Week two
Alex: It’s nearly time for our second Shooter Tutor session to begin, and I’m looking forward to showing Ryan my progress. Not in terms of skills, because I’m not sure if I’ve made any. No, I mean literal progress in the game. I managed to complete my level two mission, my level three missions, and I even got about halfway through my level four missions before I got my ass handed to me by a horde of aliens. (Sadly, from the small amount I’ve read, the average player makes it through this much of the game in an afternoon.)
Every night this past week, I sat down for at least an hour and tried to stumble my way through another mission. I could tell you that I felt very savvy indeed when I returned to the way station in between quests, redeeming my engrams and points for new weapons and armor, but that would be a lie. I had no clue what was going on in that place. Part of the problem is that I’ve been so focused on the mechanics of play that I’ve managed to gloss over the story aspects of the game almost entirely. That’s fine when it comes to, say, the motivations of the characters—“Kill bad guys, save world” is a pretty self-explanatory purpose—but it left me a little unclear about what all I should be doing outside of learning how to shoot things.
In terms of my skill set, it’s difficult to say if I’m improving. Sure, I’ve managed to complete a few missions, and I’ve leveled up from two to four. But what if it’s just dumb luck? What if I’m merely fumbling my way through bad guys, firing wantonly and getting lucky, the way I tend to eventually get through other games that ask me to engage in intimate shoot-outs? What if I’m doomed to suck, like I always assumed?
Ryan arrives, we fire up Destiny, and he asks me how it’s been going. “Pretty good,” I say, pointing to my small but measurable progress into the game. He nods. “How’s it been feeling? Practicing the things I told you to work on last week?” This is the part where I openly confess one of my prime tactics in playing the game: I run away. At the first sign of trouble, I’m out the door—or back in the door, depending on which side of the door the aliens are on. A typical skirmish for me goes something like this: I walk until I come upon a clump of aliens. Staying as far away as possible but still within range of my auto-rifle, I proceed to pop out the side of my hiding place, spray some ammo in the direction of the baddies, and then duck back behind my barrier the instant they return fire. It’s not pretty, but it’s kept me alive. Unless you count all those times I’ve died.
After hearing of my bold “don’t risk anything ever” strategy, Ryan asks me to play through a mission for him. “What do you want to see me do?” I ask.
“Let’s start with a simple assignment,” he says. “Just play through a mission, but don’t die.” This is said with an implied assumption of success, the cavalier air of someone who’s just asked their assistant to safely bring them a cup of coffee, rather than the assistant screaming and jumping out the window with it. “You got it,” I say, hoping there’s a mission titled “Nobody Dies” somewhere in the game. He instructs me to select a level four mission on Earth, and I start playing. After emitting a couple of indecipherable sounds throughout the first minute, Ryan says, “You know what? I’m not going to say anything for this first one. Let’s just watch you play.”
Ryan: I can’t help but wonder how much practice Alex will need to improve such shaky aim. Ten hours? A thousand hours? Remember the so-called 10,000 hour rule? Proposed by a Swedish psychologist and popularized in Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, it theorized that mastering a skill or profession takes 10,000 hours of practice. It’s a concept that rings true but—like most TED Talk-friendly pop psychology—turns out to be bullshit under close scrutiny. Practice does not necessarily make perfect. One meta-analysis found that practice, on average, can explain 12 percent of skill mastery and success. But even that number seems arbitrary to me. It seems reasonable that it would require 10,000 hours to become amazing at something incredibly complex and mentally taxing like brain surgery but not, say, darts.
On that scale, perfecting a modern first-person shooter video game probably ranks somewhere closer to bar-room darts than neurosurgery. My goal is to equip Alex with tools that will make him the best shaky shooter possible. There’s plenty in a game like Destiny that requires repetition and foreknowledge to succeed. You need to bone up on how the game’s meters and systems function. How does that grenade cool-down timer work? And you’ve got to immerse yourself in its physics. How hard does my rifle recoil? How high does my character leap during a double jump in relation to an enemy?
After week two of Shooter Tutor, I want Alex to focus primarily on learning the best approach for every encounter. Sometimes, he’ll charge headlong into groups of four or five enemies with no real plan on how to kill them, and other times he’ll play too conservatively and hide behind a wall with only one alien in his vicinity.