9 votes

How designers engineer luck into video games

2 comments

  1. [2]
    nothis
    Link
    I heard a critical take on this I found rather interesting: Luck in games is generally a bit of a sleazy technique (see gatcha games and loot boxes for extreme cases) but the one thing, the only...

    I heard a critical take on this I found rather interesting: Luck in games is generally a bit of a sleazy technique (see gatcha games and loot boxes for extreme cases) but the one thing, the only "truth" they convey to the players is a sense of probability, chance and statistics. If you take that away because players feel "frustrated", that's among the tackiest way to deal with the problem and actually makes people worse at dealing with probability (which is already very hard to intuitively grasp).

    XCOM 2 did this with win percentages under the hood, nudging them towards being more forgiving when they "look really high". The funny thing is that the reasoning is that people have "a feeling" about what "85%" means and get frustrated when it doesn't mean "a more or less guaranteed hit". Now a game could actually teach you that "85%" isn't always as good a chance as it sounds, but instead they validate that entirely false "feeling" about probability. I'd get that for story or maybe the severeness of enemy encounters but to do that with actual numbers is akin to misspelling a word in a book because so many people really feel it being spelled differently. It's stupid and makes people stupider. It's games causing cultural damage.

    2 votes
    1. papasquat
      Link Parent
      It's kind of weird. I'm really into board games and tabletop RPGs. When I get bad rolls in those games, it's not fun, but it always feels fair. The dice/cards are right there in front of you. You...

      It's kind of weird. I'm really into board games and tabletop RPGs. When I get bad rolls in those games, it's not fun, but it always feels fair. The dice/cards are right there in front of you. You shuffled them, you threw them, you can see the dice tumble and the cards go to random places in the stack.
      Because videogames are essentially a black box, you can't see that randomness. So when I have a 95% chance to hit in XCOM at a critical point in the game and I miss, I immediately and instinctively yell "Bullshit!", much to my wife's annoyance. I couldn't actually see the dice at work there so it always feels unfair.
      Videogames are in a unique position there. All the randomness is behind the veil, and you never quite get the feeling that you can totally trust it.

      2 votes