of new terminology. The “safe lane” is the “short lane,” while the “long lane” is the “offlane” or the “suicide lane.” If this seems straightforward, there are those who point out that the safe lane is, in fact, longer than the “long lane” (depending on how you measure it). It’s a game that has developed its own language over the years, but more than that, the gameplay of Dota itself constitutes a strange language, and every game tests ten players’ ability to argue in that language.



When I first played Dota, I came to the same uncomfortable realisation that so many of us have when we first play Dota; I was terrible. I knew that I was terrible, but there was no number of guides I could consume that would lend vigour to my play. Normally, I’d be content to sit back and say, “Maybe I’m just not very good at competitive games.” That had been my experience with Brood War and Starcraft II, but there was something else lodged at the back of my mind, almost out of reach. It took a long time to identify that feeling.



This felt like something I could be good at. There was a capable portion of my mind that was trying hard to digest an enormity of data that was arriving in the wrong format. I needed some simple analogue to learn from. I needed a mnemonic.



Somewhere in my consideration of a mnemonic device that could encapsulate every hero and their skills, it occurred to me that I was writing an essay... but I wasn’t alone.

Before you write anything, you need to have a plan. It begins with the introduction. If you’re an aware reader, you can guess at the way an introduction will be written, if you know who’s writing it, if you know the shape of the piece. In an essay like this, you’ll want to open with your central thesis, you’ll want to present things in a very particular way. If your writer is competent enough, they might be able to stint things a particular way, to give the impression that they’re not going to make the argument you think they are.



Before you pick anything, you need to have a plan. It begins with the draft. If you’re aware enough, you can guess at the way a team will be constructed, if you know who’s doing the drafting, if you know the style of their game. In a game like this, you’ll want to open with things that are core to your lineup, you’ll want to present things in a very particular way. If your captain is competent enough, they should be able to present things in such a way as to give the opposing team the wrong impression.



In Dota, as in writing, there’s a lot to be said for a little misdirection.



When you draft, you’re not just building a team, you’re building an argument. The less preparation your opposition has before they’re faced with that argument, the better.



We’re all familiar with the way a game of Dota plays out. For the most part, players sit in lane and hurl spells back and forth for the early game, the laning phase, and one team or another ekes out an advantage to take into the midgame, at which point things start to lose their defined shape. Knowing how things will shake down in the laning phase as early as possible allows you to alter your draft accordingly. If there are particular arguments that will undermine your strategy, you have the opportunity to ban them.



As with any argument though, there are unorthodox movements. You could always open an argument by insinuating that the person with whom you’re debating hasn’t any right to be there in the first place, or that his mother is a tawdry harlot. You could start your debate by shaking hands and squaring off against the opposing team, or you could slap their captain in the face and grab yourselves an aegis at level one.





The analogy runs deeper than debate though. For those of us more used to working with words than with spells and skills, the laning phase is an opportunity to test your opponents ability to build their argument. The players involved find themselves with a limited vocabulary that grows over the course of their first few levels. These skills, for the most part, represent the verbs with which you can interact with the opposing team. Verbs are nice and easy, you press a key and something happens to another player; the subject/object relationship isn’t too difficult to disentangle.



What you end up with then is a conversation unfolding across three lanes (assuming that no one has retired to the jungle to start working on their thesis somewhere quiet).1 The way in which those conversations unfold depends on the heroes involved and their respective vocabularies.



In the case of heroes like Lion, Shadow Shaman, or Silencer, a huge proportion of your input into the conversation comes in the form of being able to cut off a part of the vocabulary your opponents have come to rely on, whether in lane or as part of their teamfight. This might include something as simple as unexpectedly silencing or stunning a Treant Protector at the exact moment that your allies decide to make trouble for his friend on the opposite side of the map. In cases like these, it’s possible to weaken their argument by revoking access to certain skills.



