Delay reducing control – “Ahh, the Arathi highlands… why am I here?”
Delay reducing control is another familiar and frustrating error. It is where there is some time (and often space) between when you start the intent to do a task and when you actually perform the task and, because of this delay, things go wrong. An example of this would be being in your crafting location in a game, and you realise that you don’t have enough crafting material to make a certain item. So you travel to wherever it is you can get the material you need but when you get there for the life of you, you just can’t remember why you came in the first place. This is also sometimes known as the “What am I doing here?”, “What was I supposed to do here?” or even worse, the “I should be doing something but I can’t remember what?” effect. One theory for why this error occurs is that by changing environments you have removed the cue in the original environment that triggered you to want to do the action in the first place. So in the example above, you were in your crafting room looking at the recipe you were trying to use. But when you get out into the world, that cue is missing, and because you were kind of operating on autopilot, it can be hard to recall what it is that you wanted/intended to do. Another example would be finding an object in an adventure game that suggests you have to backtrack to a previously visited area, but you can’t exactly remember where that was, or when you get back there you forget why you came.
Error reduction: Make cues portable e.g. through the use of quest logs, journals, prompts, map markers, and so on. Basically, use reminders and affordances in the world to support what the player wants to do. Also at an extreme level you could just avoid quests/tasks that require travel to different locations or that require time delay before the intent to perform the task can be turned into action.
Error encouragement: Spread tasks over multiple locations but limit the instructions about how to perform the task to specific circumstances or places (i.e. a bit of dialog or a note written on a wall). Make sure that time passes between when the intent to perform an action starts and when it needs to be completed, and make sure other events occur in-between those two points. Require backtracking to other locations, with very little (or no) cues to assist in remembering these locations.
