Practice Doesn't Make Perfect
May. 5th, 2008 10:49 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rowynOne of the reasons that people like levelling games is that with practice, your character gets better. Always. It's a simple linear formula: do Y for X times and you will improve. It's based on the popular fiction that doing something will make you better at doing it.
Which of course isn't true. If it were true, skill-based games would be just like levelling games: the more you played the better you'd be. But they're not. In part that's due to natural differences in talent, and to skills learned in prior games that apply to the current ones. (Even levelling games have a certain amount of skill involved, with better players progressing faster and capable of more difficult challenges than inferior players of the same character level).
But a lot of it is that skills are acquired not merely through performance, but through the conscious effort to learn the skill. For myself, I find that simply doing something for a while will make me better at it until I reach a plateau. After that plateau, doing more of the same doesn't make me any better.
And at some level, I think that performance stifles my ability to improve. I once wrote, in full knowledge of the irony: "I'm too busy writing a novel to learn how to write a novel!"
I did learn some things about writing a book by writing a book. But there's other stuff that I still haven't figured out, like "how to write a book concisely" or "how to write action" or "how to build tension" or "how to work in reversals of fortune to keep the narrative interesting". I'm not sure I'll ever learn those things just by writing.
More subtly, when I'm focused on producing, I'm not focused on improving. If I read a book for enjoyment, I don't notice most of what the author does well or badly, or how she does it. I only see the product and not the process, not the pieces. To notice those things I need to pay careful attention, to keep in mind what I'm trying to learn and see how it's done. When I'm trying hard to make the writing happen at all, it's more difficult to think about how I might do it better.
With this in mind, and also because my muse quit a few weeks ago and I haven't been able to woo him back or hire a new one (does anyone know where to get a good muse?), I dug up my copy of Creativty Rules!, a book of writing exercises that I started a few years ago and only got through a few chapters of. Maybe now that I'm not writing anything, I can figure out how to get better at it.
Which of course isn't true. If it were true, skill-based games would be just like levelling games: the more you played the better you'd be. But they're not. In part that's due to natural differences in talent, and to skills learned in prior games that apply to the current ones. (Even levelling games have a certain amount of skill involved, with better players progressing faster and capable of more difficult challenges than inferior players of the same character level).
But a lot of it is that skills are acquired not merely through performance, but through the conscious effort to learn the skill. For myself, I find that simply doing something for a while will make me better at it until I reach a plateau. After that plateau, doing more of the same doesn't make me any better.
And at some level, I think that performance stifles my ability to improve. I once wrote, in full knowledge of the irony: "I'm too busy writing a novel to learn how to write a novel!"
I did learn some things about writing a book by writing a book. But there's other stuff that I still haven't figured out, like "how to write a book concisely" or "how to write action" or "how to build tension" or "how to work in reversals of fortune to keep the narrative interesting". I'm not sure I'll ever learn those things just by writing.
More subtly, when I'm focused on producing, I'm not focused on improving. If I read a book for enjoyment, I don't notice most of what the author does well or badly, or how she does it. I only see the product and not the process, not the pieces. To notice those things I need to pay careful attention, to keep in mind what I'm trying to learn and see how it's done. When I'm trying hard to make the writing happen at all, it's more difficult to think about how I might do it better.
With this in mind, and also because my muse quit a few weeks ago and I haven't been able to woo him back or hire a new one (does anyone know where to get a good muse?), I dug up my copy of Creativty Rules!, a book of writing exercises that I started a few years ago and only got through a few chapters of. Maybe now that I'm not writing anything, I can figure out how to get better at it.
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no subject
Date: 2008-05-05 04:06 pm (UTC)What I really had to do was to do it myself AND see other people do it, AND get critique, AND care about actually doing better, AND be interested enough in this to actually listen whem I'm told what I'm doing wrong ... and many other things. That happened to work for me with computers simply because I was interested in it, it was something I could work on, on my own, whenever I wanted - and also my dad knew enough of Fortran to give me a few tips. (He also encouraged me to READ THE MANUAL, and it was a pretty short one. Plus, there was that cool "animated" tutorial program on learning BASIC. Ah, nostalgia!)
I didn't really analyze why one thing worked for me and another didn't, though.
But I can also see how once you get into a routine, once you figure out what's "good enough," it can hinder getting any further along in the process. If I'm busy, it's hard to set aside time to learn how to do things better. (And if I'm not busy ... it's too tempting to find more entertaining things to fill the time.)
no subject
Date: 2008-05-06 01:28 pm (UTC)But for most things, it takes that whole variety of things you described if I am to get past the adequacy plateau.