Every game under the umbrella of decision-making contest has a component of one player or team being on offense and the other being on defense. Usually that correlates with the capacity to score a point. In most sports the you can only score while your team possesses the ball. Here, possession of the ball defines Offense as we conventionally understand it. This places the other team, the team which does not protect the ball as being on Defense and inheriting the role of preventing the other team from scoring. This is the general public’s understanding of offense and defense.
The player or team that is on offense is indeterminant of who happens to have the ball or the point lead or any observable advantage in your favorite esport. Offense is exercised by the actor. Defense is exercised by the acted upon. One can be in the defensive role (not in possession of the ball) but still be the primary actor. The role of actor and acted upon are determined by the communications between both players up to this point. To win the game a player must maintain the actor role the longest. Basically if you’re worried about what the opponent may do, you’re on defense.
For example, in American Football the team on offense may be unsure of their plays, worried about the opponent’s defensive players, afraid of allowing a sack or throwing an interception. Hesitation and uncertainty are symptoms of being acted upon. The team while is technically on offense, they are not a threat to the team on defense. Unless the team on defense is equally unsettled, they are more likely to solve the problems presented to them and win the game. After all the winner of a decision-making contest is the side that is correct when and where is counts most.
But you may say “That’s just mind games! The team on offense is trying to score. The team on defense is trying to stop them.” I would say the only game is the mind game. All games are exercises in practicing the mind game. The roles of offense and defense are more like parameters in which contextualize the conversation. In a game like Street Fighter, League of Legends, or Hearthstone we don’t have these convenient roles. Yet in all of these games there are clear moments when you can tell that one player or team is on the attack and the other is on defense. Here are a few ways you can tell.
Offense:
- Quick pace
- Proactive decision making/Decides what the objective of the play is
- Calculated risk taking
- Better execution of tactics
- Objective
Defense:
- Slower pace
- Reactive decision making/Focused on damage control.
- May take bad risks because they are reaching their wit’s end.
- Poor execution of tactics
- Emotional
As you can see above we can tell who will win based on these observations. Thankfully these are not the defaults of the contextual roles within ball-based sports. As mentioned above, this observation is independent of that context and meant to be more applicable to all decision-making contests. Offense isn’t the party who may score, its the party that advances the conversation. In good competition, the lines between these roles blur up until a winner is decided. Sometimes both parties are actors, sometimes both are acted upon; although this doesn’t last very long once one side gets any sort of advantage. And with all competition it is true: you can only win by playing offense.
