Imagine that you’re playing a fighting game. It’s the last round, both you and your opponent are low on health. You see the timer ticking down when inspiration strikes: “There is no way they’re going to block this”. You throw out a desperate attack, certain of your victory, only for your opponent to easily block. Worse still, they didn’t even have to do anything extra; there was no way your attack was going to work. As you watch them strike the finishing blow, you’re left with one resounding question echoing in your head:
“Why did I do that?!!??!”
If you’ve ever played a fighting game you’ve probably been in this situation many times. If you’re like me, you might even follow up that question with “I suck” or “I’m so stupid” — we’ll talk about that second part in the next essay. For now, I want to focus on “why did I do that?”.
You might be wondering “Who is this mysterious super genius dispensing wisdom for free on the internet?”. I’ve been competing in fighting games for several years, most recently in the Guilty Gear series starting with Guilty Gear Xrd. Outside of games, I am a research scientist with a doctorate in experimental psychology. With the next entry in the Guilty Gear series on the horizon, I wanted to blend together my background in psychology and my experience as a competitor into this series of essays. The goal: help a new generation of players get better without ever having to touch a controller. If that opening paragraph resonated with you, consider giving me a few minutes of your time before you press rematch.
Back to the question at hand. It took me awhile to realize that I was actually asking the right question during those moments of frustration, but wasn’t looking for a real answer. Let’s take the situation from the opening. There are many reasons one might make that choice; maybe you misread the round timer or the lifebars and thought the situation was more desperate than it actually was? Did you hope the desperate move would hit even though you knew it was unlikely (a “wish punish”)? Did you just give up even though the game was still winnable? These potential explanations can give you important information on how you can better approach the situation next time.
Ideally you should be asking “why did I do that” even when things are going well. Why did you decide to go high on this mixup? Maybe it’s because you attacked low the past two times and thought your opponent wasn’t expecting it. Maybe you did it because you just think it looks cool. The same outcome can be the result of some very different thought processes and being aware of those is important for improving. If you can understand why you expect something to work, you’re going to be able to recognize that same situation again.
That all sounds well and good and you might be ready to jump back in but there is a catch: being aware of why you’re making choices is HARD. Have you ever finished a match, had someone ask you a question about the match and realized you have no idea what happened just a minute or two ago?
Memory is a complicated thing but I’m going to try to break it down quickly. Memory can broadly be segmented into three parts: sensory memory, working or short-term memory, and long-term memory. Sensory memory is the immediate sensory information your brain gets through your senses. It lasts for a moment and the pieces your brain focuses on get pulled into your working memory. The information you rehearse and focus on in your working memory gets encoded into your long-term memory. If your brain were a computer, sensory memory is like the background processes you aren’t always aware of. Your working memory is like the desktop you’re working on. Your long-term memory is all the files you’ve stored on your hard drive.
If you find that you can’t remember why you made certain choices or even what happened in a match a few minutes ago, then it’s likely that you didn’t encode that information into long-term memory. There are many potential reasons but let’s drill down to one specific topic: attention.
Attention is a limited resource. The amount of total “attention” that a person has to spread around varies from person to person, but everyone has a limit to how much they can attend to at any one time. As more things compete for your attention, it gets harder to focus on each specific thing and encode them into memory. In this video, try counting the number of times a person passes the ball to a person wearing the same color shirt.
Did you notice the gorilla? Some people don’t because their attention is fully directed elsewhere. It’s part of the reason people get hit by 40 frame overheads in 2021. Aren’t brains just the coolest? I know what you’re thinking: “I see plenty of gorillas on netplay already. How is this going to make me a better player?”. Understanding how attention and memory connect to your ability to unpack and analyze your play is an important step in structuring how you approach learning.
Speaking personally, I have an attention disorder. Maintaining focus for long periods of time is exhausting for me. After playing through a block of pools at a tournament, I usually have to take a nap because forcing myself to attend to my gameplay, the people around me, and tuning out all the other lights and sounds is difficult. However, I’ve learned some helpful tricks over the past few years.
Be aware of your limits. There is a romanticization of “the grind” when it comes to fighting games as if bashing out long sets is the best way to improve. I don’t think that’s true at all. Some people can play 100+ games and clearly recall a situation that happened twenty games ago, but odds are that you aren’t one of those people. You might be more like me and start to lose sight of things after only a few games. Once you cross that point, it’s time to take a break. Mashing rematch is trying to roll a boulder up a hill if you’re not able to retain information.
Remember to take breaks. A dear friend came up with an idea once while we were playing: play until one of us got a two-game streak. When that happened, we would stop, watch replays of those two games, and talk about our decision-making processes. After a few sessions of playing like that, I improved dramatically.
So why did it work? Taking breaks to check why we were making certain choices required us to critically evaluate them. Instead of playing to win I was focused on retaining information about situations where I knew I either wanted to ask a question or expected that he might have a question for me. The stopping rule also forced us to break and refocus. This allowed me to stretch my attention span much further than usual.
Even if it’s hard at first, keep trying. laying this way especially over long periods of time is much harder than pressing buttons and seeing what sticks. The good news is that this can get easier overtime. You might have heard the phrase “simplifying your mental stack”. What this means is finding ways to stretch your attention further by developing strategies to simplify how much information you need to attend to at any one time. As you get more comfortable with this approach to playing, you’ll figure out shortcuts and tricks. It might even start to feel natural.
Knowing how your brain operates can help you figure out ways to plan your practice. I am a big proponent of “work smarter, not harder”. Hopefully, having some insight into the connections between memory and attention will help you with that. Please let me know what you think and if there are any specific topics you’re interested in