(This post is quite rambly, as it’s been sitting in my drafts for almost a month now, since November 7th. A lot has happened in my life since then, so I just wanted to push it out so I don’t feel pressured into chipping away at it. It’s nothing of real importance, anyways.)

I love rhythm games.

Rhythm games are a special interest of mine that has lasted me for eleven years from the moment I picked up osu! in 2013, and was likely sparked before that when I fiended DDR Extreme 2 in my youth. I’m certainly nothing impressive as a player, as I don’t get a lot of time to play the games and have taken pretty sizeable breaks from them as a whole due to lack of interest in the moment, but beyond that, I have done a lot of research for fun on weird and obscure rhythm games, namely things that aren’t mainstream in the USA for very understandable reasons. This background isn’t very relevant, at least not directly; what is more relevant is how much my friends know of me for this, as I don’t tend to hang around in the rhythm game space and, as such, am the best rhythm game player I know by a longshot. I spend a lot of time when friends pick up the game trying to help them improve by introducing ways to help them get used to my game of choice, Quaver, and follow their progress, as it’s really fun to see my friends improve over time and get over the mental block that going into these rhythm games with high expectations will do to you. Though it’s been a very long time since I was new to rhythm games, I definitely have a bit of that experience, because, like anyone who’s played these games and gotten a decent bit in, I’ve gone through it myself.

Unlike a lot of my less experienced friends, however, I have gone through much of my time playing these games immersed heavily into community happenings; when it comes to osu!standard, I could name many top players, mainly from my time playing, but also many of those who actually set records in the modern day. As such, I’m incredibly well aware of how unique of a competitive landscape community-driven rhythm games like osu! have from the inside, having been a slave to the grind back when I was an active osu!standard player. Part of why I’m writing this is because I’ve relapsed; I started playing osu!mania as an easy way to get involved in an Archipelago run and, around that time, I got into osu!catch, as how it controlled on mobile was interesting to me. (I now play osu!catch on PC because I ended up not processing things as well when I was using said mobile controls, and, whenever I can get my hands on a new drawing tablet, I want to pivot into becoming an all-mode player, as it’s something I wanted to do at a point when I was more active in the game, but never had the energy to learn.) It’s because of this that I’m mostly going to talk about osu!’s gamemodes here, namely osu!standard due to my past experiences, but I feel like similar ideas apply to rhythm games as a whole, albeit with some of them focusing more on direct competition as opposed to indirect competition to weaken some of the points I have here, albeit not fully.

As a player, the “better” player is pretty objectively defined within osu!’s systems: Whoever has a higher rank thanks to higher pp plays wins. This system is definitely farmable, as any good play will get you pp, but prizes consistency across maps, as hitting lots of very good plays around the same level is the best way to make sure all of that pp counts due to the weighting system. A system like this makes the battle for the #1 spot on the leaderboard a competition of real skill as, if you’re able to set many top plays, you’re probably also able to perform at the highest level of difficulty when you’re called upon in a real-time setting, like a liveplay you make to prove you’re legit or, more notably, a tournament; in a game where you’re not directly interfering with the other player, a direct competition is just an indirect competition that you get one shot at. That’s not to say the pp system doesn’t have flaws over a system that pits players directly against each other, as any automated system such as it prioritizes a specific skillset that top players have to identify and exploit, but it has a very interesting consequence, especially in a community driven game where other players determine what the best of the best can hunt, where the game plays like a PvE game, but without a skill cap; players are constantly pushing the limits that mappers are making, and mappers are targeting the exploits players want to see. In essence, I think pp is interesting because it is exploitable, and those exploits seem like impossible feats to the average playerbase.

What got me thinking things through when I thought about this was what I’d see as the “spectator’s journey” when I started to pick up the game and understand what was going on. A story I’ve seen circulated often in these spaces from osu! players who are showing their uninoculated friends the game at their level is that these people often can’t tell difficulty past a certain point, to where an average 5* is worth as much as a challenging feat such as The Big Black, or another similarly difficult “boss song”. I feel like that’s partially the fault of the best way to read the game being something you have to learn as well, thanks to phenomena like common scroll speeds and skins in osu!mania being fast to space out patterns and force users to rely on audio to time, while being inaccessible to spectators; at the same time, the fact that all of osu!’s other modes force their Approach Rate to a set value per map means that, unless you can actually tell what’s going on, everything looks the same. This isn’t something that can really be helped; slowing down scroll speed or Approach Rate just serves to make the field more confusing for everyone, both player and spectator, and is a challenge in itself.

I feel like the results coming out of that phase are twofold, in a way I feel mirrors a fight or flight response in a weird way: When looking at a rhythm game, namely osu!standard, which looks the most accessible of osu!’s four modes at first, spectators either seem to come to fear rhythm games because of this high level play, citing that they will never hit that level (often true, but not because their skill has limits, instead that they don’t have the patience to hone their craft over years, which is obviously understandable), or dive in head first under the assumption that the game is easy, citing that they can pull off those feats in no time at all (pretty much always false, but that doesn’t mean you can’t progress incredibly quickly with time and patience). I was in the latter camp personally, but, as I was young and had high academic expectations on my shoulders, I never got anything remotely close to good at osu!standard; while I do think I’m decent at VSRGs, as I’d say I’m able to play at around the entry level to the patterns at the peak of the game, that came after a decade of grinding in a mode that is nothing like a VSRG, at least in core gameplay. My main point here is that I imagine this is why it seems hard personally to get others into these games, as well as part of why I think players like me have high expectations of their skill that don’t seem to be met for a very long time in these kinds of games, though I think that’s more involved.

Eventually, I think players get to a point where they are comfortable with the norm when it comes to their setup and it becomes possible to actually read what’s going on in these kinds of games. I find this to be the case for most games I don’t play that I end up watching, where I spend a lot of time just trying to figure out the flow of things before I actually feel confident talking on the matter and thinking about strategy. osu! is unique in this regard, where you actually have to immerse yourself in the game in an attempt to understand what you can’t do; I think it’s in part because you don’t fully understand things about the game that make things like high NPS very impressive to lower level players, despite being easier to hit. This is best exemplified by things like jhlee0133’s A Fool Moon Night play, which, while incredibly impressive, does not seem like an incredibly technical play past a certain point of understanding, at least when you compare it to something like Rude Buster (Camellia Remix) in the osu!mania 7K sphere. I’d say it’s around this point where you truly understand what you’re watching at least: The best players are performing feats of magic that the masses can understand, but will likely never be capable of; uniquely, instead of being an opponent you can contest on their turf that will dominate you, you may never step on these hallowed grounds in the first place.

I think it’s because of this that osu! is such an engaging spectator sport, despite there being little to nothing to actually glean from high level play in one’s own gameplay; while there are battles you can fight on your home turf and the comfortable grounds around it, actually breaking out into the top sphere is something that requires you to be fighting in an entirely new arena that the average player is not in. This is similar to direct competition in some ways, but very different in others, as there is no direct comparison to what you’re fighting; instead, either you are able to complete the feat or not. This is true among the top echelon of players, and it’s why I think the #1 player ends up being so dominant on the leaderboards for so long; at a point, they’re just so much more capable than their peers because they are the only player who can do what they do for a really long time, and everyone else has to play catch-up to the bar they keep setting. When more than one combatant is at this comically high level, it’s almost like watching a shonen anime battle, with the two competitors continually pushing their limits with each clash.

I’m sure I’d have more to say on this if I actually knew anything about osu! World Cup and other major tournaments, but I don’t, so I’m just going to push this post out because it’s been sitting in my drafts for way too long.