Yep, put me in the camp that thinks talking about ‘talent’ is a toxic waste of time.
Also I don’t think there’s a significant difference in creators and critics besides where they prefer to put their energy.
I don’t want to come across as some radical blank slate ist, though, I actually do believe there is such a thing as talent, I just think its boundaries are nebulous and it’s difficult to know whether someone has reached the limits of it, without trying to improve oneself at great length (and even then… it’s possible you just didn’t find the one weird trick yet to make a breakthrough). Plateaus often come more from lack of enjoyment, which of course correlates with skill, so it can be hard to tell.
I also tend to think that talent is quite sharable across disciplines so if you’re good at one thing, you’re good at lots of vaguely related things too, as opposed to the contained microtalent view. Success in one area should be taken to convince yourself you can be successful in another, as opposed to consoling oneself with “I’ll never be good at this, but at least I’m good at this”
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I didn’t expect to be accused of toxicity for stating what I think is an obvious point. Do people think I’m an advocate of genetic determinism or something? Obviously interest, experience, diligence and practice are necessary for anyone to become truly great. But it’s equally obvious that Steph Curry probably doesn’t have quantifiably more interest, experience, diligence or practice than your average NBA backbencher. They’re all trying about as hard as anyone can, and they’re all way, way better than you or me, but some are still better than others.
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Is the only significant difference between Navy SEALs and nuclear physicists where they prefer to put their energy? I mean how universally applicable is this principle?
Well, I think in the spirit of modesty you underestimated your own potential in saying you have no talent at synthesis. I don’t think what you said implied genetic determinism at all, but it struck me as fatalistic and defeatist. You were so quick to assume your lack of skill there was due to talent when it doesn’t seem you’ve examined any artist’s approach to synthesis, which if you did you might find actually easy to replicate. That defeatism is what I was reacting to.
Sorry the word “toxic” was rather harsh, certainly your statement was mild and you don’t deserve to be singled out on this. I’m just angry at the cultural trope as a whole.
I’m a bit surprised we’re not on the same page here given your interest in education reform, since something I’ve heard a lot lately (and which I agree with) is that helping kids not have a defeatist attitude by praising effort rather than talent is a proven best practice.
If I was being defeatist I’d have to be upset about it. I’ve organized my life around what I’m good at - analysis is the lawyer’s tool, especially the defense lawyer. I don’t feel any disinclination to the creative pursuits I enjoy (noodling almost-daily on this guitar I got 2 years ago, making my LP videos that I haven’t done in like 3 years or whatever, writing shitposts on this here webforum), I just appreciate the modesty of their quality. I’m old. Part of the wisdom of age is knowing thyself, which is just a way of saying what you’re good at and what you ain’t.
A huge part of my ego is wrapped up in being really, really good at what I do, which I am. (True story: won another trial today, womp womp.) I don’t also need to feel like One Day I’ll Be Good at artistic pursuits as well. Even if talent didn’t exist and all skill came purely from time and energy spent, I don’t have the time or energy to spend, which is a choice I freely made. I’m not tore up about it.
As it happens, when I was growing up almost all my free time was taken up by creative pursuits, specifically music. During high school I was in something like 13, 14 different musical activities simultaneously. But even in that realm I was much better at theory than practice: I intellectualized music, but wasn’t much into execution (papered over gaps in execution with clever intellectualizing, in fact). Then I went to college to read books, and my musical pursuits were significantly chopped down; after graduation, they basically dwindled to nothing. That’s due to a willful change in focus and not the locus of some horrible regret - there was no way I’d ever be a professional musician. I love playing, but I’m just not built for it.
Weird that you got me talking about myself, the least interesting subject. But there you go.
Kids are a whole different thing! Talent might take all kinds of time and energy to unlock, and everyone has idiosyncratic plateaus to conquer for self-improvement. Rewarding only those who are immediately OK at something (no one is ever immediately great at something) is shortsighted and presumptuous. It’s better to work from kids’ interests, really let them go far down the paths they choose for themselves, and only when certain ends become clear maybe start helping them shift their focus to something to which they may be slightly better-suited.
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My dad had your attitude, and he would make statements like the one you made all the time. A propos of nothing, he would declare himself immutably bad at something, and he would justify it by saying that he was old, but that I however being young still had plenty of potential to be better at it than him. I’m not quite sure what drove him to make such statements, but at some point, they stopped sounding like wisdom. I don’t know, he was telling himself a story about his life, to justify the way it went, and to reinforce that everything was in its right place, there was no better life to be had, and that I was a perfect vessel and surrogate for his dreams.
Your life sounds more successful than my dad’s, you’re a successful lawyer and you’re not a lonely transplant into a French-speaking land like he was. So I don’t want to go too far in projecting the melancholy I detected in him onto you. I’m just saying, what you said reminds me of him.
Well, this is quite some Zelda thread now.
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I was trying to say there’s way more bleed between critics and creators than it was implied earlier. JRR Tolkien was a philologist and one of the main reasons we talk about Beowulf as a work of literature today, and all of that fed straight into his fiction. So many writers started as critics and even a few critics began as writers.
