How the Flick drill works
A single target appears somewhere in the arena, always at least 28% of the arena’s shorter side from where your crosshair is. Hit it and the next one appears straight away, again at a distance. There is no grid and no pattern to learn, so every shot starts with finding the target and ends with stopping on it. A miss loses 30 points and the streak; a hit scores more the sooner it comes. In pointer lock the crosshair follows your mouse’s raw movement, scaled by your sensitivity setting, which makes the drill closer to flicking in a first-person game.
Why distance and size both matter: Fitts’s law
In 1954 Paul Fitts showed that the time to move to a target and stop on it grows with the logarithm of distance over target size. This page uses the Shannon form of his formula, which MacKenzie first published in 1989 and defended at length in Fitts’ Law as a Research and Design Tool in Human-Computer Interaction (1992): a flick’s difficulty in bits is log₂(D ÷ W + 1), for a distance D and a target width W. Twice the distance, or half the width, costs about one more bit. When MacKenzie refitted Fitts’s own tapping data with this form (and with widths adjusted to where taps really landed), each extra bit added about 122 ms.
After a Flick run, the page takes the difficulty of every hit, averages it, and divides by your average time to hit: the result is throughput in bits per second, shown next to your other stats.
| Measure | What it tells you |
|---|---|
| Median time to hit | how long a typical flick takes, from the target appearing to the hit |
| Throughput | speed with distance and size taken into account, for comparing your Flick runs |
| Shot map | whether you overshoot (dots right of centre) or stop short (left) |
| Accuracy | hits ÷ shots |
Practising flicks
- Keep one target size and duration while you follow your progress: the history is kept per setting.
- If the shot map leans right, your flicks carry past the target; aim to land on it and make the correction smaller.
- For small corrections after a flick, pick Microshot on the main aim trainer page; for switching between nearby targets, try Gridshot.