For the love of the game
Youtube style thumbnail of Geometry Dash with Brandon Moyles ( Brandon Moyles / The Puma Prensa)
By William Winkelman, Website Editor
Imagine doing the same thing over and over for hours, hoping to finally complete it, only to mess it up and have to restart. Now do that over 13,000 times with no success for months on end. Some would call it insanity or a waste of time, but for Brandon Moyles, it's all for the love of the game.
Since Moyles was 10 years old, he has been playing a game called “Geometry Dash.” Geometry Dash is a game about a cube jumping over spikes, which over time has grown to more of a rhythm based game, involving new game modes and challenges. In concept, it sounds like an easy game, but in reality there is an extreme skill gap between new players and experts, as timing is everything. In more challenging levels, any movement needs to be done in fractions of a second, and keeping track of the layout and the mode you're in are necessary for success, sometimes for minutes on end.
Even though he found the game at 10 years old, it wasn't until 13 he really started to learn how to master it. Once he mastered the easier parts of the game he started to challenge himself with more difficult levels. In terms of progression he says, “Once I got to Nine Circles (a very difficult level) I really wanted to challenge myself more.”
Since then he has beaten many challenges, including levels like Bloodbath that less than 0.01% of players have beaten, and which took him months of practice. During his time spent attempting the level, he failed 95% of the way through the level, causing really rough losses as this level is almost two minutes long, meaning even though you got close, it means little in terms of completion. After a while longer, he finally beat it after over 11,000 attempts, all on that extremely hard level.
For some more context, Geometry Dash is a rhythm game about a cube or other objects that you control jumping over spikes and other obstacles to reach the end of the level. Throughout playing the game the timings get tighter and the difficulty ramps up as more gamemodes and modifiers are added in.
Most Geometry Dash levels are under two minutes, so that means most of what you are doing for these thousands of attempts is the same task over and over. To do something like this takes serious dedication and practice, all for the payoff of personal achievement rather than anything physical. Especially with how difficult certain levels can get, with some timings between clicks so close that you have 0.017 seconds to time it out, or even less.
Motivation like this is harder to get nowadays, as burnout, stress, and a feeling of being overwhelmed becomes more common among younger generations. One of the best ways to find this motivation is through passion, which Moyles has done. While some may say putting this much effort into a game like this is a waste of time, he says, “it is just a silly little video game which isn’t that serious at all, I just like it a lot.” To put it plainly, if you're passionate about something, do that something as you will enjoy it a lot more than doing something just to be productive, profitable, or preformative and motivation will come easier.
For someone like Moyles, who experiences failures 95% of the way through a level, he thinks that, “90% plus deaths should motivate you cause you have already gotten so far,” instead of giving up. It's this mentality and motivation that has pushed him to complete challenges like Bloodbath, and even his current challenge, Sonic Wave, a level which far less than 0.01% of people fully complete.
During the writing of this story over the last two months, Moyles has gone from 13,000 attempts on Sonic Wave, to beating it after 20,000 attempts. Also if you are interested you can follow him on Instagram at @nodnarb_gd to see his progression.