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

[Reincarnate]

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

Higher neural density in these areas and faster firing rates/higher degrees of myelination

Just to substantiate this a bit with another data point: I had a friend back in college who was studying neuro, and when I asked her about this topic way back when, this is precisely the same response she gave (and it's also the only reason I even know what myelin is, haha).

This also shows up in quite a few other skills/games/activities/hobbies/etc.

[Cavernio]

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

I thought timing was all cerebellum. The purkinje connections in the cerebellum are mind-bogglingly evenly spaced, something that would be absolutely necessary for keeping things even.

My experience is that I'm bad at FFR not because I can't interpret the patterns, (although at an insanely high level of play I can't follow it, but I feel that's because I simply have never played at such extremes often enough, it feels attainable), but various other reasons. One of them is simply that my fingers don't follow instructions. This only becomes an issue when it gets fast. On occasion the muscles will simply tense up too much, but at other times, I fully expect my finger to move, but it doesn't, or it does, but it's way too late or early and I *know* it's off before the finger moves. That is definitely a physical timing issue, and that ultimately requires proper cerebellar timing.
Another thing, I've noted that my left hand is far worse than my right (down and left arrows), and I'm pretty sure that's because I'm not using individual fingers, which are individually innervated, ie: there's 1 signal per finger getting sent to/from your spine and brain, your cortex doesn't have to re-arrange anything. I've played a lot using 2 different forms for my left hand, both of which use my thumb because I actually have a thumb joint (the first one only). The left arrow I've switched from using my index nub (which uses the muscle at the base of your finger) to using the entire left side of my hand with the pinky nub as the part that hits the keys. The latter feels better, probably because I remember training myself to move my nubs individually at different ages in my life, (still don't move the 4th nub very well) but folding my hand in half length-wise is how I've always grasped things, probably since infancy. Anyways, I suspect that the probable lack of individual innervation in my left hand is a large part of the issue, not lack of practice or lack of use.
I compare it to playing with toes in that sense, because your toes can move individually, but they generally don't and they're not each signalled individually. Would it be possible for someone playing with their toes to get as good as the best finger players? It'd be neat to know.

All that said, what keeps me from AAA's on easy peasy FFR songs, and is likely my biggest hold-back, I just don't beat things evenly. I'm very musical, and I like rhythms and can interpret them just fine, but my piano playing has always suffered from keeping an even rhythm, and pretty much all rhythm games have shown me that I'm not good at keeping an even, steady rhythm. Part of this is me thinking I am keeping an even rhythm but the games show I'm not, but other times I'll know that I'm not even because it sounds uneven, but I can't, again, make my fingers be more even. This is especially true when playing the piano, and that is most noticed with my right (normal) hand, when trying to play runs and such.

I'm actually a pretty good dancer, (with practice of course!), when I was younger I had a professional dancer very seriously tell me that I was really, really good. But in the everyday I'm actually pretty clumsy. (I was getting clumsier too, probably the celiac disease.)

Lastly, my celiac disease seems very much the cause of the peripheral neuropathy I'd developed over the past several years (independently of commonly tested vitamin deficiencies), and it's been unquestionably found that celiac patient's immune systems can damage motor neurons from the cerebellum all the way down to the peripheral ones when it gets triggered. Whether or not my neuropathic pain means my motor neurons specifically have suffered is unclear. However, it's possible that if I applied myself to rhythm games NOW that I could overcome some of the short-falls I've noticed.

tl;dr I don't know everyone's individual hang-ups and where they notice they have issues, but certainly for me, it's largely a lack of properly timed control of my out-going movements.

Does anyone feel like their sticking point is in interpreting the arrows? I was accused of not being able to interpret/process the arrows based on my terrible scores, but I guarantee that's not my failing point, not at the level of play I prefer at least.

Another failing point could be in the visual timing of arrows, (I'm probably bad at that too), not necessarily patterns.

[Mollocephalus]

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

Ah yeah, cavernio brings up yet another issue which has never been covered in this discussion up until now. Scroll speed. Is it really so important? Are some people more naturally inclined to read higher speeds and have faster reaction times?

[clasko1000]

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

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?

