That summer was a weird one, back in my parents' house for what would ultimately be the last consecutive period of time I ever lived there. I had lugged back my little dorm television, the one that I grew up with, the one we used as a monitor for our Commodore 64 and later my NES and SNES and now my PlayStation, all of them piped in through RF, daisy-chained Nintendo-brand switches. Sometimes I had to jiggle the adapter on the back to get it all to come in right. The speaker grill on the front had an incongruous bend in it from where, my father told me, I drove a screwdriver straight in and pried it up and down as a child too young to know or remember what I was doing. I like to imagine I was just trying to get the sound outta there and see what it could do.
One of my main duties at the factory was slamming bushings into large gears using a pneumatically-powered metal press that looked kind of like a giant stapler. I'd put the large gear onto the base, grease the inside hole, slide a thin copper cylinder onto the top part, then activate the machine to force this bushing down into the gear perfectly. The only problem was that because all the gears were made by hand, I had to make minor adjustments to how exactly the gear sat on the base as the press holding the bushing was moving down. If I was off, the bushing would impact at an angle and explode in a loud, dramatic fashion. It was simultaneously scary yet invigorating—I was forcing metal into metal with a huge machine that had little room for tolerance or error, and no matter how many times I got it right, every single time I did it was a brand new chance to get it wrong.
I'm no stranger to rhythm and music games like Theatrhythm. I can remember early in my Super Nintendo days as a school musician, tappin' away on the buttons of my controller between scenes and thinking it would be really neat if we could have some sort of game that tested our rhythmic acuity and timing by using the controller instead of an actual instrument. That's right, I invented rhythm games in my head and the game companies stole my idea! (I also take credit for Thief.) There are basically two types of ways that I recognize "kinds" of rhythm games, for which I use terminology that is probably not entirely accurate: analog and digital.
Digital rhythm are those kinds of games that I perceive as having inputs that are extremely responsive and are always either "all on" or "all off." Stuff like Frequency and Amplitude, the Beatmania games, Pop'n Music, even the Yoshi racing game in Super Mario RPG, Daigasso! Band Brothers, Space Channel 5. These games all require series of single, immediate inputs that are activated by pushing a single button down, a button with a very small amount of travel until activation.
The counter to digital rhythm games are analog rhythm games, which are games that might incorporate elements of digital games but are "actuated" by using analog, or fuzzy, kinds of input methods with greater amounts of travel. For me this is stuff like DrumMania, where you're swinging drumsticks through the air to hit drum pads, Guitar Hero and Rock Band, where you're holding digital switches but pushing the "analog" strum switch up and down with not a lot of feedback, Para Para Paradise and Samba de Amigo, which involve coordinated waving of hands in space, and Dance Dance Revolution, where the inputs are of course digital but the method of hitting them (your legs) is the real analog element. There's one more, exceedingly broad category of rhythm games that I also consider analog though, and that's games that use a touch screen for input. You're holding a stylus, in the case of Nintendo DS games anyway, and for stuff like Ouendan or Rhythm Thief, are tapping different areas of the screen, with travel, with the slight "give" of the touch screen due to its digitizing layer, in a way that does not feel as "on" or "off" as a single button. I've always felt more skilled at digital rhythm games than analog ones, but while I frequently get really good at digital ones and let them sit forever afterwards, analog ones are the games I continue to be drawn to over long periods of time, always enthralled by that fudgy element, the difference between my leg straight down or slightly to the side.
As I play through Theatrythm, I've been starting to think about how these feelings of rhythm and action, activation and travel, really course through us. Cory (who also happens to be playing the game right now) and I had a little conversation about how our natural tendency with the game seems to be to hit notes slightly early, which is to say we're triggering them before they are fully centered in the "activation" circle. I most specifically noticed that I was striking early as I looked at the screen directly. When I read ahead, or closed my eyes, or looked just out of peripheral vision and focused solely on the music, I had had better results. This is much the same way I've behaved with most rhythm games, though I am reminded specifically of Rhythm Tengoku for the Game Boy Advance, which I managed to clear with 100% perfects, many of which were obtained by not looking at the screen at all and listening only to the sound.
