Controlling key items is the fundamental skill of any arena shooter. Keep your stack full while denying your opponent a fair fight. It requires game sense, timing and a bit of mental math.

It’s that math bit that some players can get hung up on. Who wants to do a bunch of addition while nailing sick mid-airs and rails? Math Blaster was great and all, but there has got to be a better way. And there is.

Every Quake duel revolves around two key items: the mega-health and the big armor, often referred to as “red”, a throwback to past titles. Time these items to the second and you’ve got the advantage.

Both items are on thirty-second spawn timers. Grab the mega at 0:30 and it will respawn at 1:00. That’s an easy one. What about other times? A 2:12 armor pickup comes back at 2:42. Just add thirty seconds. Trouble is, our ability to do arithmetic suffers in the heat of battle. The culprit is task saturation.

Drunk Drivers and Airline Pilots: A Lesson in Task Saturation

Studies have shown that driving while talking on a cell phone can inhibit awareness as severely as being drunk behind the wheel. Drivers are put on a test course while attempting to carry a complex conversation. Those experiments demonstrate the concept of task saturation.

Our minds can only process so much information at once, and even less under stress. Managing all the nuances of a close Quake duel certainly qualifies as stressful, especially in the tournament environment. Throw in arithmetic and you’ve got a recipe for task saturation.

We have to give up something. Either we mess up our spawn timing and lose control of the map, or we lose a little bit of our game sense, allowing a crafty player the element of surprise - not good.

Professional pilots are taught that task saturation is the case of too many tasks in too little time. They have also trained that the margin of safety is the buffer between pilot workload and pilot capabilities. When workload exceeds capabilities, safety has been compromised.

Consider an engine failure right after takeoff. Your valiant crew receives priority and is quickly vectored to final approach within minutes. Meanwhile, they need to run a complicated checklist, coordinate with flight attendants, quite possibly talk to dispatch and maintenance and set up for an unplanned approach. That is a lot of work in a little time.

If task saturation happens when we have a lot of tasks and a little time, the solution is simple: Add time or reduce tasks.

Adding Time - Slow Down

Finding themselves tasked with work, our savvy aviators might realize that they are task saturated. They contact air traffic control and confess that they aren’t ready to land yet. After all, there’s no emergency you can’t make worse by going too fast.

In Quake, we can try to slow things down. You don’t have to pick up that powerup right away. It might be better to wait and grab it at an easy time. Say .15 seconds, which correlates easily with .45.

It might even be wise to give up a powerup that hasn’t been disputed, particularly when the enemy’s position is known. That’s the element of surprise. It’s not always viable.

Cutting Tasks - Don’t Do the Math

Let's get back to our flight crew. What if they have a bigger problem on their hands? When time is critical, it might not be prudent to talk it over with the dispatcher. Just set up the approach and get that bird on the ground.

Like flying, Quake doesn’t offer many opportunities to cut tasks. In order to win, a player has got to keep the game sense up and control the map. That includes knowing the spawn timers. But it’s those spawn timers that so frequently break our game sense.

There’s an easy solution. Don’t do the math. Adding time requires something called modular arithmetic. For most, modular arithmetic is just awkward.

Suppose the mega is grabbed at 3:48. Ten seconds later is 3:58, that’s easy. Another ten and we loop back to 3:08. One more time and the mega returns at 3:18.

Don’t do the modular math on the server. Instead, commit the following numbers to memory.

0 ←→ 3

1 ←→ 4

2 ←→ 5

The numbers in the above table represent the tens second placeholder. When you grab a key powerup, check the last two numbers in the timer and convert.

To make it easier, look at how similar those numbers look. Stranger Things fans might see that two is really a five in the upside down. If you squint, it’s clear that the number four has a one running right down the middle. And that curvey three is just a zero split apart.

Let’s take some examples.

1:00 becomes 1:30

4:52 will respawn at 422

5:17 correlates to 5:47

Just glance at the tens-place number, make that mental conversion and call it out. There's no need to even think about minutes, just focus on the seconds. Simplicity is key.



RocketNinja's Guide to controlling mega and armor

Callouts

Any Counter-Strike player can tell you Banana isn’t just a fruit, and the best way to fill a Sandwich is with a Molotov. Callouts have become commonplace in esports as a means of denoting map positions. The same is true in Quake, with most callouts correlating to an item’s spawn point. That’s valuable for team games, but there’s one callout that’s valuable in every game.

Verbalizing the next spawn solidifies the number in the mind. When you pick up an item, try stating the next spawn time: “mega fifty-two”. This is a must in team games, but it benefits the dueler in two ways. One, it reinforces a good habit for TDM. Second, it increases retention. It’s one thing to note something, but we retain information much better when we say it.

Task saturation is a very real threat. As a player, it’s important to keep our mind clear and focus on the game at hand. Prioritize and simplify. By skipping the mental math, spawn timers will become second nature and map control more likely.