Free Fall

The cost of choice, measured

On Lights Out there is one place to watch and one thing to do, and a good catch takes roughly a quarter of a second. Here there are eight places, and suddenly 400 ms is a respectable catch. Your eyes did not get slower. The extra 150 milliseconds is the price of not knowing where.

That price has a rule. In 1952, W. E. Hick measured how reaction time grows as you add options and found it climbs in a strikingly regular way — every doubling of choices adds roughly the same delay. It is why this test starts feeling genuinely different from a one-target test around the third or fourth catch, when you stop guessing and start scanning.

Playing it well

The strong strategy is boring: watch the middle of the row and let your side vision do the work. Your peripheral vision is bad at reading detail but excellent at noticing that something started moving — which is the only information you need. People who chase the drop with their eyes lane by lane run out of time around catch fifteen.

The speed-up is capped on purpose. Drops never fall faster than 340 ms, because past that point no human is reading anything and the game would just be a coin flip. The runs that reach the cap and keep going are decided by nerve, not eyesight.

Reading where the run ended

Where you died says more than how many you caught. Deaths in the first five drops are almost never about speed — they are mapping errors, your fingers not yet knowing which key is lane six without asking. Deaths past twenty are the opposite: you read the drop, your hand was honest, and the window was simply shorter than your floor. No shame in either. The deaths in the middle are the interesting ones — usually attention, a blink, a lane you had quietly written off because nothing had dropped there in a while. The game notices which lanes you stop believing in.

As rough bands: under ten caught usually means the layout is still foreign — play twice more before reading anything into it. Fifteen to twenty-five is a genuine scanning run. Past that, you are negotiating with the speed cap, and every extra catch is nerve.

Your own Hick’s law number

You can pull a personal constant out of this page. Take your Lights Out average — one place, one answer — and your typical catch here before the speed-up bites. Eight lanes is three doublings of one, so the gap between those two numbers, divided by three, is roughly what one doubling of options costs you. For most people it lands somewhere around 40 to 60 ms. That figure is Hick’s law wearing your fingerprints, and watching it shrink over a week of runs is more satisfying than any single score.

A cousin you may know from school

PE classes measure reactions by dropping a ruler between someone’s fingers and reading the distance where it was caught — distance converts to time, because gravity is reliable. Free Fall is that idea’s arcade cousin: eight rulers, one drop at a time, and the ruler fights back by getting faster.

And when the drops start feeling readable, the sequence cousin is waiting: Arrow Rush, where all the choices stand still and the clock does the chasing instead.

Further reading: Hick, W. E. (1952), “On the rate of gain of information”. Overview: Hick’s law.