Game:

Beat Saber (2018)

Duration: 9:59

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After getting torn apart by any attempts at Expert yesterday, but after getting decently good at Hard and playing through some of the campaign (I'm about 1/3 of the way through now), I thought I'd try to practice up on Escape Expert.

So I try it three times here at slow speed, and after I think I have a good study of it, I try the real thing (7:07), and only screw up 20 times. Not awful. There are a couple spots where I just keep screwing up. I tried again later at faster speed and couldn't do it, yet.

But it makes me realize being good at this game isn't just being able to respond purely to what you see. There is memorized choreography and muscle memory involved, like a dance routine. One of the problems I have watching these hyper capable players on youtube is that I think some people are just supposed to be good at some things, and we wonder how they are able to do it. But it's practice and time spent. Time, practice, time, practice. It's no different than dancing, working out, or anything else you want to get good at. I'm 51 years old. If I can do it, you can. I wouldn't have thought I couldn't do it 20, 30 years ago, and that seems to be the typical pattern, that getting older means you think you can't do certain things and you just wonder how "these kids" can, just because they get so much better at it so much faster. I don't really feel that way myself, but I know a lot of them (both the older people and the kids) talk that way, and that affects a lot of the perception. But that doesn't have to be the most important thing about it, even if some of them will say older people will never get the thrill. It's still quite alive in me. If I lose that, just toss me in front of a bus.

I'm not trying to have an attitude about it, even though it's easy for me to. All I'm saying is that on the path to mastery, there are a lot of satisfactions it offers you along the way. The mastery itself is only one of them. The people that say to your face that mastery is all that matters are missing two points - the joy along the way, and the joy of sharing it.

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