What makes some people more able to time better than others at rhythm games?

Re: What makes some people more able to time better than others at rhythm games?

I don't think timing has much to do with reaction since after a long period of time the mind no longer has to "react" but instead it becomes something like riding a bike.

IMO, it all boils down to muscle memory. Lots of people can time good because they can have so much muscle memory to be able to coordinate all of these notes perfectly without messing up, that's pretty much the difference. You can't have good timing without muscle memory.

Re: What makes some people more able to time better than others at rhythm games?

I don't get it either. There are people who whore this game and aren't elite, and there are those people that can go a long time without playing and still be "elite"

Re: What makes some people more able to time better than others at rhythm games?

according to some documentary on the brain that i watched like 5 years ago and barely remember: the human brain has mechanisms desiged specifically for detecting and following beats and rhythms and such. they even showed some woman who can't understand music in the same way as most people because her brain doesnt detect or interpret rhythm in any meaningful way so everything just sounds like a collection of noises to her. they had a short story about how she always wanted to be a dancer as a kid but no matter how much she practiced and perfected every technique she was always at the bottom of the class because she couldn't understand the rhythm of the music and therefore couldnt match it with her dance.

i imagine this plays a part because as far as i know, good MA players aren't reacting to each individual note as much as they are feeling the rhythm of the song and matching it. (i'm not an MA player so maybe someone can correct me on this?)

Re: What makes some people more able to time better than others at rhythm games?

MA was always impossible for me

What I have is hard song MA. Being able to hit a song already guarantees decent accuracy.

And playing on low speedmods... yeah. The music doesn't do crap for me at all. I play on a higher cmod and I can SDP something, but when I play on 1x and listen to the song and actually play with the song, I can't even get below 150 perfects.

Re: What makes some people more able to time better than others at rhythm games?

just cheat~
onsrsnote I'm not really sure,
My timing in general sux ass. or, I guess "rhythm"
I notice this most when I'm using fl trying to make some wicked beats yo' and when i just try to do a constant tempo of eight notes it's always sloppy/jazzy.

Re: What makes some people more able to time better than others at rhythm games?

The reason I'm skeptical of this being the only explanation is because, well,

people with very good MA are not always the best dancers; in fact, it's usually the opposite. The best DDR freestylers back in the day tended to have bad PA, and people with very good PA had very bad freestyle. There were exceptions, of course -- a few people were great in both -- but dancing ability seems to affect MA not at all.

Perhaps dancing ability is something like that ability + the ability to execute physical movements and the amount of rhythmic ability for dancing isn't as high as the physical ability, while MA is just that ability in isolation.

Re: What makes some people more able to time better than others at rhythm games?

whenever i go for an MA score, i really make sure my keytaps have the perfect gap between them. i've quadded two songs with the song muted so music doesn't really help me with accuracy; if anything, it distracts me from doing this. i've been playing drums since i was 8 so i've always had the ability to keep a steady rhythm.

Re: What makes some people more able to time better than others at rhythm games?

I can compare SM/FFR to any musical instrument. You can spend the rest of your life trying to become the best guitarist in the world. You'll become a great technician sure, but that won't make yourself the best songwriter in the world.

To answer your question, it's probably the same skill involved in learning a new instrument. There are a lot of similarities : you have to learn how to read a sheet music, then hit the right notes at the right time.

Re: What makes some people more able to time better than others at rhythm games?

Personally, I'd like to see the effect on people's MA when you remove the judgment display.

Re: What makes some people more able to time better than others at rhythm games?

i'll try that later

do i even qualify as MA player tho???


EDIT: without judgment to tell you if you're going well enough, it's MUCH harder to keep a consistent MA. Or maybe i should check again my global offset.

Re: What makes some people more able to time better than others at rhythm games?

I'd think it has something to do with making an internalized sort of pattern in the brain that projects the pace at which notes are displayed as they appear, and predicts the future notes by having consistency or by being able to anticipate a pattern change as the music changes. I'm sure it's a lot more than that when you combine physical dexterity to it as well though.

