Eliminate Autopilot with Acknowledgement
Everyone agrees that autopiloting is a bad habit. Here’s how you can use Reiterate, and specifically its Acknowledgement feature, to eliminate autopilot from your game play.
I’ve written about autopilot before. When you’re playing a game without giving careful thought to your actions moment by moment, that’s autopilot. It’s an easy trap to fall into, because the game is designed to keep you on your toes, throwing events at you in rapid fire succession. If you simply react to what’s happening around you, then you don’t have time to think or plan ahead.
Have you ever been driving somewhere, maybe some route that you’ve driven hundreds of times, and when you arrive you realize you have no memory of actually driving there? You were driving on autopilot. If you’re not careful, you can play a game of League the same way. The game ends, and you may have gotten a lot of kills or even won the game, but you can’t remember any specific plays you made. You were playing on autopilot.
Everyone agrees that autopilot is bad, but there’s not much advice on what you can actually do about it. That’s where Reiterate comes in.
First, if autopiloting is when you’re playing without thinking, then the opposite of autopilot is deliberate thought. But what do you want to be thinking about? The answer to that question is different for everyone. Maybe you need to be thinking about the mini map, or perhaps checking to see if an enemy hit a power spike. Everyone has different blind spots, and that’s why Reiterate lets you custom design your training sessions to focus on your specific needs. Once you’ve determined where you need to focus, you can record clips that will help train you to keep your mind in the game, by replaying those clips as you play.
Next you will want to take advantage of the Acknowledgement feature. When you have Acknowledgement enabled, you have to repeat each clip out loud as it’s played. This engages the speech and language centers of your brain, which are normally not used when you’re playing. It changes your mentality and prevents you from “zoning out” or simply reacting to the game. This is how you defeat autopilot.
Finally, Reiterate gives you a means of quantifying and measuring how well you’re avoiding autopilot, by giving you an acknowledgement score at the end of each session.
Reiterate tracks how many clips you successfully acknowledge, and gives you a percentage score. You can treat this as an autopilot indicator. The lower your score, the more you were autopiloting. This gives you a concrete, measurable goal for you to work on as you eliminate autopiloting from your game play. As a general rule of thumb, I would say that if your score is below 30%, then you were playing on autopilot. Between 30% and 60% is pretty good, and if you get above 60% then your mental was on point. The best I’ve scored so far is 81% – what’s the best you can do?
Eliminating autopilot from your play is the first critical step on the path towards overall improvement. Reiterate is designed to be the best tool out there for achieving that goal.