I guess i dont really understand why someone would question this, while i have thought about it. I dont have any friends that play FFR who "do not" DDR/ITG. It doesn't bring me to a consensus that players have any advantages from playing only one. I think that all rhythm games help you improve no matter what game or style. For example, i just attained my first 2 AAA's in the 60's, I have every song on every DDR game AA'ed(wasnt all that interested in AAA'ing except a few songs), and can do some 11's(+ delirium) in ITG.(I prefer to play toe style, its more fun to me, but i will put my bar on the pad and play heal to do this, however i find it much less enjoyable.

I can tell you that im much better than a couple friends at PA'ing pad songs, even with friends that can play higher difficulty's than me and I notice that i can read songs in ITG outside of my being able to move, so i attribute that to playing FFR.

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?

I find that every time i come back to FFR over a break I'm better, i don't know why. I try to play songs every little while, while not focusing on score. I guess that's not really a break, but yea. I do play other rhythm games during my time away so that my contribute my skill. Rockband, DDR/ITG, GH, Technica, Beatmania, This could by why i don't drop.

I know i haven't really answered your questions fully(sorry, i ramble), but i have a theory that some people are just better at games, it has to do with one's intellect. I always hold my little brother in high regards because hes much smarter than myself. He beats me at almost every game we play competitively, but hes not really into rhythm gaming. **This could pose another question, that does rhythm games take intellect, or is it all instinct? I don't know, i feel that im good at games because i have good motor skills.

P.S. A ex at the time bought that Theatrhythm Final Fantasy game and was struggling at medium difficulty. I was like 1-2 NPS for you to tap with your stylist. The whole game = ROFLSTOMP EZ.


EDIT: I though Halogen was the topic starter, i should learn what clicking a link on the right side of the front page does... :/

[Cavernio]

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

Umm, I brought up scroll speed?
In DDR the really slow scroll speeds screw me up.

[Reach]

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

I thought timing was all cerebellum. The purkinje connections in the cerebellum are mind-bogglingly evenly spaced, something that would be absolutely necessary for keeping things even.

They are involved in keeping tempo. I left that part out to simplify the explanation

Especially because the cerebellum has so many different functions. It's obviously involved to a degree. I would expect SM players to have particularly developed portions of the cerebellum, but the Cerebellum does coordinate fluidity and quality of motion as I said before, and these functions are largely irrelevant and it could explain Arch0wl's anecdote (though to be fair, I question the validity of said anecdote. I highly doubt SM players are bad dancers. they're just untrained dancers)

The truth of the matter is that most of your brain would be activate while playing, for example, areas of the frontal lobe and areas involved with memory (hippocampus), along with many other motor pathways. I would expect, however, that the areas I mentioned would be lit up like a wild fire though on an MRI and would dominate most of the neural resources that go into being a good player.

[Cavernio]

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

Of course I would expect someone good at the game to have lots of activity in the motor cortex, and for it to be specialized in doing well at SM, no doubt about it. Also for higher tiers of visual cortex to be activated more due to pattern recognition, and interconnectivity of it all would be activated/created in excellent players. But for a player like me or frank munoz, it seems to me that a poorly calibrated/inneravted (for lack of a better way to say it) cerebellum, the evenness parts, could be what's holding us back from becoming great players. Afterall, if I can't make my finger tap an even rhythm, I wouldn't expect it to be able to accurately tap something in time to what I see on a screen perfectly, even if I were as good as an expert player with every other aspect of play.
Of course there would have to be a partially separate ability from purely perceiving evenness though...like if I can tell my finger is uneven from how it sounds, my auditory system can hear evenness just fine. Does hearing evenness activate the cerebellum? (like a test, say, where you just have to say whether a tempo you hear is even or not, what brain areas are activated in people who are really good at that versus bad at it, and what overlap does that have with people who are good at tapping an even rhythm.)
This isn't to say that that would be something that couldn't be overcome, although I would suspect (I don't really know) the cerebellum has less neuroplasticity than very changeable cortex.

Ultimately there are a ton of possible failure points from the variety of necessary skills to be excellent/perfect at SM, right from the beginning where you need to be able to physically see all the way to being able to physically move, and every breakdown step inbetween. There may be more common sticking points that practiced players reach, but without any sort of proper data collection from watching people and then what they say and imagining techniques (not just fMRI because that's relatively poor temporal resolution, but EEG as well), it's all just theory.

[SCWolf]

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

Now, I'm not a neuroscience major or a professional on the topic, but I'd like to give my opinion because this is an interesting topic.

