Ask HN: What are your best tips for quickly getting better at video games?

Step 1: spend a lot of time playing video games

Step 2: play video games that reward deliberate practice and skill

Step 3: put in effort on reducing lag, especially if you're playing games developed in the time of CRTs. Modern games are built and tested with modern everything and you get more time to react to things, but games built for CRTs expect nothing more than a couple gate delays between the video out and the electron beam, and for the inputs to be current when sampled. Modern displays have a lot of nice things (convergence is great, vertical and horizontal alignment is perfect, the picture size doesn't change when the background gets brighter or darker, etc), but they usually also have an image processing pipeline that's measured in milliseconds, some take much longer than others. Bluetooth controls use bluetooth, enough said.

Wired controllers and a CRT won't make you good, but flakey wireless and a laggy LCD might make you bad.

Step 4: make a practice plan and use it, and adapt it as necessary.

i am pretty surprised so few people identified what is by far the best way to quickly get better at (virtually) any game: watching a very skilled player play. especially if they are introspective / able to explain why they are doing what they are doing. literally, just watch Twitch streams.

all the other metalearning stuff the other commenters point out works even better when watching the gameplay of someone who "knows" the things that to you are still "unknown unknowns". when the skilled player makes a choice that you yourself wouldn't have made, stop and ask yourself why she did that-- was it a contextual decision? was your read on the game state just categorically wrong? is there some underlying principle that eludes you, or is the difference more a byproduct of her inhabiting a competitive universe of equally highly-skilled players that plays by different rules?

in terms of the "micro" aka "hands-related" aspects of video games, the only way to improve those specific skills is via practice/doing, although it doesn't necessarily need to be practice specific to that game to be generally quite helpful, much in the way that playing any sport improves hand-eye coordination. i have found that time i put into mastering any specific game tends to have positive externalities for my gameplay in other games as well.

once you reach a certain level, however, it is definitely valuable to identify key high-leverage mechanics and mastering them via more specific practice (e.g. difficult, but highly impactful ability combos)-- even a little goes a looong way compared to other players at your skill level, who usually don't put in that dedicated of practice (until you reach god tier).

and one more point on watching skilled players play: while you might think that it's impossible to glean much from observing someone who just has wayyy more raw mechanical skill than yourself, oftentimes you can actually distill a lot about how to put yourself in the best positions to succeed with minimal amounts of risk (minimax / maximin thinking). it's usually a sign of bad play to put one's self in a situation that requires raw-outskilling one's opponent (""). that said, while you're learning, it is very valuable to put yourself in these sorts of scenarios, even if it leads to worse results in the short term (they call it "limit testing").

As has been stated in other comments, the type of game you are looking at dictates what needs to be learned to get better.

Shooters require a different skillset than say an RTS, which is quite different from a turnbased Strategygame, which is completely different to a mechanical skillbased game like tetris, which is different to a card game like magic or Hearthstone.

If you are looking to get better at videogames in general, just play different videogames and try to identify what skillsets are required in them.

If you have a specific one in mind, or a genre, more detailed advice could be given.

RTFM aka read the rules and/or what certain things do. Apart from that get muscle memory. Setup your key bindings. And as with everything, practice