848 Muscle Memory

The idea of muscle memory is interesting to me. It’s this unseen concept that is often referred to, and is in theory separate from memorization and other types of directly conscious skills.

So, in gaming, as we play games over and over we develop muscle memory for repetitive actions, either local ones to the game we’re playing or general ones from just playing a lot of games. At a certain point, these muscle movements take over from our direct control and often times the player appears to be in a “zone” or to jump in skill level. I think that’s probably because once the active brain can offload some of this work to the unconscious brain (I know noting about brains), it is free to use its attention on other aspects of the game. That often means the player is better at thinking ahead and adapting to situations, which makes them in general better at the game, and the cycle continues.

Pretty interesting.

[ Today I Was Playing: nothing… ]

#game-design-topic