Entering "The Zone"...

[Conqueror Kenny]

Happens most of the time in games with great enviroment, and these days I must say it's S.T.A.L.K.E.R. that's bringing me into the zone most of the time... pun not intended. I also found out I no longuer need a crosshair, and feel like a videogame addict for it.

ah yes this has happened to me a few times whilst playing gears i find myself giving headshots without aiming at all and im just like "wow".

 

[xMacx]

I think xMacx found something about right, though I persoanlly feel it's a lot more non-conscious than the article suggests.

Depends how you're defining non-conscious. If you're referring to learning a pattern of activities over time, to the point where you're not serially attending to sequences of activity, you're probably talking about the chunking of procedural memory that accompanies expertise in a particular area. Personally, I don't think this would explain the phenomenological experience most people are talking about in this thread. You could develop great expertise in a combination of button presses (which most of us do), but the experience of heightened awareness/drastically improved performance wouldn't really explain this. Chunking of actions tends to follow either a slope or a more of a drop-off (like a cliff)in terms of speed or accuracy - this type of spike in performance doesn't follow with the chunking of physical activity as part of a larger procedure.


Muscle memory usually refers to nuerophysical linking for particular actions; people get this confused with procedural chunking, often linking mental, skill-based activities with the nebulous concept of "muscle memory" without recognizing that users have chunked mental procedures together over time.