Beating The Drum For Dyslexics

Musical prowess has spinoffs for people with reading difficulties, not to mention video gamers.

- Marc Wilson

There was a time when I wasn’t a slouch on the video-game front, but newer games are a different cup of bitter failure. Compared with my 15-year-old son, I’m embarrassingly slow at Rainbow Six Siege, for example, a game in the “tactical shooter” genre.

Nor do I shine at Beat Saber, a game that’s remarkably simple in concept. Blue and red blocks come towards you in time with a musical backing track, and your job is to use the controllers in each hand to wield lightsabers to cut the blocks in the direction of the arrows on their faces.

The format of block speed, height and direction is, I speculate, designed by a group of psychological torturers to make adults feel incompetent as they flail about trying to cross their hands and back again. My son makes it look easy.

It’s actually fun to watch him – it’s like a dance. It’s fair to say he gets at least some of this from his mother, whose family are so musically talented that her brother actually makes a living from it.