In gaming, micromanagement describes small, detailed gameplay elements that must be manually addressed by the player. It appears in a wide range of games including strategy video games, construction and management simulations and pet-raising simulations. Micromanagement has been a controversial aspect of game design for many years: some gamers regard it as an unwelcomed distraction from higher levels of strategic thinking, and some games try to minimize it; some players and designers treat it as an important skill, and one that is necessary if the game is to support top-level competitions; and some enjoy opportunities to use tactical skill in combat but dislike having to do a lot of detailed work when managing their economies.

Detailed management of units in combat aims to maximize damage given to enemy units and minimize damage to the player's units. For standard combat units the most common techniques are: grouping units into formations, for example to keep lightly-armored archers behind and protected by more heavily-armored melee units; concentrating the fire of all ranged units on one target and then a second, etc., to destroy threats as fast as possible; withdrawing seriously damaged units from combat, if repairing / healing them is cheaper than replacing them; "dancing" units that have taken some damage out of range and then back into combat once the enemy have locked on to another target; using military tactics such as flanking and counterattacks; exploiting Rock-Paper-Scissors relationships between units; using cheap units to draw the enemy's fire away from more expensive units, gameplay especially typical of games of the real-time tactics type. Micromanagement is even more necessary for units which can cast spells or have other special abilities which can only be used infrequently.

"Micromanagement" in this sense is often abbreviated to "micro", which can be used as a noun or a verb. The range of possible economic micromanagement techniques is much wider than for combat, because strategy games' economies work in so many different ways. If the game uses "worker" units to gather resources and / or build things (a common technique in Real-time strategy games), one must make sure none are idle and that they are doing the right things, and must avoid letting enemy raiders destroy them (as is happening in the Starcraft image above).

In some turn-based games one tells colonies what percentages of their efforts to put into various activities such as industrial growth, research, and building defenses or combat units; as colonies grow or the strategic situation changes, one has to check and adjust these ratios. In Sid Meier's Civilization series, it may be important for either economic or military reasons to build railroads as fast as possible, and doing this efficiently requires considerable micromanagement of Settler / Engineer units.

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