Pick a Power-Up and We'll Read Your Instincts
Given three glowing icons and half a second, almost nobody deliberates. You reach. Whatever you reach for tends to be consistent across genres, across decades and across games you have never played before, which makes it a more honest signal than most things a quiz can ask about.
So these seven questions are all versions of the same question: what do you want the game to give you? Speed, safety, force, leverage or a surprise. Pick fast and do not tidy up your answers on the way through.
See all the outcomes this quiz can land on, and what each one means →
Why picking one up feels so good
Steve Swink's 2008 book Game Feel argued that a large part of what we enjoy in games is not strategy at all but the moment-to-moment sensation of controlling something: real-time control, simulated space, and a layer of polish sitting on top of both which he treated as an aesthetic in its own right. A power-up is that layer concentrated into a single instant. The pitch of the sound rises. The screen shakes very slightly. The world stops for a few frames while a hit registers, and everything you press for the following ten seconds lands harder than it has any right to.
Developers call the collection of tricks juice, a term pushed into wide use by a much-watched conference talk given in 2012 by two independent developers, Martin Jonasson and Petri Purho, who took a plain and rather dull prototype and added feedback to it until it was fun without changing a single rule. Screen shake, particles, easing, layered sound, a little bounce on the numbers. Nothing about the underlying game improved. Everything about playing it did.
What a temporary boost does to your decisions
Mechanically, a boost with a timer on it is a pacing valve. It hands a designer a way to give you a stretch of guaranteed success without permanently lowering the difficulty, which resets your mood and buys back some of the goodwill the last three deaths cost. It also changes your risk calculation in ways you can watch happening in yourself. Give somebody a shield and they will walk into things they had been carefully avoiding, quite often for slightly longer than the shield actually lasts. The safety net changes the behaviour, which is precisely what the designer was counting on when they placed the pickup just before the hardest stretch of the level.
Your pick says something about which of those effects you are chasing, whether sensation, insurance, pressure or leverage. Do read it lightly, though. Nothing in this quiz is timed, nothing measures a reflex or a reaction, and no figure printed near it was calculated from anything at all. The percentages are decoration laid over a set of preferences you described yourself. The interesting part is not the label at the end. It is noticing, the next time an unlabelled glowing thing appears, how quickly you already knew which one you wanted.
