“When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."
–Goodhart’s law.
The 'Quest' for greatness.
When I got my own Oculus Quest instead of having a shared one for the house, I switched from having local high scores in Beat Saber, where I was competing against my wife and various housemates, to having global high scores, where I was competing against the other 2+ million people who’ve bought Beat Saber.
I played a handful of the default songs (the ones that don’t require the custom song mod) in this mode and got scores in the range of 8,000th to 14,000th on the global leaderboard. It’s a bit unsatisfying until I realized that getting 8,000th out of 2 million puts me at roughly 99.6th percentile of all Beat Saber players. Still, it’s unsatisfying.
I spent a while playing the same song over and over again, learning as much of the sequence as I could and quitting if I made a mistake early. I started to pay more attention to when the tracking seems to become inaccurate, and started holding my arms differently. I researched the details of how the scoring works to optimize my movement strategies. Accuracy of angle, for example, is not important. Taking big swings is important.
With repeated practice drilling the same song over and over again I could get up to around 4,500th-5,500th in the world. Cool, I’m at 99.8th percentile.
However, maybe I could do better. I picked 90-degree mode, which to my knowledge very few people play as it’s basically a version of 360 degree mode designed for people who are playing in small rooms. On the first try I got ~2,800th. If I spent a lot of time searching I could perhaps find the least popular mode in the least popular song on Expert+, play the hell out of it, and do even better.
However, for even better performance, I could pick Easy Mode on a default song that isn’t very catchy, add all the modifiers that make it slightly harder, use the scoring techniques from the article I read. Since this is kind of boring, probably very few people do it. On my first try with this approach I got ~300th in the world.
Now I’m basically just solving an arbitrary optimization problem instead of having fun and getting exercise in VR. I’ve succeeded, but I’ve failed. Now I’m back to getting the constant stream of enjoyment I get from playing new custom songs all the time instead of trying to work my way up the leaderboard.
It's fun until it isn't.
Some leisure activities have the property that as you get better at them, you end up having less fun. Scrabble, for example, is mostly playful word-recombination when you’re a casual player, but if you want to compete, you have to spend a tremendous amount of time just reading and memorizing long lists of accepted words. For example, at one time the top scrabble player in French didn’t even know French; he just spent a lot of time learning what words were and weren’t OK to put on the board.
On the other hand, sports like rock climbing appear to be just as fun as you start competing on a more advanced level. You find yourself traveling around the world to beautiful places and doing amazing routes.
In leisure and in work, it’s important to think about your goals ahead of time and periodically make sure that whatever metrics you’re using to track your progress towards goals are still serving you.