I've been playing the guitar for 14 years now. I started when I was ten. Learning Starcraft has made me remember how I felt those first few months of playing the guitar. When you start playing an instrument, you can do it in one of two ways. The first way is simple, you learn exactly how to play Smoke on the Water or Für Elise by googling where you want your fingers to be and then simply copying those instructions. The other way is to mercilessly practice the basics. It's not fun and you don't get any quick or even semi-quick results. A guitarist has to learn each chord painfully slowly and spend endless hours trying and failing to hit the chords, then transitioning between them and coordinating the two hands. A pianist has to learn fingering by practicing until he or she wants to headbutt a wall, then concentrate on one hand at a time until both can do things on their own.
In the end, the Für Elise people will only know how to play Für Elise, and they can never transition out of it. They have no foundation. The people who learn the basics well become actual musicians, able to learn Für Elise in a fraction of the time it took the other person by applying those basics to that particular song. When I get cheesed in the bronze league, it makes me think of kids playing some simple melody over and over again while snickering at me trying desperately to just hit a G chord. But I want to learn how to macro, and I will spend the time it takes.
To continue the analogy, I want to tell you what it feels like to play the guitar once you actually know how to. A ton of stuff happens simultaneously in every single chord or tone. When you play a G chord, you have to put three fingers on the correct strings and frets, but you also have to put them down hard enough and in the right place, otherwise the string will be muted and no sound comes out. You also need to have your fingers in the correct angle so that they don't touch any other strings, because if they do, those strings will be muted. Your other hand then produces the sounds, either by hitting the right amount of strings in a sweeping motion, or by picking the strings one by one in some order. But when you know how to play the guitar, you don't actually think about these things. There is no individual control of the fingers, you just think "G" and the experience from years of practice automatically places your fingers in the right spots with the correct angles and force. If you've practiced finger-picking a lot, it also requires very little thought to control your other hand. Your fingers pick the strings almost automatically. There is also no "1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4" in your head to keep track of the rhythm. You just have a feeling for it, and that comes with experience.
When I play Starcraft, I'm completely overwhelmed. I have a basic idea of a build order and how I want it to end up, but this is what happens in my head:
"Ok, I'm making SCVs, making SCVs, should I build more marines? How much money do I have? Crap I need to put down more barracks OH SHIT I'm not making SCVs, gotta make SCVs, oh hey scouting probe, is there a proxy somewhere? Where did it go? Damn it, supply blocked! Oh shit I didn't take the gas gotta make some SCVs which hotkey did I use? Are you all in the control group? Noo, I haven't muled at all, shit should I scan? Why don't I have a factory? I should have one right about DAMN IT, SUPPLY BLOCKED AGAIN!"
When I play chords on the guitar, all I really need to do is think "G A Am Em" and a general idea of how I want the strings to be picked. Because my hands move by themselves, I can concentrate on other things, such as singing at the same time, or adding small flourishes to the chords or the melody in my own personal style. If I play a heavy metal solo, I break it down into pieces that I practice individually using various techniques I've learned, until each of the pieces becomes easy, then I put them all together. Being able to improvise takes a long, long time and you have to know the basics so well that you can play the guitar in your sleep. After 14 years of playing the guitar, if I hear a song and it's not too complicated, I can immediately play it myself. I can also make up songs in my head and then make those sounds with my guitar. But it's taken forever. I've spent thousands of hours playing to be that comfortable.
I'm not a Starcraft pro by any stretch of the imagination, but when I watch them, I think that I understand what goes on in their heads. It's certainly not "I'll make drones let's see 4 S D 4 S D check this expo check injects 4 S D 4 S D let me look at that keyboard how much do mutas cost?". It's impossible to do this with over 200 APM, you can't think that fast. A guitarist doesn't think "Fourth fret good angle hit e string with right hand, fifth fret good angle hard enough to make sound without right hand, seventh fret good angle hard enough", a simple hammer on technique that can produce three tones in a fraction of a second. The guitarist just thinks about the sounds and then it happens.
To learn how to macro, I think I know what I need to do. I need to hit those G chords, then those A chords. What this means is breaking down the game into parts. SCV production is one part that has to be constant. If it's not, everything else fails. So I practice just making SCVs. Then I add buildings. Then I add units. If I fail to make SCVs constantly because I'm concentrating on buildings, I know that I need to go down a step in complexity and concentrate on making SCVs again. My eyes need to go between the mini-map and the supplies in the top right. If they don't, if I'm too overwhelmed, I go down one step in complexity again. It's boring and it's frustrating, but I need to learn those basics until they just happen by themselves if I ever want to be good. So I'm just playing against the AI, practicing the basics over and over again.
I long for the day I can macro while doing fifty other things on the map, which in this analogy would be equal to singing while playing a complicated song on the guitar. And the only way to get there is to practice those basics over and over again.
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