This seems like a good time to talk about reaction times and how they affect the design of action games and competitive multiplayer games in general!

Because I'm not getting any work done tonight obviously.

So there's a thing people like to say that certain classes of action games or competitive action games don't have hidden information.

That is completely false! The window of time within your reaction limits are hidden to you. You can predict what will happen, but you don't know.

Pretty much every famous platformer from the earliest are based on this concept, knowingly or not. As a player, you can grasp the situation, and plan your buttons ahead of time.

But if something you don't expect happens in that timeframe, your plan is derailed.

In the design of, say, fighting games, this means you don't know what your opponent's action will be. You can start throwing a fireball now, while they're still grounded, but if they jumped at that time, they win out.

There's a reason most jumps in fgs trend towards ~40 frames.

Fast reaction times help you... to an extent. Some games will just be too fast for normal players, and some are too fast by design, so you _have_ to be predicting motion ahead of time.

It's important to consider that fog of information when designing a game's mechanics.

entertainingly, this ties into rollbacks as well: Because rollback design inherently cuts off the first few 'frames' of an action, it both reduces the cues you can react to and increases the amount of fog you have.

Certain animations don't work well online for that reason!

(grumble grumble invisible at 6f buffer youmu guard crush grumble grumble)

Either way, it's important to remember that action games are designed with human reaction times in mind to make them interesting when played as humans and with humans.

And if you're designing one, to start from there!