I'm sure it isn't luck but at the same time I watch these things and genuinely don't understand how they do it. Particularly the whole thing of seeing and reacting that quick.

It reminds me of how bad I am with rhythm games. I can't even get through Easy on DDR because the arrows move too fast. It's like I can't read them and react quick enough.

Typically I do much better with games where the point isn't to see, process, and react within milliseconds. I definitely think there is a type of brain that can play games like these and another type that can't, and I'm in the latter.

> I can't even get through Easy on DDR because the arrows move too fast

The trick to basically all of these games is not to actually try and look at the arrows. There are a lot of them, they are moving fast, your conscious mind can't actually track and respond to each one of them individually.

But with practice you can train your self to more-or-less automatically respond to the sequence - there are only a handful of variations, and you learn the patterns that they typically arrive in.

(For a little while I had too much free time on my hands, and was in the top-100 BeatSaber players)

I think you can train it, at least that's what I did with Stepmania in the early 2000s. I was watching in awe how people could manage to get perfect scores when I could hardly see the steps before they were at the bottom of the screen.

Eventually I learned to stop looking at the individual entities, and just "stare in the middle" kind of, and you stop "looking" and start sensing in a way, without looking directly at them. They might just flash by, but it's enough for your brain to be able to at least figure out what right finger to use.

Then it's just a bunch of training :) I think it's fairly established that "reaction time" is something you can train, you just need to always be at the limit and slowly make it faster and faster. Same with speed-reading/listening I think.

How much effort do you put into trying before you quit?

I used to look at games like Hades and Returnal and see nothing but chaos. But with enough time on the sticks both games became instinctual and I was able to find a flow.

Yes, there's variation in potential range but most brands are capable of most things if you give them enough time to grow the necessary neurons and pathways.

I just timed DDR First Mix on the default settings on Boom Boom Dollar (135bpm). You have 2.67 seconds from the arrow first appearing to needing to input a step. 2,667 milliseconds. Reaction time is not your issue. DDR’s arrows actually move extremely slowly.