How To: Gaming
THE HOW TO CO. — EDITION 10
How To: Gaming
THE HOW TO CO. — EDITION 10
One flight, between the terrace you are standing on and the one above it. Every dip in this stone was cut by somebody entirely ordinary, doing something small, on an evening they no longer remember.
The ladder above the gate has terraces going up into cloud, each with a line under it and a line over it. This page is one flight between two of them, seen from the bottom, where the only thing that exists is the work. Three jobs live on this stair, all of them boring, and almost everybody skips one — which is why a step can take a year.
The moment a position becomes a thing you own, every game becomes a thing you can lose — and you quietly stop trying the action you are worst at. That action is the entire step. Go in with one thing you are testing, and let the result be information rather than a verdict.
The instinct is to review the game you nearly won, because it is the pleasant one. The information is in the game that was over early. Watch your own side of it and look for the decision, not the moment it visibly went wrong — those two are usually minutes apart.
Somewhere in every session you stop practising and start rehearsing mistakes, and the games you replay on the way to bed are all from after it. Nobody can hand you that hour. You find it once, by catching two losses in a row where you watched yourself err and kept going.
A step wears in the middle because everyone stands in the same place. Nobody aims for the centre — it is simply where a foot lands when you are tired and looking up. After enough feet the stone gives, and eventually the dip is deep enough to hold the rain.
That is the whole of the comfort on offer here, and it is more than it sounds. Whatever is stopping you now has stopped an enormous number of people in exactly the same spot, and most of them are above you today — not because they were different, but because they came back on a night they did not feel like it.
The terrace above you still has the sun on it. That is not a message about you.
A run of losses arrives shaped like a sentence: you are worse than you thought you were. It is not one. The fourth loss really is affected by the third — through your hands, your patience, how fast you queue again — and not through some quality that drained out of you overnight.
What it does do is small and worth respecting: it makes you play faster, hold tighter, and reach for the safe option you already know does not work. Read it as a signal to stop for the night, not as evidence to file. The stair turns before the top anyway — from here you get the next six steps, which is exactly as many as you can act on.
This flight is not the ladder. It is one of the flights the ladder is built out of — and every one of them is worn in the same place.
“I kept a note that only said what I was testing that night. It said the same sentence for a fortnight, then one evening it said something else. That was the climb.”
Poppy writes the Video Games chapters. She has taken this flight badly several times and is not especially embarrassed about it.