There is no more effective way to counter the argument that a pair of heroes is making in your lane than by having a full and comprehensive understanding of the way they’ll want to make their argument for the lane. Knowing their abilities inside out gives you the advantage of knowing how to undermine them, whether that’s by ensuring you’re never quite inside the range of their stuns or denying them the experience they need to get required levels.



Of course, this means that, if you’re a beginner looking to get into Dota 2, your journey from “noob” to “effective player” is most probably going to require your learning at least the most common of Dota’s 100+ heroes’ skills. Given that most heroes (with the exception of outliers like the Invoker) have somewhere in the neighbourhood of four skills, you’re staring down the barrel of some 400 skills. Of course, you’re going to spend your first few games playing with others who aren’t making the best use of their chosen heroes’ vocabularies, which will make life easier, but sooner or later you’ll need to engage in a little language acquisition.



That language acquisition comes in a few different forms. For those of us who are into the esports side of things, you’ll hear the names of items and players bandied around. For those who take a more learn-by-doing approach, you’ll see other players building items you can’t imagine in your first few games. Long before you have the opportunity to build one in a game, you’ll likely have some idea of what a Black King Bar or a Scythe of Vyse does. The similarities with childhood language acquisition aren’t too hard to puzzle out.



As your vocabulary broadens, you’ll find yourself in a position to pick holes in opposing teams’ arguments. Where certain compositions had before seemed watertight, you’ll begin to see that critical hero or skill that holds the team together. Once you identify that weakness, you can begin the delicate work of disentangling your opponents’ arguments.

While you do so, you may have to consider the utility of a hero like Rubick (whether he’s on your team or with the opposition). Playing against a good Rubick is like trying to have a running debate with a man who has access to a dictaphone and a mixing desk. Your own points come back to haunt you, but in the context of the enemy’s team they seem twisted and larger-than-life. Playing well in that context requires you to understand your own skillset, but also how well individual elements of your own abilities synergise with those available to their team.



Playing against a competent Silencer is an experience akin to attempting to have a political debate with a member of the opposition occasionally kicking at the cables of your microphones.2 The capacity to put him down (ideally by silencing him, for the sake of poetic justice) before he manages to do so helps to unravel the other team’s strategy before they can enact it.



As you can see, there comes a time when simply knowing how to play the character you’ve chosen offers diminishing returns. There’s more mileage in knowing how the characters you’re interacting with function, whether friend or foe, as well as understanding the quirks of their individual skills. You’re not competing with the other team nearly as much as you’re attempting to build a very compelling argument with your teammates. You need to understand the points your team wants to make so that your own arguments will back them up, rather than undermine them.

Of course, all of the above only really addresses the “verbs” of Dota. Some of the most interesting spells in the game function in a manner far more similar to adjectives. Rubick’s Null Field, for example, confers on his entire team a resistance to magic that reduces the efficacy of a whole selection of the verbs available to their opponents. Knowing when it’s in effect, to what extent, and how it affects every skill on your team is a feat of mental gymnastics that gradually becomes a sixth sense.



The Crystal Maiden’s Arcane Aura does almost the reverse, lending everyone on her team extra mana regeneration, which means that opponents need to be aware that they’ll be on the receiving end of enemy spells more often. Huskar’s Berserker’s Blood manages to transform him from “ranged hero” to “insufferable ranged hero.”

Then there are skills that act as adverbs. Weaver’s Geminate Attack ability effectively just appends the word “twice” to his attacks. Similarly, the Antimage’s Mana Break causes his basic attacks to bleed a victim’s mana away, while the Enchantress’s ultimate lends a healthy amount of damage to her attacks.



Each of these skills is going to have an impact on the way you phrase your in-game argument, determining what stance you’ll take to enemy behaviour, and that’s before we even get onto the topic of items. On top of some 400 or so skills for you to add to your working vocabulary, you need to remember that you’re playing against five people at once, rather than just the one, two, or three you can see early in the game. So, from the pool of 400 skills, the enemy team has access to twenty, give or take. Ideally, you’ll know how their skills interact too, but we’ll get to questions of grammar a little later on.





