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Since 2016 I have played the first person shooter Overwatch made by Blizzard games. While it is far from my first video game, it is a game that I have spent by far the most time playing, and more importantly, trying to improve at. Overwatch is a game of many variables with a very high intensity, that is there is rarely if ever any real downtime while playing. One of the keys to success in the game is developing a significant bank of muscle memory, or in more technical terms developing many different motor plans to use in order to reduce the amount of time it takes to analyze a situation and plan the appropriate actions. With 5 players per team, and multiple characters capable of eliminating you with a single click your reaction time and decision making must be entirely driven by muscle memory and your proprioceptive reflexes must also be highly developed in order to get on target and therefore survive. The above gif shows the insane reaction times, but more importantly well developed motor plans that Overwatch players rely on, as this player had to move their mouse to the exact correct position in a fraction of second to accomplish this shot which looks almost super human.

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Watch and share Huge Flick GIFs by azn123 on Gfycat

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The Gradual Climb Through the Ladder of Learning

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The Gradual Climb Through the Ladder of Learning

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I have been playing video games most of my life and I have always had a love for First Person Shooters especially team based ones like Overwatch. Despite playing it for many years with thousands of hours, it took me a very long time to get "good" at it. When I began playing, I was able to progress to platinum rather quickly getting there in my first year of playing. However it wasn't until earlier this year that I finally achieved Grandmaster which is less than 1% of all players who play the game worldwide.
This pattern of rapid progression followed by a slowing as the learner becomes more experienced matches the phases outlined by Fitts and Posner's Three Stage Model of motor learning. The first stage is defined as the cognitive stage, this is when a learner is getting the hang of a skill, and requires quite and bit of active thought and forward planning to accomplish it, but the progress is rapid. The next stage is the Associative stage. This stage is where most individuals will stay as the improvement becomes more gradual, however, this stage is defined as the stage where an individual becomes more consistent and begins to refine an existing motor program. The final stage is the autonomous stage. This stage is the point at which a large portion of the action has become autonomous freeing up attention to be placed on other things. This stage is often very difficult to achieve and few people actually can achieve this for a lot of skills. It is thanks to a lot of my Overwatch gameplay being autonomous that I am able to play as well as I do, as I can invest focus on planning ahead.

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Freshman year of college I began lifting weights and following powerlifting. I stayed consistent for about 1 year, however for a variety of reasons such as a hectic school schedule, I haven't been able to go consistently. When I was going consistently I would go to the gym at least 4 time a week, these days I go closer to once a week, and I have large gaps sometimes, despite this, my strength, but more importantly my form on lifts has barely deteriorated. I credit this to focusing not just on developing the motor memory of the action, but also developing my episodic memory of it as well, in other words I didn't just learn to do the motions I also learned to teach the motions. Episodic memory is the conscious recollection of past experiences, and it is through the development of this that my motor memory is always able to come back as quickly as it does after I return to the gym and walking through the steps cognitively is no problem. This image is of Renowned Strongman Eddie Hall who despite retiring in 2017 is still one of the strongest people on the planet.

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When I began lifting I struggled with almost every single lift, despite my overall strength being rather lacking and the rate at which I was improving being slow, I persevered. Eventually my strength improved when using machines but I still struggled with barbell movements especially bench-press. Eventually though something seemed to click, and my form improved, and with it so did my strength. This matches what we would expect from Ackerman's Integrated Model, which in part outlines the fact that your initial performance in a given skill is a very poor predictor of proficiency later on. Ackerman's Integrated Model provides scientific evidence of the importance of hard work, and even SpongeBob should be able to improve if he stuck to lifting, despite his obviously poor start in the above gif. Ackerman's Integrated Model specifically states that the abilities that an individual performs while doing a skill change regularly throughout the stages of learning.