During the matches against TLO and MaNa, AlphaStar interacted with the StarCraft game engine directly via its raw interface, meaning that it could observe the attributes of its own and its opponent’s visible units on the map directly, without having to move the camera - effectively playing with a zoomed out view of the game. In contrast, human players must explicitly manage an "economy of attention" to decide where to focus the camera. However, analysis of AlphaStar’s games suggests that it manages an implicit focus of attention. On average, agents “switched context” about 30 times per minute, similar to MaNa or TLO.
Additionally, and subsequent to the matches, we developed a second version of AlphaStar. Like human players, this version of AlphaStar chooses when and where to move the camera, its perception is restricted to on-screen information, and action locations are restricted to its viewable region.