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Comment by faitswulff | Hacker News Reader

I can think of one instance in which this does not seem to hold true - Dance Dance Revolution, at least for me, was more about reacting than planning. Once I got to the point where I had to memorize and think ahead to the next steps that were about to show up, I lost interest.

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I think this is a common point for all of those kind of games (let's say action games, I could be Super Mario, an FPS multiplayer game or DDR), where you can have fun just with "reflexes" but to get really good, or otherwise "master" the game, you start to go into the memorizing-planning part. In DDR means you memorize the whole song, and if you play "no bar", there's a huge planning in your movements too. Also in games like Overwatch, you might have a good aim and reflexes, but at some point you'll need some planning skills, just think of "keeping in mind the ultimate status of your enemy and how to counter it". I think you enter in this "master" phase of the game if you truly like it, you stop before if you want to have a more "casual fun" with that game

I think a more extreme example of this phenomenon is pinball (physical machines). It's great fun as a beginner, because you're mostly reacting to the chaotic movement of the ball, but as you get better you realize playing slowly gets you higher scores. It's usually a good idea to bring the ball to a halt whenever you can. The multiballs that were so fun before turn into ordinary play with backup balls held in reserve. Reaction time becomes less important, and patience and precise ball control become more important. It's rarely a good idea to attempt difficult shots.

I stopped playing once I understood what I'd have to do to get good.

>Reaction time becomes less important, and patience and precise ball control become more important.

This is the history of human cultural and technological development summed up in a sentence.

>I stopped playing once I understood what I'd have to do to get good.

This is mostly why people stop doing any activity for leisure - when the ideal path to success is a path that feels time consuming and wasteful to pursue. it's why i could never pick up gardening. gardening ideally means dealing with fertilizer and handling pests,both of which i dislike. i realized what i liked was the routine of watering plants - which i satisfy by having a couple of cactuses in the house and a spray bottle.

DDR exists in an interesting middle ground for me. I find that I really enjoy Standard, and occasionally Extreme class steps (for the uninitiated, that's basically "medium" and "hard") but could never get into the really complex charts. At the medium level of play, the charts are interesting and the planning of my body mechanics to get the footwork to flow naturally is a lot of fun. My friends that are really good at the game though, they set the scroll speed up ridiculously high and seem to be doing some kind of twitch reflex thing. I can tell they enjoy it, but it's so fast and mechanical that it ceases to really feel like dancing. It's not my cup of tea.

So I do enjoy DDR up to, but not past the point where planning ceases to be something I can do in the moment, and transitions into something I must through repetition and practice.

You can do AI-like meta-planning without using your brain btw. What you do is you choose a simple pattern of reaction to what happens on the screen, then you play. If you like the result you try to do more of what's at the core of the pattern, if you don't like it you change the pattern a little. No thinking and abstracting needed. For a game like DDR it might even be enough to get to the very top.

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