When building a system of controls it can be incredibly helpful to build a series of settings into them to adhere to specific activities. For example a set of stage controls might have Lecture, Discussion, Projection, or many other settings. Lecture will keep the entire room bright, Discussion might keep just the stage bright, and Projection may darken the whole room.

One of the main problems with this methodology is when multiple systems have to work in tandem. The lights are one thing, but what about the projector? What is the state of the projector screen in each of these settings? You don’t want to have to go back and forth throughout your talk to change each specific setting on a panel, it takes ages. We need some form of activity centric control to hot-swap on the fly.

The problem with activity centric controls is when they are too specific. For example, if you are showing pictures in the Projection setting and you want to swap to the Discussion mode to speak to the audience, the projection screen may close and the projector may turn off in the midst of your presentation.

Activity centric controls can be extremely useful, but there will always be edge cases in which they simply do not apply. Thus, making manual modifications to them must not reset them. One should be able to turn on the lights without the projector turning off, and vice versa.

This makes me think about difficulty settings in #game-design