No matter what your stance is on Quick Time Events (QTE's), you have to agree that there is a lot of room for improvement. What's a QTE? It's something that happens when you're in the middle of normal gameplay or watching a cut-scene. Suddenly, a graphic display tells you to mash on the X button, only you're caught off guard so you screw up. Whoops! Looks like you're dead and have to watch that long cut-scene all over again. Why didn't you mash the button when we told you to?

Fortunately for game designers everywhere, I'm here to tell them how to do their job. Have the urge to stick a QTE into your game? Just follow these five steps and you'll have a QTE system any gamer will love!

5. Be Forgiving
It's a shame when a commercial and critical failure such as 2008's Turok can execute a better QTE than some of the biggest successes out there. Rule number one for successful QTE integration—if you have a cut-scene that involves the sporadic pressing of buttons, make sure you include a margin for error. At the end of Turok, the player has to succeed in a knife fight to progress to the final boss. If you screw up though, you don't die; you simply lose the upper hand and are closer to losing. This allows you to try and regain your footing instead of repeating the entire sequence a second time. This is an idea the final chapters of Resident Evil 5 definitely could have benefited from.

4. Don't Mix It Up
If you follow step five you won't have to worry so much about this one, but the worst part of going through a QTE you failed once is going through it a third time because that random X masher changed to a stick waggle. Once again, Resident Evil 5 is a big offender here. If it's a button mash of X the first time, then it should be a button mash of X every time thereafter.

3. Give Plenty of Warning
The worst sort of QTE is one that occurs without warning. You're busy aiming for someone's head or reloading when all of a sudden the game tells you to press A. Before you have the sense to do it, a meteor has crushed your very soul beneath its space-uranium. Or you may be using the cut-scene as an opportunity to grab a potato chip when an alien suddenly bursts from the villain's chest. Unable to mash A in time you fail to avoid it and the  little green fetus chews into your neck. Time to do it all again!

I'm just saying; if you're going to do a QTE, make sure it's at a time when the player expects it. You don't have to go overboard like Ninja Blade and notify them before every single one, but some sort of signal to say "Pay attention, honky!" would be great.

2. Just let me open the @#$%ing chest/door already
If there were any valid reason to hate God of War, it's for introducing this stupid idea of "gameplay" into mainstream design. If I've explored your level enough to discover a chest or I approach a door to proceed, I don't want to perform some silly masher ritual to get the thing open. It's like going to McDonald's, ordering your cheeseburger, paying, and then having to dance like a chicken before you can unwrap and eat it. There's absolutely no purpose for this but to annoy the crap out of me. And by me I mean the player.

1. Consider letting the player actually play the game
I understand that the purpose of a QTE is allowing the game to be cinematic in a way it normally can't be. However, it's a lot more fun to actually perform bad ass maneuvers yourself than to press one button and watch the game go on rails for a while. If possible, do like Bionic Commando, another commercial failure that did the QTE's right. The fight with the giant robot-worm thing was awfully cinematic—throwing you into the air to blast with its laser only for you to mash your robo-fist into its optics—and it was all done with in-game abilities. That's right, not a single "press A if you want to live" moment. The developer instead trusted the player to be smart enough to figure things out on their own. How novel.