The Hearthstone Hover

The best part of Hearthstone is the lit­tle orange out­line that shows around a card when your oppo­nent is look­ing at it.

At some point in Hearthstone’s devel­op­ment, some­body at Blizzard real­ized that they could not pos­si­bly allow the play­ers to talk to each other. While many (if not most) com­pet­i­tive mul­ti­play­er games allow for text chat between play­ers, Hearthstone does not. Instead, if you click on the por­trait of your char­ac­ter, you can choose from a num­ber of pre­s­e­lect­ed state­ments, each a vari­a­tion on one of nine phras­es: “Greetings,” “Oops,” “Wow,” “Thank you,” and so on. Although the game does fea­ture an in-game chat client, you can only use it to talk to peo­ple on your friends list, not the other play­er in a game of Hearthstone.

This is good. People on the Internet are hor­ri­ble. There is no rea­son to ever talk to an oppo­nent in an online videogame. Nothing makes me more cer­tain of (and hope­ful for) the even­tu­al extinc­tion of the human race than the way peo­ple talk to each other in videogame cha­t­rooms. I have this prob­lem a lot: I love com­pet­i­tive videogames, and love play­ing games with peo­ple, but I am so aller­gic to the usual trash talk and hyper­com­pet­i­tive alpha non­sense that so per­me­ates com­pet­i­tive videogames that I find myself phys­i­cal­ly ner­vous before I press the “Ready” but­ton while play­ing Heroes of the Storm. I love videogames – I am deeply dis­trust­ful of gamers.

The prob­lem, how­ev­er, is that with­out the abil­i­ty to talk to the other play­er, it is very easy to for­get that you’re play­ing with anoth­er human being rather than sim­ply an AI. I don’t want to play against com­put­ers, I just don’t want to have to talk to the other per­son I’m play­ing with. It’s always more fun to play against a human mind than a com­put­er – humans are unpre­dictable and prone to psy­cho­log­i­cal war­fare in ways that com­put­ers aren’t. Given that Hearthstone doesn’t let you com­mu­ni­cate much with your oppo­nent, it would be easy for you to for­get that you’re play­ing with a real per­son. That’s where the orange out­line comes in.

Hearthstone is a very tac­tile game, and it plays beau­ti­ful­ly on a touch­screen. You play cards by tap­ping (or click­ing, if you’re play­ing with a mouse) on the screen and drag­ging the card to wher­ev­er you want it to go. Playing a min­ion to the board has a delight­ful feel­ing of just flick­ing it out, like you’re Gambit throw­ing a card at a wall. If you want to get a clos­er look at a card, you hover over it with your mouse cur­sor or press your fin­ger on it and wait – a zoomed-in ver­sion of the card will appear in the cen­ter of your screen. On your opponent’s screen, what­ev­er you’re look­ing at will be sur­round­ed by an orange out­line.

The game thus shows you (in approx­i­mate real time) not only the moves your oppo­nent is mak­ing, but the cards they are look­ing at. This gives you a win­dow into your opponent’s mind. When you play an obscure card with a dras­tic effect and an orange light appears around it for a few sec­onds, you know that your oppo­nent is look­ing at it, per­haps to remem­ber what it does or to decide what to do next. You can see your oppo­nent cycling through their hand try­ing to decide what to play.

Hearthstone’s reliance on ran­dom num­ber gen­er­a­tion means it behaves in a way that a phys­i­cal card game can’t, but by allow­ing you this insight into what your oppo­nent is think­ing, the game brings you back to the feel­ing of sit­ting across a table with an actu­al human being, rather than cradling a glow­ing screen in your bed­room in the mid­dle of the night.