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Does Mathematical Tuning Make Games Better?

Posted by Zonk on from the pi-over-rockets-equals-killing-spree dept.

simoniker writes "What do game designers need to know about statistics? Age Of Empires DS designer Tyler Sigman focuses on statistical topics that he believes should be understood by game designers, in a new article. His reasoning: 'In the game I just finished, we recorded data from play sessions and then set challenge levels in the game based upon the mean and standard deviation values from those recorded data. We set Medium difficulty to be equal to the mean values, Easy difficulty to be equal to the mean minus a certain amount of standard deviations, and then Hard difficulty equal to the mean plus a certain amount of standard deviations.' Would all games be better if they were tuned mathematically?"

2 of 109 comments (clear)

  1. Absolutely... by __aaclcg7560 · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    It's always better if the answer to 2 + 2 = 4 instead of some null value that the programmer doesn't catch until after the game is released.

  2. AOE DS was tuned? by MacBrave · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    It doesn't appear that the developers of AOE DS tuned the game, mathematically or otherwise. The game frequently locks up on my DS, and there is a known bug regarding the length of your profile name which can cause a lockup.