Reimagining "competitive" Destiny (Destiny)

by CruelLEGACEY , Toronto, Monday, August 12, 2019, 16:20 (1937 days ago) @ Cody Miller

The whole point of building in your muscle memory and your instinctual actions is so that you free yourself up to play 2-3 minutes out. From an “honestly competitive eSports” perspective, I would say that what wins games in a Quake 1v1 has nothing to do with your moment to moment. It’s all map control and timers. If you are not playing 1 minute ahead of where you are you have already lost.

That's the way I see it. Being able to line up the headshot and the motions to win individual gunfights is what becomes instinctual. Nobody focuses their mental energy on that. It's automatic. They use their mental energy on the higher order stuff.

Again, that's why I stress the importance on focuses mental energy on paying attention. Taking in and processing visual information is actually very taxing to our mental abilities. We selectively tune out most of the visual information coming in so that we can think about other things at the same time. But if you literally try to pay attention to everything you see for just a few minutes, its exhausting.

When I used to play Basketball or Soccer, a massive part of playing well as a team is knowing where your teammates are. And that isn't easy, because at any given moment, you might have your back to half of them. Practice helps with this, because repeating plays helps you familiarize yourself with where your teammates are at all times, even when you can't see them. But during a game, things rarely go precisely as planned (one of the reasons long-term planning isn't particularly helpful). So when I was running up the court, I'd be focused on taking in as much visual information as I could so that my mental simulation of the court was as well informed as possible. As I lost sight of my teammates, I'd track where I thought they were using whatever mental processing I had available. And when I turned for a split second, I'd catch the briefest glimpse of everyone and update my mental simulation of the court. This is a constant process, and it takes a lot of attention and headspace.

Eventually, at pro levels, more and more of this becomes routine to the point where each player can focus a greater portion of their mental energy on the defender right in front of them, and the goal beyond that. It's a process of shrinking your timeframe of attention, because as you get better, the longer-timeframe elements of the game become more and more routine. That, and you have coaches to worry about that stuff :)