Quote from: Blizzard on November 01, 2010, 03:09:14 pm
I actually did understand everything you said up to this point. ._.
I fail to see why training does not develop a skill. Training is the very definition of improving a skill. Training oneself to respond to certain situations in certain ways IS developing a skill. A skill is an automated set of responses that have a meaning in a certain context. Whatever you do in your life for the first time, it will not be done well. Through repetition you will learn to do it better and better each time, developing a skill in that area. Of course, different skills aren't mutually exclusive. If you are a good chess player, chances are high that you will be good at anything that requires memory, reading tactics and foreseeing possible outcomes. That's why they say that strategy games help build organizational skills and FPS-es help improve eye reflexes and increase eye-hand coordination.
To me it seemed that Rey was saying that my above statement is not true.
@Branden: Are you saying that you actually LIKE casual games? I'm breaking up with you.
Let me clarify because I was unclear and this is all really my fault.
A
reaction is
not a skill. You can train yourself in the same way you can train your muscles to be better, but training yourself to blink whenever you see green is not a skill, it's a programmed response.
We can also break this down and say certain types of reactions are skills, and yes, we can go over technicalities forever, in the same way I could argue with you, with 100% accuracy, the blue and green are almost exactly identical.
That statement was made in reference to older games with brutal difficulty, that required you to pretrain yourself to hit A before you consciously knew there was a danger at a precise time in order to avoid it. Then you'd run into the next, identical A button trap but since you weren't trained to jump under the orange cloud instead of the blue cloud, you would never jump over the trap.
If you could jump over both traps with equal accuracy without having to retrain yourself, you've developed quicker reflexes, which is a skill.
If you couldn't jump over the traps because your brain didn't have that preprorgrammed response, you've developed an unconscious reaction. You've been trained, like salivating dogs to a pavlovian bell.
The only reason I feel the need to address this is because it was common in older games which were "more skillful" than common games thanks to a brutal sense of difficulty. When I say train, I mean it in the pavlovian sense.
Button tapping I don't see as a skill, even though it technically is, simply for simiplicity's sake when talking about skill in videogame. A game can be skilled requiring faster reflexes, this is true, but being a primarily mental media the more significant tests of skills will come from mental qualities- thought time rather than button tapping time- and so I value reflexes as almost insignificant in comparison.
I use a lot of exaggeration when I type and extremify things to make a point, because it forces you to inspect things and pick apart my statements on a more technical level and take things that are true and false from what I say, but I was tired when I typed my post and it was poorly written so it came out a lot more off than I intended and a bit more confusing than it should've been.