From what it seems, rhythm only helps play a part in overall accuracy, it does not dictate it. Playing a file is heavily dependent on pattern recognition. Accuracy is generally improved by your comfort level being on par with the speed at which you're reading. Rhythm comes in after. What you're reading on the screen can actually tell your brain what tempo the song is being played at and how to adjust. How rhythmically inclined you are can differentiate how well you "adjust".

How fast you read in terms of speed and why it helps is something I have yet to figure out without contradicting myself while explaining it, but I think it can be related to general reading comprehension in literacy. People will read faster once they become more adept because it's easy for them.

[kommisar]

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

Is there such a thing as reaching a physical plateau? How do people differ in terms of what is physically beyond reach? I know I probably won't ever get as fast as Stian doing 400bpm jumpstream but I often wonder if I had kept playing as intensely maybe I could. Or could I?

same applies for pad. in regards to speed of reading I don't doubt people could get used to faster after a while, but I actually read somewhat slower than most people (used to read c755 on sm5, 725 for solo). But is there a limit to how fast I can physically read notes as well? After a while it would probably become muscle memory if conditioned enough.

[MinaciousGrace]

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

I've actually thought about/really want to see brain scans of high level sm play

shame it'll never happen because it would be really fucking cool

also I think physical and mental limitations are so far beyond what we're currently seeing that's it's not worth thinking about reaching them at this point but that's just me.

[Arch0wl]

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

so I bought the book Perfection Point to see if it could lend any insight to the book I'm writing about rhythm game design

there's a chapter on the theoretical max bench press and the author mentions that a limitation on us seeing anything close to the max bench is because many of the most successful powerlifters go into wrestling, there isn't money in powerlifting

which made me think: if something this standardized, sanctioned, and mainstream could have these difficulties with attracting people who could reach its maximum, how does something obscure like Stepmania rank by comparison?

a lot of us are limited by the following:

- lack of popularity (obviously)

- lack of standards (hopefully my book will help with this since I've delineated basically every type of skill you could have in a rhythm game, lmfao)

- lack of technology (less obvious, but the right keyboard makes a huge difference, ESPECIALLY for index -- if the "index controller" ever gets off the ground, that may be a new tech standard for that playstyle)

- lack of knowledge base for how to improve (improvement at sports has literally been made into a science by this point, improvement at semi e-sports like rhythm games not so much (yes I just called rhythm games e-sports))

- lack of motivation (you can make money with sports, you cannot make money off of Stepmania although if one of us ever gets rich and dumps a lot of money into making SM an e-sport thing that might change)

[MinaciousGrace]

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

improvement at semi e-sports like rhythm games not so much

korea, japan etc

e: also there are a handful of players who have independently taken a methodical approach to improvement at the game- reach, rubix, myself I know and others I'm sure, that being said there isn't really a centralized knowledge database to which newer players can default for information, but I'm gonna be honest if a player doesn't have the capacity or willingness to broach the subject on their own I don't think there's any reasonable expectation that they're capable of pushing limits in the first place.

[Jerry DB]

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

In my experience the level of interest you put into it and your attitude has a huge amount to do with how well you play. I've tried many things in life and the things that I seemed to be a natural at, were the things that I obsessed over the most. If you're into something so much that it's what you think about when you go to bed and comes to mind constantly throughout the day, then there is no doubt you will improve quicker then others. There are clearly neurological patterns that allow your brain to fire off more quickly with repetition. Even with that being said the amount of interest you put in while doing the activity makes a huge difference, even if you have been doing something your whole life. The more you learn to focus on a single activity, the better you are at channeling out all other activities and thoughts so you can truly focus on the task at hand. My ability to focus while playing guitar and skating definitely transcends into my ability to focus on ffr and vice versa. I don't have any scientific articles or whatever, just experience. Sure there are genetic differences, but if you are constantly thinking you were dealt a bad hand, it inhibits your ability to focus. In my mind the most important things are:
1. Positivity
2. Obsession/time spent
3. Focus
4. genetic differences
most of the time from what I see is people try something for a very short amount of time and are constantly comparing themselves to the greats and put themselves down because of it. I think 90 percent of the time your genetics are just as good as those on top, you just didn't stick with it and keep telling yourself you will make it.

[Cavernio]

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

Are you saying you wouldn't be able to do nearly as well at ffr while having a conversation because you need that much focus jerry?