My theory was that perhaps the indieszero dev team who put Theatrhythm together may have added this delay on purpose as an attempt to buffer out the average gamer's inherent tendency to underestimate the amount of travel time that occurs between firing the synapse to strike and the actual registration of the note by the touch screen digitizer layer. There are dozens of other possibilities of course: that the timing of the note charts aren't synced perfectly with a part of a certain song, that the visual delay our eyes experience in sending the image to us doesn't match up as precisely as that of sound, which could even vary from person to person, or that in cases where we already know the songs, we get ahead of ourselves, as is easily prone to happen in actual music performances, by anticipating the notes and playing them slightly too early since we know they're coming. It could also be that our average reaction speed is faster than the players they coded the timing windows for, who maybe held their stylii further from the screen than we do and thus incorporated more travel time to their strike. At any rate, it seems to be slightly safer to strike a note in Theatrhythm a little late than a little early when it comes to nailing that "critical" window (equivalent to a perfect strike in any other game, the ideal series of frames to hit the note for maximum points). Anything slightly outside that window registers as a "great," with more egregious slip-ups giving a "good," then a "bad," and finally just a straight-up "miss."
It's fascinating to me to be conscious of the ways that stress and anticipation affect a person's ability to perform taxing activities. I think as humans we are all drawn to it. We need look no further than videos of the greatest sports meltdowns in history to see how the human psyche can transform talented people into people that completely lose their rhythm when certain elements combine to break the tendency toward confidence or composure. I found myself experiencing exactly the same thing while taking on a sort of self-instituted challenge to complete three songs in one of the game's "series mode" sets in a row, all with full critical combos, to get an overall SSS ranking for a certain course (all criticals with no abilities or items equipped, 9999999 points).
The first time I thought it would be possible was after I SSSed the first song without even trying, then noticed I got almost through the second one before my first "great." The game (in a feature relatively unique to rhythm games) lets you just hit start and immediately retry any song in a set for whatever reason, so once I got that great I thought yeah, I can really do this, so I just hit restart to try again. But after I got it in my mind that I was going for the SSS, things started to come apart. I had to re-train myself to time sections of the song I had no trouble with previously. I started zeroing in on every note, conscious of the fact that I had to keep hitting criticals. My natural, automatic rhythmic impulses were getting pushed aside in favor of logic, of self-analysis. It took me almost another twenty tries before I even got back to where I had gotten with my critical streak that first time through the song, the time that convinced me I could go for an SSS after all. Sometimes I'd mess up a note and just keep going, to practice the later parts of the song. Almost invariably, after I missed a note and rode out the song "just for practice," I'd critically ace it like it was nothing. But when I would get to the same part on a critical streak, I'd become too aware of it and flub it almost immediately, sometimes on the very next note after the one I had been missing. It took me another handful of tries before I actually finished it, trying my hardest not to think about what I was doing.
When I think back to the time I spent in that factory, I realize how similar that kind of work was to what I've been doing in Theatrhythm here, how the conscious awareness of my exact actions would often have the inverse effect. When I first started pounding those bushings in, all I could think about was making sure not to miss, not to break it, cause I knew it would scare the shit out of me, wreck the bushing, damage a gear, cause the other workers to laugh at the new guy. I'd over-analyze it and mess it up every time. But by the end of the summer I was confident, automatic. After ten hours a day, five days a week, I had stopped thinking about it. The adjustments were natural, not rehearsed but practiced, internalized. It's the same feeling I get about any sort of rhythm game I've ever felt like an expert on, from DDR to Rhythm Tengoku to Guitar Hero.
In a way I think that—always conscious of it or not—I'm so drawn to rhythm games because of my fascination with that human tendency toward instinct over focus, to being a "clutch" player over one that chokes. I always found it interesting that the great clutch sports players of all time would be regarded as having a high clutch ability as opposed to merely the absence of choke. Being clutch isn't a thing you have, it's what you naturally tend toward when instinct and ability take the place of self-awareness and second-guessing.
Maybe rhythm games are an instrument that relies on our natural human tendency to appreciate the skilled performance of a particular craft, be it woodworking or pass-catching or lecturing or handcrafting, to feel a sort of human synchronicity in the rhythms that we all can understand. I think that as I tap those dots scrolling past while my mind wanders to the factory, on its own paths, I'm letting my rhythm take over. I think I can smell it in the pedal-fired car exhaust, in a bit of air pushed on a handheld fan. I think I can hear it on the concrete.