Internalization

"Internalization. This occurs when you've exploited impact, when you've molded the standard material to your needs and made it yours, when you've made your new skills strong through hard use. All of a sudden these new concepts stopped churning within you, and a new reality is born: You and the concepts are one. They have literally become you. You have become them."

-Tom Hopkins

Starting about four years ago, I was for the first time exposed to a large number of concepts and abilities with great depth. Entering university was an eye-opening experience of just what it meant to truly learn something; until then, education consisted mostly of rote memorization and regurgitation of facts, or straightforward application of rules. Of particular difficulty for me was in mathematics, where building a proof often requires a strong intuition and understanding of mathematical techniques. I had never before seen math that required me to really understand all of the implications of a theorem in order to build an idea of the sort of situations in which it's relevant.

Around the same time, I started playing Super Smash Bros. Melee as my first real competitive game. Say what you will about its validity in that regard; whether or not it's a "true fighting game" or whatever is unrelated to the point I want to make with it. In order to play this game at a reasonably high level, it is paramount to become mechanically proficient in a number of techniques that enhance your character's movement and attacking options. The most familiar example is probably wavedashing.

The term is borrowed from other fighting games, but describes a similar action: the character slides along the ground in a neutral state. In Marvel, this is executed by dashing and then immediately crouching, using the residual momentum from the dash to continue to push your character forward. It's a comparatively simple technique. In Melee, on the other hand, there is a lot more complexity. First, you jump, and on the first frame in which your character is considered airborne--which happens before the character has actually left the ground--you airdodge to the side and slightly downward. The character gains momentum from the airdodge, immediately becoming grounded again, and standing while still being carried by that momentum. For reasons that are well beyond the scope of this post, this technique enables a huge number of movement options.

The more movement-heavy Melee characters make incredibly extensive use of wavedashing and derivative techniques--you will see it used many times a minute in any given match. Yes, this means that every few seconds a Melee player is performing a one-frame link.

One of the frustrations that newer Melee players have with wavedashing is that, even when they can consistently perform it in a vacuum, they are often unable to perform it in an actual game, or if they can, they find its use limited because they don't yet understand either the situations in which it's appropriate, or the options it makes available to them. Wavedashing is not useful until the player has internalized it.

What is internalization?

For what it's worth, Merriam-Webster defines the verb "internalize" as:

to give a subjective character to; specifically : to incorporate (as values or patterns of culture) within the self as conscious or subconscious guiding principles throughout learning or socialization

In both mathematics and Melee, it's important to come to a complete intuitive understanding of the tools available to you. You must be able to recognize, immediately and without thought, when a tool may be useful to you. Melee adds the requirement of having internalized its execution, so that you cease to think about wanting to wavedash, or to perform its constituent actions. You must wavedash completely unconsciously; the tool needs to be an extension of you. This is what is meant by "internalizing" the tool.

There are a couple of litmus tests I make use of to determine how far I've internalized a concept. Whenever I achieve any of the following milestones, I know that I've internalized a little bit further:

• Making use of the concept with absolutely no conscious intention to, in a situation that called for it. In fighting games, throw breaks are an easy example. Breaking a throw that you did not consciously read occurs when you recognize either a setup or throw startup, and then you automatically press the button to break it. Occasionally, you may only recognize that a throw even occurred after you've already broken it.
• Using the concept in a way that you have never used or seen it used before, recognizing and understanding that it would be effective there, and being correct. A correct response to a mixup setup you've never seen before, for example.
• Automatically reacting to and handling a situation that you consciously misinterpret. Misreading an opponent and thinking that they're doing something else, but unconsciously reacting correctly, in opposition to your conscious intention.

And so on. In general, any novel or unconscious use is a sign of internalization. It's at that point when you've ceased to need to think about how to use your tool in order to actually do so.

Making use of internalization

As your internalization progresses, you can add more layers of abstraction to your thoughts. A beginning piano player may need to consciously determine the timing of the notes he plays, the fingers he uses to press each key, and the force he uses. After a while, he can stop thinking about that, because he's internalized it completely, and instead move on to consciously thinking about chords. Further, and he can think on the order of chord progressions.

