The Story of Aiming With My Parents
Description: TL; DR: Some ways to relate how aiming in FPS shooters to how skills are acquired.
I’ve been nudging my parents to play some of the games that I’ve been playing. Usually, they consist of fighting/shooting games at an arcade. In the beginning, my parents tried the following process. Call this process P. Here’s how the process went.
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Made sure that the crosshair was centered at their desired target.
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Made sure that their cross hair wasn’t moving, and then hoping
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Made sure said target didn’t move.
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Shooting their gun.
Over time, as I’ve dragged them out of the house further: they got (unsurprisingly) faster at shooting the enemies. The individual steps of process P got overall faster. Their arm was more steady, and they were more willing to fire faster. But the one major tip that I gave them was instead of trying to aim using your crosshair, AIM USING YOUR EYES TO TRACK YOUR ENEMY. (See: https://youtu.be/IRTnRs4IXpw?t=31 to see how it applies to Fortnite) The key to this is that eventually, the muscle memory of simply aiming and firing your gun once your gun is lined up will be faster than consciously going through all four steps of P. Call this process Q. For some particularly advanced players, they would simply flick their gun over to the correct spot, instantly locking eyes with the next target/enemy that needed to be shot. With this process, they simply trust that they just fire perfectly. If they miss, they’ll just get back to it later in the chain. Call this Process R. (See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wVxbQ0OeCi4 for an example.)
Similarly, I think most people should instead use their imaginations to set reasonably high goals for themselves. In particular, they should trust that their habits of hard work and dedication will go along for the ride and get them to their target. Just like Process R. And yet we still believe that the only way to improve is to be completely locked on one singular goal, obscuring all other goals. This is especially true if people have spent lots of time in that subject. Whether it is the IMO for math Olympiad, or CompTIA Security+ for cybersecurity, people preach from going from Process R to Process P. You see this almost everywhere, from teachers, to coaches, and many other motivational quotes on a wall.
Of course, it’s harder to execute in practice. But going from Process P to Process R isn’t a matter of how good you are at doing some skill. It's about practicing all skills in a different manner.