It's Hard To Explain When You Understand It

Experience broadens and narrows your mind

At the end of the day, after dinner, my wife and I often play video games together on the Nintendo Switch she got us a couple of Christmases ago. I grew up with a Super Nintendo, then a PlayStation, and had everything from the NES to the Xbox over the years, so I’ve played plenty of video games. I have a gut familiarity with them—I can pick up a controller and feel out how a game’s controls work, guess at what the level design is trying to tell me to do, etc. It’s almost like being fluent in a language.

My wife did not grow up with video games, so she doesn’t have that second-nature/sixth-sense familiarity. I’ve noticed a funny thing. Sometimes I’ll get some detail—how to execute a move, or which combination of buttons makes you run, etc.—and she’ll ask, sometimes even seemingly doing the same thing but not executing the move, “How are you doing that?” And I realize I can’t explain it. I don’t know which button I’m pressing. I don’t know if I’m pressing one first, or both at the same time. I have to stop and try it slowly and look at the controller and think it through.

Sometimes, you need to know something really thoroughly in order to explain it to someone else. But in other cases, I find—like this—it’s hard to explain it when you know. It’s hard to explain it because you know it. It’s a kind of knowledge that almost bypasses consciousness.

This makes me think of urbanism (everything does, sorry).