Defining the “Skill Floor”

It came to me recently that I completely misunderstood the whole concept of the “skill floor” in video games. What I used to think the “skill floor” was, conceptually, was kind of the reverse of what it is. A game with a high skill floor was a game in which even a new player could have an impact, while a game with a low skill floor was a game in which they needed to practice a lot to “raise” themselves up from that floor in order to begin having an impact on the game. This definition is wrong, but the correct definition prompted me thinking more holistically about the actual concept of the “skill floor.” For those who do not know, the true concept of the “skill floor” is essentially how much you need to practice and grind before you are able to play the game. Here’s a good example: Smash Bros Melee, GunZ The Duel, Starcraft 2, are all games with high skill floors. Grinding out things like melee techskill, GunZ animation canceling, starcraft 2 APM are very difficult, take a lot of time, and are skills that are fundamentally necessary to engage in the RPS of the game you’re actually playing. To use Melee specifically as an example, the game has absolutely no buffer. When you complete an action, you can’t preemptively buffer other actions like dashing backwards to retreat. So, if an uninitiated noob were to play against an average Melee player(even in a mirror match, for argument’s sake), it wouldn’t even really matter what they’re doing. Their opponent is just quite literally processing and playing the game purely faster. It’s like their character is literally a buffed version of the character the newbie is playing. <a href="https://medium.com/@froggalexis/defining-the-skill-floor-2bfdf9648971">Website</a>