Problem with games is that you have more fanboys than actual critics, and that reflects in the indie landscape tbh.
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But the grounds and plaza have level design.
Mario’s movement would be meaningless if all you had was a vast flat plane to work with.
Successful is a big word. Let’s just say I’m happy with my competence.
Anyway, I’m certainly by no means immutably bad at anything in particular, it’s just that the mutation would take reordering my life priorities in an unpleasant way. If I was being a defeatist I wouldn’t play guitar at all. What I’m saying is that I’m satisfied with my noodling, I don’t feel a pressing need to grow quickly or efficiently along that axis because I know what kind of effort it would require and I’ve got other things I’d rather be doing.
I wouldn’t fear my projecting my failures onto my kids and pressing them into service as surrogates because I never made it to the state championship, or whatever. I take what you call a hands-off management approach. I’ll be happy if they don’t end up in prison.
i’ll grant the plaza but the grounds are pretty close to being a featureless plane
Anyway i don’t agree and think that moving Mario around is inherently frictive and engaging but i don’t feel like arguing the point anymore
anyone wanna talk about zelda
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The castle grounds are goal-less, though.
It’s evidence that they built forms in anticipation of level design but did not actually engage in directed level design until much later.
And under any task segregation you have to work this way. You put your character in a jungle gym and ensure that the experience feels as good as possible for what it should be, you fill the sandbox with level design elements, then you turn over to building actual levels and use those lessons and chunks to do so, with confidence that the character can handle them.
So I don’t think it’s proper to think of those spaces as levels. They are game environments but they exist in the extra space modern games naturally have floating around; hubs, home bases, diegetic menus. Not that it’s not important for us to consider them because we often don’t recognize and cut them too hastily in order to trim the fat.
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I can’t discern this from what they’ve shown of BotW, but a big frustration with the combat from OoT on is that all of the timings are balanced juuust so that you fight an enemy in a implicitly prescribed pattern. Skyward Sword takes this further by making each swipe a hexagonal puzzle. By contrast, MonHun (or Souls if you prefer) allows you flexibility and gradation of success relative to your greed or frugality in each maneuver. It would be nice eg if an enemy did not have absolute spatial awareness and rotate on a dime to face you. Spacing would then be more meaningful than two steps of either within or outside of striking distance at the right time.
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I’d also be happy if they fixed button mashing as an implicit win; they have a stamina gauge ready to go and everything.
I think the real problem is not being able to decide to jump into difficult combat or leave it. Zelda hasn’t sold well enough next to development costs to give them a clear mandate so they hem and haw over who the game is built for; a slavish fan-wank but carefully tuned to be easy enough that no one can get blocked.
And Zelda’s mandate has always been to competently showcase many different genres: good puzzles, good exploration, good combat; this worked as long as Nintendo had budgets and polish far advanced over everyone else but post-PS2 the most they can claim is that they are ‘tastefully restrained’ (and they clearly aren’t (but parts of Skyward Sword are so gorgeous they make that turdpile gleam)).
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I think people mistake experience for talent so much that to them there is no difference. I am not a very talented musician. I’ve just been playing for years, since I was kid. there are people who just start out who can play circles around me. most of them never get anywhere because they never bother to develop any discipline. I’d rather play with knowledgeable, practiced and experienced people than with “talent”, and when people call me “talented” I get a little irked because it negates all the work I put in to get to where I am. I started with a little talent, that I cultivated for a long time. imo, this is the case with most great artists. it is also the case with most shitty hacks. every now and then you get someone like prince… but he’d still not be anybody if he hadn’t cultivated himself.
and yeah, I agree that focusing on talent discourages people from trying. all you need is the tiniest amount of talent. as long your desire to improve is great enough, that talent will develop. there are many things in my life that I “decided I was just no good at”, only to later encounter them again and… get good at them. it just takes repetition and time and frustration and effort. there are very few things that I doubt I could get good at, if I devoted the time and energy. I don’t think this makes me special! I’m pretty sure it’s true of most people!
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maybe it’d be less of a hot button issue if we replaced “talent” with “aptitude”
i’m not quite sure why it matters if some people get discouraged if they think too much about whether they have talent or not. just do your thing regardless. people get discouraged about a lot of things they can’t control, and a lot that they can. this isn’t meant to oversimplify, but i guess this just feels like a personal quirk rather than universal best practice
I used to be a hot-shot shitposter on internet forums about Pixelart for years. Even though I’m not that great of a pixelartist myelf, I loved giving people criticism to help them get over whatever pitfalls I did. Studying the format helped me a lot too, but it helped me with giving other people better criticism too.
I actually think the opposite of you, I think that an artist can be enjoying making art a fair amount and still hit a plateau rather easily without even noticing it.
Honestly, the most common way an artistic plateau usually happens is not being willing to either challenge yourself more - or dedicate more time to it. A lot of hobbyist pixelartists and artists stay that way forever because they never can really take the leap of it being a hobby to something they actively engage with it.
I think talent makes the difference though, as every artist I’ve seen (for instance: http://neoriceisgood.deviantart.com) that is naturally talented breaks through their plateau much, much easier and by dedicated less time to it