"The Game"
I play a video game called Apex Legends. It’s an online battle royale, like Fortnite’s older brother. You get put into a squad of 2 or 3 players, depending on which game mode you chose to play, each of you chooses your character (they have slightly different abilities), and then a dropship launches you into a battleground where you compete against 19 other squads (in Trios; 29 other squads in Duos). A ring of death slowly tightens a noose on the battleground, forcing squads to move closer together and fight until only one squad remains and is declared the Champion.
I started playing Apex last year, February of 2020. My son had been playing it for a while. I’d given him a pretty hard time about this game where 90% of the gameplay appeared to be running around in a frantic state trying to accumulate your ideal combination of weapons, body armor, grendades, weapon attachments, and so on. The other 10% of the game, obviously, was the fighting.
For the good players, which my son eventually became, this becomes more like 50% running/looting, 50% fighting. For the best players, a.k.a. the pros, it’s more like 10% looting, 90% killing everyone else.
The ratio for a new player, or simply a bad player, is completely different. It might be 80% percent load screens, character selection, and flying in, 2% frantic looting, and then 18% dying. It mostly just feels like dying. Waiting to die, then dying. Then waiting to die again, then dying. With 30 seconds of “on the ground” time in between where you’re desperately trying to learn the guns, the controls, the environment of the map.
Of course, there is a training grounds where you can learn the guns, pratice your aim and movement and such. But honestly! Who wants to pratice a game when you can just PLAY IT!
So for a guy that had mostly played things like Zelda and Mario Kart for the last 15 years, I’m not sure what sucked me in.
I kind of know what keeps me in.
The game has a very arcade-like quality. I say this gaving grown up in the eighties on Pong, Asteroids, Frogger, an Atari 2600 classic called River Run. We pretty much skipped the Nintendo/Super Nintendo/Sega years. It was much later that I played things like Mario Bros. But regardless, the combination of repetitive action and juice keeps me coming back. And the socials. Let me address these separately.
The action is clear enough. The engaging of the brain in coordination tasks like analyzing the environment, tracking enemy movement, aiming, running/climbing/jumping/sliding/crouching. All of this is very engaging.
The juice is the sounds of the weapons, specifically when bullets hit their targets. Surviving a fight? Winning a fight? Extremely satisfying.
I just realized I am probably addicted to the dopamine hits I am surely getting when I play. How I am so slow to see these things is hilarious.
And the socials are kind of meh, but they’re there. It’s a different experience than playing single player games, or even online games where you can’t interact with your fellow players beyond competing against them. Having a voice chat function to talk to your fellow squadmates definitely adds to the experience. Sometimes what it adds is toxicity and negativity, but more often it adds cooperation and very occasionally light-heartedness and fun, which is arguably difficult to come by in a game geared toward killing all of the other players.
Now, what’s funny about me continuing to play this game is how long it is taking me to get better at it.
Mastery
I was reading a book called Mastery: The Keys to Success and Long-Term Fulfillment by George Leonard. I haven’t finished it. There’s irony there, and you’ll understand it in a moment.
Early in the book he outlines different types of people, categorized by how they approach skill development.
The correct approach to mastery involves a lot of time spent on plateaus, while still paying attention to practicing the fundamentals. Imagine a long flat line with occasional bumps upwards, periods of sudden evolution of the skill being practiced, followed by another long plateau before you hit another bump of sudden improvement.
The incorrect approaches to mastery are many, or, in Leonard's estimation, three. I am his classic Dabbler, someone who begins learning something, hits that first bump of skill development, gets excited, then hits the second plateau and wanders off to find something else.
I am also sometimes his Obsessive, someone who hits the second plateau and thinks the way past it is to double down. Essentially, to expend such a huge amount of energy in such a frantic, short period of time, that they fizzle out and drop the pursuit.
I am also, I admit, his Hacker, someone who quickly develops enough skill to hit perhaps a second plateau, and then is happy to stay there. He never digs deeply enough into foundational areas to develop the depth or breadth of expertise necessary to go far in his chosen field. He becomes competent, but not expert.
But the main idea here is that on the road to mastery, you will spend long amounts of time practicing with no visible sign of improvement. And then, punctuating this, very occasionally you will experience a rapid and short increase in your skill. And this seems consistent with my experience playing Apex. Except that the plateaus are very long compared to how quickly my son and his friends develop. If this is brain plasticity, or what, I don’t know. It is what it is. If it’s my age that makes me slower to adapt, slower to respond to visual clues, etc., then it’s my age. Perhaps they simply spend many more hours playing these games than I do.
Regardless, I do not have dreams of becoming a great Apex player. I do wish to become competent, and I think I’m getting there. It’s something I always dreamed of when I was younger. That by middle age, I would be a middling competitor in online video games, playing with and against younger generations.
Excuse me while I go drink some coffee and rethink my life.
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