Nouns are a strange case. For all of the other connections between Dota and language, they were the example that it took longest to occur to me, in spite of how common nouns are in everyday speech. At first, I had thought that there simply wasn’t a parallel, so many spells seemed to fit the “verb” template that the humble noun seemed to have been eclipsed. As is the way with these things, as soon as I thought of one the rest slotted into place in short order.



There are relatively few skills or items that manifest as nouns in Dota, but those that could be considered to do so, without stretching too far, are those that involve the summoning of some creature or other. Visage’s ultimate, Summon Familiars, as well as the Invoker’s Forged Spirits are certainly examples. Beyond that, the Dark Seer’s Wall of Replica, Warlock’s Chaotic Offering, and the humble Manta Style all allow for a player to create some new creatures to fling at opponents.



Of course, I should have looked no further than Phantom Lancer, whose skillset allows for little more than the tireless creation of additional Phantom Lancers with which to erode an opposing team. Having a decent Phantom Lancer on your team allows you to simply filibuster your way to victory.





Dota does have some skills and items that effectively function as prepositions, though there are few enough of them. There are certainly times when a skill would be more useful if it were executed from “over there” or “on top of something” or if the enemy were “closer to me.”



You can use a Blink Dagger or a Force Staff to describe a position you’d rather something were in. While the skills that fit this description most closely are, of course, the Antimage and Queen of Pain’s Blinks (with all their various differences), there are also Sand King’s Burrow Strike, Kunkka’s Marks the Spot, and Puck’s Ethereal Jaunt to consider, and that’s before we even begin to describe Pudge’s Hook and Chen’s Test of Faith (to say nothing of their strange combination). There are, of course, others, but you get the idea.





If you were to tell anyone looking at a new game that they’ll have to learn the rules behind 400 skills and 130-ish items, they’d tell you where you could shove your game... but words? Words are straightforward. Anyone reading this piece knows tens of thousands of words, but it’s not just a question of how many words you know. Rather it how those words are deployed in sentences and in all of their manifold combinations that makes language function in the way that it does. There is a tremendous volume of metadata attached. In isolation, any skill is an interesting curiosity, but once those skills start being stacked on top of one another the question of whose understanding is better starts to get muddy.



The ways in which skills interact with one another constitute the grammar of the game. Knowing and understanding the strange interactions between skills like the Batrider’s Flaming Lasso and Pudge’s Meat Hook. Both skills should allow you to drag a player from one position on the map to another. We all know that Shadow Demon’s Disruption can be used to save a target as a Batrider drags them or that the Beastmaster’s Roar cuts through Magic Immunity, but how many of us can say with any confidence whether it’s possible to hook a player who is currently under the effect of a Flaming Lasso?



Questions of grammar like the above don’t only arise with beginners either. Earlier this year, we were fortunate enough to speak to 3 Na`Vi’s superior understanding of the game’s arcane grammar facilitated those staggering teamfights.



It could have been the turning point of a match between the finalists in a competition that would determine the best team in the world... and it all came down to just one of the possible interactions between two of the game’s 400 skills.



In terms of spells intertwining, there are no means by which you might predict how things will work without simply testing the interaction. As a frustrated French teacher once shrieked at me during what was to prove a protracted oral exam on irregular verbs, sometimes there is no rule of thumb, there are elements of language for which the only effective option is to study every possible detail and attempt to memorise every aspect of what you discover.





