Meditations on spending 150+ hours on a game about timing, trying harder and harder things, relearning to progress, and when our goals vs external goals are useful.
I had devoured self-help books through my 20s and gave up with them during my 30s, but lessons from those books were popping up in my mind as I played a song for the 10th or 50th time, failing to reach the goal I was after.
This strange crossover of self-help and gaming was fascinating to me. Why was this the most useful those books had ever been when they failed me in real life? Curious.
Aside from the good ol' days of the dance mat controller you could plug into the PlayStation, Theatrhythm was my first experience of a rhythm game. For someone who has never gone after a platinum trophy or ever done achievement hunting, this game is lining up to be one I fully complete.
Playing on and off over the last couple of years, just 30 minutes here or there between longer 2-hour sessions, I came to a point where I was seriously having to think of how to progress my abilities physically and mentally to be able to accomplish tasks.
To prevent myself from gushing about the game, let's get straight to the point. Just know for context that this game is a Final Fantasy music game, which blends RPG elements with rhythm challenges.
After struggling and struggling to get a certain score on a track - an S rank at least, I would sip coffee first thing in the morning and feel the adrenaline building where I was playing tracks too far out of my league but being determined to achieve a good rank on it.
This played out in several ways, sometimes over days of small sessions or a couple of long sessions, but it was the same experience. Like running a race, I would be pushing mentally and physically, with digit muscles tensed and pressing the buttons as fast as I could manage and eventually overcome the track by the skin of my teeth.
I FF'ing did it!
Dopamine dump delivered. Relief and accomplishment flood my body.
The music is something I adore with Final Fantasy, so I will replay tracks to experience them in more dimensions - I am kinetically joining in with the music.
Let's do another run through that same track I just poured effort into, because now that I have done it, it should be easy. I mastered it. I know what buttons to press, the patterns. This is something I have achieved and could do again and again.
This self-confidence, this illusion of competence, was a hard rock to swallow when I sat back and relaxed through the same track only to utterly fail at it.
To get the same output again, I would have to put in the same amount of effort. Shit.
It took several weeks for this lesson to be repeated over and over, for it to finally sink in. Maybe this is from a spoiled upbringing of being told I was amazing at anything, no matter how bad I was at it.
The lesson here is:
After completing one hard project, a similar project will still be hard the next time too. It doesn't make a similar project easy.
I have seen this and been part of this in software development a lot - estimating how long something will take, and if we have done a similar project before, then we assume it's going to be easier than it turns out to be due to familiarity.
Is this familiarity bias?