I'm fifteen, and I'm a girl. Video games have been my greatest passion in life ever since I was a child.

I want to go somewhere. I want to do something before I grow up, before I lose the childlike enthusiasm that drove me to win my very first tournament.

But it all feels like a pipe dream. I've recently become part of the online gaming community, and I have an entire internet full of tips for netting a contract or finding tourneys with good pay.

I'm still young. Very young. And I know I might not be even close to ready for MLG two or three years from now.

But I practice for hours every day, all genres across the board, and with players from all around the world using the internet. It's the progress that I need, however.

I need to find some way to make my practice more... intense. I can play a game for months and become skilled at it, and then another game will come around and it will take another months of practice. In other words, I'm not actually improving my game or my reflexes or anything of that sort.

I practice up to 6 hours a day, and I'm still making little to no progress. I need to add efficiency to my time input. And I need to know how to do that.

How can I change the way I practice so that I get progress as output? I've been playing games for a very long time, and yet my skill level stays stationary. I'm not going to accept that I'm at full capacity, because I know it's not true. And I'm not going to accept that my progress crawls along at the agonizing pace it does right now.

How can I improve myself from game to game?

Tl;dr I have a dream that will only ever come to fruition if I start making progress now. Advice?

You are aspiring to going major league in on-line games and you play six hours a day. If you attain your goal, what are your financial rewards in this?

You have probably already reached a peak of performance and you don't recognize it. You probably don't recognize it because it is a dead end.It is what it is. But it isn't simple.

If you have the tenacity to practice six hours a day, when do you sleep, go to school, eat and do the things normal fifteen year old girls do. What do you do for social interaction. I think you had better look at these aspects of your lifestyle before you as how to improve yourself at your chosen field.

Tick

Thank you for the response.

To be honest, I'm not in it for the money. Aside from the fact that I would like to represent female hardcore gamers around the country, even entering in national competitions kickstarts my potential in the future of the gaming industry. I plan on majoring in game development and linguistics when the time comes.

I was forced to quit public school due to chronic health problems, so I have a lot of free time on my hands. I plan on taking the GED on my sixteenth birthday, which will give me one or two years to study abroad and take courses in art before I move on to college.

Reaching major league status is not a career for me. It's to help build an impressive resume and create a name for myself in an incredibly competitive field.

What exactly are normal 15-year-old girls supposed to do? I have a dog, I practice martial arts and Parkour, I'm an artist, and I have the most supportive friends a girl could ask for.

I'm realistic; I'm no Teesquared, and I don't expect to reach that level. I have no intention of reaching that level. I have no intention to sacrifice part of my life for practice or competition.

*shrug* I like to think I'm not that naïve. I'd rather get the answer I was looking for than a speech on how to spend my free time.

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Originally Posted by kiragira

Thank you for the response.

*shrug* I like to think I'm not that naive. I'd rather get the answer I was looking for than a speech on how to spend my free time.

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I hope you get the answer you are looking for here, too, I don't think it was necessarily a speech on how you spend your free time. It was my opinion only. You will get others. Some you may not want to hear, but this is what this is all about here, and you take out of what you want and throw the rest away.

Tick

I mostly agree with tickle. First I agree that if you come here and ask questions, you are going to sometimes hear things that you do not want to hear. And while you didn't ask about your life -- you asked about how to improve your skills -- she did point out that perhaps your skills are as far as they will go, and just sometimes, other answers are appropriate even if that isn't quite what you asked.

About the only difference of opinion that I have is that I'm aware that gaming isn't about making a living, and not everything is. There's a such thing as hobbies. I know you're not doing it for the sake of making money. Most of us aren't. I think she meant that it's not going to get you anywhere in terms of having to deal with the adult responsibility of making a living, and perhaps a bit too much time is spent on that versus other things.

I can see from your second post that you've managed to accomplish other things and have not necessarily just been sitting on your a** doing nothing but playing games. Which I think may have been her concern.

You sound pretty ambitious, and competitive. That's all well and good, until you let it start interfering. A problem I see is that somehow you think this will help your resume? In order to be a good game developer, I think you most definitely have to play and understand games, know what they are about, know what people want, etc. You DO NOT have to be a top-notch player though.

You're talking about all genres and players all over the world, etc. It sounds a bit like too much ambition to be the very best at everything. And being the best at everything isn't necessary to be a good game developer. If I wanted to hire you, I'd like that you have a great interest in it - you need that. But I wouldn't care if you were great at it. In fact, can you understand a gamer who isn't great at it? Do you know where the mediocre player is coming from? The casual player? The one who only has an hour every other day?

You're right that the industry is competitive. Perhaps a bit more diversity and a little less competitiveness? And also perhaps a backup plan.

And that, of course, is my opinion.