The best way to beat a hard level is to stop playing it

The cycle of pushing beyond a difficult level or boss is probably familiar to most everyone: You fail a lot, over and over. Eventually, you decide it’s not happening and you step away. When you return to the game, you breeze past what once felt insurmountable in a try or two.

The reason this experience is so universal? It’s encoded in the way our brains learn.

“Playing a video game requires some mental energy so to speak (i.e. attention resources), which inevitably depletes over time,” Celia Hodent, Ph.D. in psychology and game UX strategist, told Polygon via email. “When you’ve already been playing a game for [one] hour and are starting to battle a new boss, you put a lot of cognitive effort into understanding how the enemy works and how to defeat it, which is draining your energy and you keep dying.”

But when you sleep on it, not only do you recuperate that spent energy — you also allow your brain to complete an imperative part of the process of learning a new skill.

“Sleep helps consolidate what was learned during the day in long-term memory. And we can’t learn if we don’t remember,” Hodent said. “A lack of sleep can have a very negative impact on learning and development in general.”

And it isn’t just beginner gamers, or beginner humans (read: children), who need sleep in order to learn new skills: “Fully matured adults also need to sleep properly to stay sharp, healthy, and to learn and perform anything properly (such as master a video game),” said Hodent.

It happened to me recently with Lonely Mountains: Snow Riders: I played the game in the morning before work and struggled to make it past a few objectives. I tried again after work and still couldn’t push through. The next morning, after a good night’s sleep and with a fresh cup of coffee beside me, I breezed through the objective — and the goal times for a few tougher runs, too.

Refusing to take a break isn’t the only reason you could be stuck on a certain level or become frustrated to the point of abandoning a game. Hodent outlined three “learning approaches” that are at play when you’re learning how to play video game levels, or learning anything, really: behavioral, cognitive, and constructive psychology principles.

You can think of behavioral psychology as conditioning — or “input-output,” Hodent said — where a certain action causes a certain effect, and you learn to associate those things, “such as when we destroy a vase we might find loot inside, or when we hear a specific sound that enemies are about to spot us.”

Conditioning also relies on repetition. “We know that letting players repeat an action, such as practicing a new weapon repeatedly against enemies, is allowing conditioning to work. Just like flash cards,” Hodent said.

She described the second type of learning — based on cognitive psychology principles — as being “about opening the black box (the mind) and taking into account the limitations of the human brain. Perception is subjective, attention resources are scarce, and memory is fallible.”

But that’s not a bad thing — it just means good video game designers should scaffold new concepts such that the player doesn’t reach a level of fatigue that leaves them so frustrated as to give up permanently. We like to learn, especially when we get a win now and again.

“We know that working memory (the part of memory that allows you to encode information, like when reading these lines) tires fairly quickly and we can’t sustain our attention for a long time, or multitask efficiently. If, in a game, we try to teach players too many new things too fast, there’s a very good chance that they won’t remember much of it, thus they will not feel competent playing the game, which can be frustrating,” Hodent said.

And now we’re up to the third framework, constructive psychology principles, which help prevent this frustration through “purposeful learning.”

“A video game that pauses to force feed players a tutorial text is not particularly efficient (and many players dislike that). On the contrary, placing players in a situation where they have to overcome an obstacle by learning a new skill […] is much more meaningful and efficient,” Hodent explained, citing Super Mario Bros. World 1-1 as an example of this principle in action. “To simplify, instead of telling them ‘hey, btw, you need to press X to jump in this game’, we show them a chest on an upper platform and they need to discover how to jump there to get it (with subtle guidance from design).”

It’s not all on you, the player, to know when to step away, either. Games should incorporate breaks from the learning process.

“Carefully crafted games should account for [cognitive psychology principles] and let players take a breather (e.g. by not having them learn any new thing but simply practicing what was learned),” Hodent wrote.

Next time you’re stuck on a tough level, you might reconsider the tactic of brute-forcing your way through as many failures as it takes to surpass it — it’s a losing game, according to science, and one you can’t trick your brain out of. Instead, take a break, practice using easier levels, or simply sleep on it.

“This is the main reason why it is absolutely crucial for children and young adults with a developing brain (until about 25 years of age) to have a good sleep pattern, because a lack of sleep can have a very negative impact on learning and development in general,” Hodent said. So prioritize that sleep schedule — it just might make you better at video games.

source https://www.polygon.com/gaming/523340/cognitive-psychology-video-games-stop-playing-games