I'd think that dancers wouldn't be the best at stepmania necessarily, seeing as musical queues for physical responses are more drawn out and fluid. With drumming of piano it's more immediate rhythmical responses that seem more along the lines of what happens in stepmania.

Re: What makes some people more able to time better than others at rhythm games?

Can you really make that generalization though? Have you seen any amazing SM players that have tried and practiced dancing and were still bad at it?

HOWEVER, even if this was the case, there's a very simple explanation.


Of course this ability is mostly neurological, but it probably doesn't have a singular localization because SM ability relies on not only motor coordination but also visual pattern recognition.

Therefore I would assume that SM ability is largely determined by the development of 1. the Primary Motor Cortex and 2. the Primary Visual Cortex.

The catch is that it probably does NOT involve the Cerebellum, but the cerebellum is heavily implicated in dancing. The Cerebellum is responsible for the quality and control of a movement but it does NOT plan or initiate a movement. In dancing the quality of a dance revolves around how movements flow and how they aesthetically please through quality of movement, not how mechanically precise the movements are.

That is the job of the motor cortex and is something that is required to play SM at a high level. You need to be able to quickly recognize the pattern and initiate the motor pattern. The quality of the movement however, doesn't really matter; you just need to hit the key/pad.

The primary visual cortex is implicated because it is specifically involved in pattern recognition and processing information about moving objects.


So what's going on in the brains of SM players? Higher neural density in these areas and faster firing rates/higher degrees of myelination. If you were to MRI professional SM players vs casual SM players during a song, you would see much greater activation in the brains of the professional players in these areas most specifically.

Much of this is probably adaptation that was acquired via practice, but the best SM players undoubtedly were naturally gifted in terms of neural density in these areas prior to ever playing the game.


Of course, I'm neglecting entirely auditory queues. Some players rely more than them than others and I wouldn't expect them to be as important as the above (many people can MA songs even when they're completely out of sync), but they would still definitely be important to a degree.

Re: What makes some people more able to time better than others at rhythm games?

One question: since top tier ITG players need not only to be accurate and fast, but also to optimize movements, would it mean pad players also need their Cerebellum qualities to excel?

Re: What makes some people more able to time better than others at rhythm games?

Reach, your insight on this topic is nothing short of fantastic.

Necros brought up the same thing that I would have; as an ITG player (or rather, a pad player on and off for the past 10 years), what sort of neural advantages might I see as opposed to an exclusive FFR/SM/(keyboard game) player?

It's interesting that some people mention having a lack of judgment causes a decrease in accuracy, considering I typically don't see that effect much. Then again, I also spent a lot of time utilizing trial-and-error with global offsets and sync normalization to ensure that I am playing to my best ability while comparing rhythms visually with how I know they should be spaced audibly (a knowledge of music certainly makes this process autonomous).

One of the things that I wonder about this though -- when I first played FFR/SM, I was 12 years old. When I started this game, I was absolutely god awful -- I mean, just something like Soul Shift (5 out of 99 on the current scale) was difficult for me to pass, let alone combo. Fast forward a few years later (about 15/16) with irregular play and a setup change; there was a noticeable improvement, but moreso due to the comfort in a spread-out setup. I still had issues with reading. A year after that, density no longer seemed to be an issue. I have always attributed this to my active playing of ITG in abnormal scenarios (like 1x/flat on really low BPMs) out of boredom, but how does that type of coordination correlate to the coordination necessary for FFR? Is that theoretically possible in explanation?

Also, is there a possible explanation for as to why certain people experience heavier devolution on extended breaks than others who take extended breaks of the same duration?

This is a very cool topic for me -- I'm not the most intelligent person (which is why I tend to stay out of CT), but it certainly catches my interest in a way that makes me want to get into this kind of discussion.