The realisation of all of the above may not help other players as it has helped me, I can only speak to my own experience. The truth is that I’m not cut out for Dota. There’s an awful lot to keep in mind, and I can barely remember getting dressed in the mornings. If you ask me what I ate for dinner last night, the odds are I’d only be able to answer it by having a quick look through the sink. Atrocious though my memory might be, there is some portion of my mind that manages to remember words quite well.If you were to tell anyone looking at a new game that they’ll have to learn the rules behind 400 skills and 130-ish items, they’d tell you where you could shove your game... but words? Words are straightforward. Anyone reading this piece knows tens of thousands of words, but it’s not just a question of how many words you know. Rather it how those words are deployed in sentences and in all of their manifold combinations that makes language function in the way that it does. There is a tremendous volume of metadata attached. In isolation, any skill is an interesting curiosity, but once those skills start being stacked on top of one another the question of whose understanding is better starts to get muddy.The ways in which skills interact with one another constitute the grammar of the game. Knowing and understanding the strange interactions between skills like the Batrider’s Flaming Lasso and Pudge’s Meat Hook. Both skills should allow you to drag a player from one position on the map to another. We all know that Shadow Demon’s Disruption can be used to save a target as a Batrider drags them or that the Beastmaster’s Roar cuts through Magic Immunity, but how many of us can say with any confidence whether it’s possible to hook a player who is currently under the effect of a Flaming Lasso?Questions of grammar like the above don’t only arise with beginners either. Earlier this year, we were fortunate enough to speak to iG's Chuan . One of the feelings he communicated about Dota was that it was of vital importance to fully understand what he called the “minutiae” of the game. When explaining the team’s defeat at the hands of Na`Vi at The International 2 this time last year, Chuan described Puppey as a genius, explaining that iG hadn’t been aware of one very specific change to the interaction between the Naga Siren’s Song of the Siren and Tidehunter’s Ravage that had cropped up somewhere in the translation from DotA to Dota 2.Na`Vi’s superior understanding of the game’s arcane grammar facilitated those staggering teamfights.It could have been the turning point of a match between the finalists in a competition that would determine the best team in the world... and it all came down to just one of the possible interactions between two of the game’s 400 skills.In terms of spells intertwining, there are no means by which you might predict how things will work without simply testing the interaction. As a frustrated French teacher once shrieked at me during what was to prove a protracted oral exam on irregular verbs, sometimes there is no rule of thumb, there are elements of language for which the only effective option is to study every possible detail and attempt to memorise every aspect of what you discover. Of course, for all Na`Vi’s cleverness in manipulating the semantics of iG’s core argument, in the case of The International 2, iG adapted and went on to crush the opposition. As in any other debate, you can only really go so far by picking at loopholes in the way your opponent has constructed their argument. In the end, Na`Vi found out just how swiftly a hole like that can be closed when the opposition is a team of iG’s calibre.



The truth is that there are very few substitutes for experience. Originality and audacity certainly have their place, as anyone who saw Alliance’s mass TP to their tier one tower for a level-one Roshan snipe during the G-1 League can attest, but, as in writing, that innovation and flexibility is strengthened by a firm understanding of the grammar on which the game is built.



If you’re bright and quick-witted, you’ll go far in any language, but there’s no substitute for total immersion. You can take every chance possible to sit down and read the rules governing a language’s usage, but the truth is that you’ll seldom find the day-to-day usage of a language in a book. You can pore over the Liquipedia pages for heroes and items, but until you understand how these things are deployed by people who use them every day, you can’t know. You might read every detail of every spell, but without actually speaking Dota with another group of players you’ll soon find yourself in the same position as iG did.



To a beginner, Tidehunter’s Ravage offers a respectable 450 damage with a 1025 radius, which might seem like a great punchline, but anyone who’s seen a few compelling orators knows the value of a opening with some of your best material.



You and I, dear reader, are tourists. Oh, we’ve got a few words here and there; we can order a drink, maybe make some polite conversation, but there’s still translation happening. We don’t really measure up to native speakers. We can’t exercise the same degree of artistic license, but we can watch. If we’re lucky, we might even be aware enough to catch some of the poetry of it.







Words - Sirjolt @Sirjolt

Art - fusefuse @jkursk



Staff @SirJolt