In fighting games, there are two important factors of internalization. Most obviously, internalizing a combo or mixup, either on the offensive or defensive side, improves how likely you are to correctly execute your combo or defend the mixup. The other factor is that internalization frees up your attention. If you can spend the duration of your combo thinking about your opponent's patterns and selecting your oki, you are in much better shape to get your next hit than someone who is too busy focusing on consciously timing their attacks so that the combo works.

The second point is the primary reason why it's important to continually practice things you can already do, and why the aforementioned Melee players who can't make proper use of wavedashing feel frustrated. With their attention spent trying to wavedash, they don't have the mental capacity to consider any sort of strategy or intelligent ways in which to use it.

Understanding just how useful attention is as a resource was critical to me in changing how I thought about practice and study. The most effective way to determine what you need to practice or study is to figure out where a lack of attention is hurting you, and why you lack that attention. Perhaps your defense suffers because you spend too much time focusing on blocking your opponent and not enough time on looking for holes in their offense. In this case, you should find a way to practice blocking that character so that you don't have to think about it as much, and are free to look for holes.

It's not enough to recognize a flaw in your play: you must recognize where a flaw arises because your attention is being spent on something else. In doing so, you can then find a way to safely move your attention to where it is needed.

"I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times."

-Bruce Lee

The surface level reading of this quote is that one effective tool is far more powerful than a host of tools that the user cannot effectively exploit. While this is true, there's a more important reason than simply "practice". Practicing a single kick 10,000 times awards an internalized level of understanding that permits proper use of that kick in all kinds of situations, while still leaving the user free to think about other aspects of the fight.

In a direct parallel to fighting games, practicing one combo thousands of times, or one hitconfirm, or one antiair, or one mixup, leaves you free to consider the more abstract mental competition. Practicing defense of course is a lot harder, but by extensively practicing offense you can free your attention to go towards your defense, making up for some of the difference.

Internalization as a feeling of power

To wrap this up, I'd like to talk about how internalization affects my enjoyment of a game. Not just a fighting game, but any sort of game in which there is a clear indication of skill. For a time, I played World of Warcraft as a member of a high-ranked raiding guild; my character class was a mage.

Mages have a spell called Blink. The spell is very simple: it's instant cast, has virtually no resource cost, and upon cast, you instantly teleport forward 15 yards, simultaneously breaking any movement impairing effects that were present on you. This is my favorite spell in the entire game, because internalizing its use leads to a host of creative applications that can optimize your performance in miniscule but important ways. To me, the greatest thing I ever did in WoW was not beating a particularly difficult boss or anything; it was a single cast of Blink during an attempt against a boss that failed anyway.

We were fighting a boss who had a mechanic in which he fired three relatively-slow projectiles at ranged targets. Upon landing, the projectiles exploded for a large radius, effectively rendering useless anyone hit by the them for a few seconds. During one attempt at this boss, I saw him use this ability. I was not the target of any projectile, but I would have been within the explosion radius of one, so I needed to move out of the way.

I could have simply stopped casting and ran out of the way. But instead, I intuitively recognized exactly where the projectiles were going, and exactly how long their explosion radius was. There was a very small safe spot completely surrounded by explosions, big enough for just one character. I considered when to move to it, and realized that I could finish one more spellcast and then immediately Blink to the safe spot, but the timing was so tight that if I was even slightly wrong about the time until my cast ended or the explosion happened, I would be hit.

But I was right in every single way, and I safely Blinked to that small safe spot in the absolute nick of time. To do that, I had to completely internalize how far Blink went, how long my cast time was, how big the boss's explosion radius was, and how long it took each projectile to explode. I had never felt more powerful in the game than at that moment, and I haven't felt as powerful since.

I realized later that this feeling of power by internalization is the thing I seek out of any game I play. Being able to completely control a character in a fighting game as if they were an extension of myself is the main reason I play them, and it's why I prefer games with many many options that can be used in creative ways. For me, internalization is the greatest expression of skill there is.