During the holidays, I found myself hopping between Baldur’s Gate 3 and Spider-Man 2 as the two major components of my gaming diet. These are, obviously, very different games – one is a roleplaying game based on the fifth edition of Dungeons & Dragons with turn-based combat, set in a fantasy world with vampires and Mindflayers and dragons, and the other is an action-adventure game with real-time combat, based on a comic book character and set in a somewhat realistic version of New York City.

I am decent at combat in one of these games, and downright bad in the other. Baldur’s Gate 3’s combat can take some getting used to, but it’s entirely reliant on strategy and patience instead of reflexes and memorised moves. I started out bad, but time and experience made me get better. Because combat leans hard on positioning, timing and strong builds, I can tweak my approach over time to give me the best result.

Spider-Man 2, on the other hand, had me embarrassing myself in front of my friends. My friends were coming over to my house to eat dinner and watch movies, as we often do, and the early birds set up shop in my room to kill time before we all sat down to eat together. They had the ill fortune of watching me get increasingly upset as I got my butt kicked in the Lizard boss fight, over and over again. I saw them start wincing, at some point, and a few of them walked out to reduce my performance anxiety in hopes that I would finally manage it.

It did not feel great.

I am, unfortunately, a button masher. I have a notoriously weak memory – I’m the kind of person who has to write everything down or I’ll forget it within minutes – which means I have no idea how to do anything other than the basic attacks the game teaches me. I internalise what two buttons do, and that is it. It doesn’t matter what I unlock in the skill tree, because I won’t remember that I have this ability or how to trigger it. This isn’t so bad in games like God of War, which introduce new skills steadily so I can learn them by muscle memory, but in games where you can accumulate a huge amount of resources to unlock new skills very quickly like Spider-Man 2, most of those skills go completely unused by me. You can probably tell I’m really bad at Soulslikes.

Yes, I’m aware this means most combat mechanics fly straight over my head. That’s why you won’t often catch me enthusing about combat-heavy games. I’m simply not built for them, and I’ve come to terms with that, thank you very much. But that does also mean that there are specific aspects of games that I can’t appreciate in full, and I do feel bad about that. I can be good at some kinds of combat in some (mostly turn-based) games, but now that I’ve recognised this fatal flaw in the way I game, I’m going to be making a focused effort to fix that. I’ll use skills as soon as I unlock them, as often as I can, until they feel natural to use in the flow of battle. I will actually read all the things under skill trees instead of skimming over them because I know I’ll forget. Dare I say it? – I will try to git gud.

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