Welcome To The Zone part 1 - A Game of Milliseconds. Speed of Light Gameplay, and the feeling of time slowing down?

shello (62)in #gaming • 8 years ago (edited)

In a gamer's world, actions are measured by thousandths of a second. How can someone's eyes process information in the body this fast, and react in tight timing windows? Welcome to "the zone", where thinking and reacting can take place in fractions of a second, and in some cases cause an array of interesting side effects to the user experiencing it. There are two places where the zone is said to exist on a recognizable basis, one of those is professional sports, and the other is video gaming. Hopefully we get some resolve, if Esports really does hit the Olympic scene in 2024!

At home setup: Logitech Orion 610 mechanical keyboard, and G303 Apex mouse (I have small hands!)

In this and the posts to follow, I will be dissecting this mysterious area, and many of it's aspects with multiple games, including prediction, mechanics, casual and pro play, Mihály Csíkszentmihályi's theory of flow, psychology and mindset, and feel read versus sight read, as we dive deep to find out how "being in the zone" actually works, on an adventure of science, magic, and a lot of practice!

Catharsis of a Rhythm Gamer

I've been playing a fun dancing game called Dance Dance Revolution for the better part of 15 years (fifteen yup!), and have played in tournaments where the difference between winning and losing can be by a single note. In the above photo, high-level community rhythm players including myself were "battling" over having the high score on a specific unlockable song when it first came out. This photo became my cover picture on social media, when I had won out of everyone else I knew! On this thread, the timing window is broken down to show exactly how fast your reaction time has to be in order to land a note.

Marvelous: +/- 16.7 ms (+/- One Frame)

Perfect: +/- 33 ms (+/- Two Frames)

Great: +/- 92 ms (+/- 5.5 Frames)

Good: +/- 142 ms (+/- 8.5 Frames)

Boo: +/- 225 ms (+/- 13.5 Frames)

Substance Behind the Story

For every "Marvelous" hit, my eyes and body are processing incoming information and reacting within 0.0167 seconds. Although it might seem like a "who can move the fastest game," it isn't. If I react too fast I will get the same result if I reacted to slow, concentration is involved to time that ONE frame window. Am I super powered? Not really, anyone can learn it. The difference comes in that I have been preconditioned through various means of practice to react faster to these triggers. There are an endless number of stories where a person gets into a dangerous situation and reacts fast enough to avoid an accident, in some cases a car crash.

Each time this type of story is told, one of "two" popular themes are; time seems to only slow down for them, and they react just in time- They always swear that what they did in seconds felt like minutes. There might be some truth to this story, you see- when I play this, and several other games; if I'm in the zone and about to mess up somewhere I can correct it and time slows down so that action seems stretched over seconds instead of milliseconds.

Time Manipulation

Let me take back that one part on super powers, many sources call this a psychic ability, or super power known as Chronokinesis, or the ability to warp your own perception of time. You won't be able to do this continuously, and in my previous example, I ran this song about 6 times that night before getting that score. There are special criteria that must be met, and that's why it's called being in the zone.

Einstein uses a hypothetical example of a train traveling close to the speed of light when explaining special relativity. The story goes something like this;

The are two people, one on the train platform,
and one on the train when lightning strikes.
To the person on the platform, the two strikes appear to happen at the same time.
However, the person on the fast moving train sees one strike happening before the other.

A Different Type of Game

So what does this have to do with gaming? When you are playing a game with rapidly appearing stimuli, you're basically the guy on the train, and the observers not playing are the spectators watching you. It isn't all in eyesight either as we'll find out later. That's why games like Smash Bros are highly spectated by peers in the fighting game community. The actions are being executed so quickly, and accurately by players, that even the most experienced of spectators are left in awe, when a combo or counter move goes off perfectly. In the most heated matches, players see and react with precision as though their characters are all moving in slow motion.

People who dedicate years of their lives on games, are actually playing a different type of game compared to casual players.

Rhythm Games Can Get Harder

I also play another fun & free rhythm game called "Osu!" which is an open-source, and internationally played PC game. They have their own Wold Cup tournament! It runs on the same rules as Elite Beat Agents on the original Nintendo DS. It's similar to other music games where you have to hit a note on time, with the added point of using your mouse or pen (from a pen tablet) to also navigate to the correct axis on the screen when you hit the note. So not only do you have to hit the note, you also have to hit it at the correct location on the screen, or it doesn't count.

I have been playing for a couple of years straight with some breaks in between, 450 hours, and over 30 thousand song plays so far. You need a ridiculous amount of game play to achieve in games and sports, and becoming "skilled" in a craft is absolutely required to reach the zone in the first place, so choose your genre and game wisely, if you're on the quest to go pro. There will be a lot of frustration to be had along the way, but when you finally reach the zone, you'll experience it, the "ultimate high."

Timing window stats that I found available:

standard OD10: (300=Marvelous) 19.5 (200=Great) 59.5 (50=Boo) 99.5 ms
standard OD6: (300=Marvelous) 43.5 (200=Great) 91.5 (50=Boo)139.5 ms

OD stands for "overall difficulty" and each setting has it's own timing window for this game. You can play the same song, with tighter timing windows when you're up to the challenge. The following is my replay video for one of the songs I played near the top of my "best plays list", when I was in the zone.

My Replay From the Zone

If you pay attention to the top right corner of the screen, I have a 100% that doesn't move for the first 400+ notes. The timing OD for this song is 7, here I am reacting each note accurately (one hand to move, one to click) a little tighter than 43 milliseconds (0.0435 seconds.)

At some point after 1/3 of the song, my concentration breaks, and I do what some upper tier gamer's call train wrecking a song, because the time between my mistakes begins increasing, with each error. During my overall playing of this game, I did this song when it wasn't the absolute hardest to pass for me at the time, but still too hard to score 95% and higher on. Since then, whenever I play this song, I can't beat that score- something is at play here.

I remember this like yesterday. I had decided that a goal would be to get a nice score on it, but my two previous runs that day were laughable, and on the second one I almost died. I took a deep breath and loaded the song again, this time I was so focused that my motions became fluid, and for some reason (which will be explained in later posts) the song seemed to be playing much slower than usual. Everything melted away, things like what I was going to do the next day, year, even who I was, everything else I could be thinking about seemed to vanish.

Playing a game on mouse with high sensitivity is a steep curve, nonetheless playing a game with a pen. I believe at the time my settings were at 370 or so, which is enough for a twitch to send my cursor flying across the screen. No, I wasn't even thinking about that. As I played with the most minimally visual skin and settings, I couldn't see anything, but I could see everything, nothing mattered anymore... I was in the zone.

Slightly after hitting the first part of the song in a trance like state, my attention wavered for just a moment and I lost my mind that the song I could barely pass a minute ago was somehow still being played in 100% accuracy. Up until I glanced, I had no clue. But that was long enough to snap me out of it. I messed up one note, and my play got more jerky, then came the task of trying to recover, another error- the zone I finally obtained, long gone.

Is The Zone Reachable for Anyone?

Absolutely, but as you will find out in my next articles- getting there in the first place is tricky business. I'll be covering many more topics including how to get there. For now, I'll leave you with this famous tournament video of what the zone can do. Until next time!

Image source 3, 4, 5,