Hollow Knight And Conscious Mastery
I've recently completed the original Hollow Knight—not because the new one's come out but a) because Shona was playing it and it looked fun, b) I already own it, c) I'm between flats, only have my Steam Deck available, and it's a great Steam Deck game. It's not doing anything dazzlingly original but it's doing it with real style and polish. It looks great, plays great, has the knack of changing things up in an interesting way just as you're starting to get bored, and is way more full of stuff than you might expect.
Hollow Knight has also taught me something in a way that I don't think a video game has in a while: that I can get better at something by conscious application of effort, pattern-noticing etc. Now, did I not already know this incredibly obvious fact about not just videogames, something I've been playing for my entire life, but also the world? Yes, I did—however, I think I didn't quite understand it in an experiential way.
When I got to a certain boss in Hollow Knight (the Broken Vessel, if you're curious), I hit a bit of a wall. Usually after dying to a boss a few times I'll get bored of the journey there and give it a break for a bit. This time, though, the journey was pretty swift so I just kept going. Then at one point I consciously noticed what the enemy did before a certain attack. I know how telegraphing attacks in videogames works. I just don't think I have ever consciously thought to try and notice it and bring that into my understanding. I'm usually just flying by instinct and waiting for the lessons to settle in.
When people talk about practice making perfect, they're probably talking about this, not just about doing something a whole bunch and getting better without thinking about it. The trouble is, I have a fairly high level of basic competence at a lot of things, and a fairly high level of luck. This means that I can usually brute-force my way through various activities without really consciously learning. I'm just reacting, I'm maybe learning stuff unconsciously, but I'm not really going through that unconscious incompetence -> conscious incompetence -> conscious mastery -> unconscious mastery loop. I'm kinda sliding messily from unconscious incompetence to unconscious semi-competence. Introducing consciousness to the equation always felt like I wasn't doing it right, somehow. Like I should be able to just do it without that.
Because I'm used to being good at stuff without trying too hard, when I encounter things that aren't easy or are unintuitive to me I often bounce off. (Funnily enough, I'll often end up pushing far harder at things that have a reputation as being obnoxiously hard (like Fromsoft games[1]) because they don't make me feel bad for being bad at them in the same way.) I have been writing blog posts for at this point nearly 20 years, and I've been told I'm quite good at it, but almost none of the improvement has been conscious. If you were to point at a bad piece of writing and ask me what to change I could probably make it better but unless there were obvious typos or something, I might have a hard time telling you why, and my explanation would most likely end up being a reverse-engineered justification. I think this is also true for a lot of things in my life.
I don't know why this thought struck me while playing Hollow Knight, but I will say it's nice, honestly! I think the way I was before made me feel limited by how much I could do in the unconscious-effort way—which was a lot, but not as much as I might have wanted to. Now I don't feel like that, and it's very energising :)
though I will say playing through this game made me realise quite how frustrating-in-a-bad-way Fromsoft games can be! This is probably at least somewhat down to the simplicity and 'cleanliness' that being in 2D grants, but I was speaking to Josef about this and realised there were almost no deaths in Hollow Knight that I felt were in any way "unfair", in marked contrast to my memories of playing Dark Souls. ↩︎
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