Coaching
A novice’s request to “pls coach me” often puts an experienced player in a difficult position. They possess a skill that has been honed to the point of automatism, to a pure feeling. The first problem they encounter is the inability to convey this feeling. The answer “just hit your shots,” while truthful, is absolutely useless for someone who hasn’t yet experienced or understood this “just.”
To help, the experienced player takes a logical step-deconstruction. They break down the holistic skill into its component parts. Each of these components is a high-level abstraction, created to simplify the transmission of a complex ability. In theory, this should help the novice transition from a state of not understanding to their first real experience.
Overanalysis
On one hand, a beginner might be able to extract something useful for themselves. However, it can also happen that instead of a holistic sensation of “tracking the target with the crosshair,” they start agonizing over a dozen isolated parameters, like: “Now I need to track precisely along the trajectory, controlling the speed, and now the target has sharply changed direction-I need a flick, but without overflicking, to jump onto the target smoothly yet quickly.”
A simple action becomes burdened by the need to simultaneously control all these concepts created “for simplification.”
The Inadequacy of Abstractions
Over time, it becomes clear that any created model is incomplete. It fails to convey the pure feeling, that very kinesthetics of aim-the fusion of eye, hand, and mouse into a single action. The model itself begins to demand simplification.
And then a new level of explanation emerges, an even higher-level abstraction, such as:
- “Just play more”
- “Just track the target and hit it”
- “Don’t shake, but you can tense your arms as much as you want”
- “Lead the target with your gaze, and your hand will follow automatically”
This is the purest truth. This is exactly how all experienced players operate-they can perform at a sufficiently high level on autopilot. But for a novice, who is still struggling with basic concepts, this advice sounds like mockery.
The Ultimate Solution
In the end, the circle closes. All the complex explanations and multi-layered abstractions lead to the only working solution that has always existed: “Watch how others do it and try to replicate it until you succeed.”
This is not merely an evasion. It is an acknowledgment that some skills cannot be conveyed through words and diagrams. They can only be absorbed through observation and built up through thousands of repetitions. Practice, in the end, dissolves all abstractions, returning the player to the very starting point of the question-to that intuitive “track the target smoothly with your crosshair and strive to hit more.” But now, this “just” is backed by real, rather than theoretical, experience.