Does Mathematical Tuning Make Games Better?

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?"

Comments

Leave out "Mathematical"

[AKAImBatman]

"Tuning" makes games better. Period. End of story.

Since tuning is all about improving the feel of the game to the humans who will interface with it, it all depends upon the creator for how he wishes to accomplish this. In this case, the creator was looking for sweet spots that he was able to find through mathematical manipulation of sampled data. In other cases, using math to tune the results might give the game a clinical feel; something that's generally bad for video games. (Unless you're playing Trauma Center. :-P)

So the question is pretty much moot. Creating a good game is an art form, but even art can benefit from a few structural calculations. :)

Re:Leave out "Mathematical"

[lostboy2]

I'll hop on the agreement bandwagon. Mathematics alone does not make for a better game.

Case in point: I once had a cribbage game where you could play against the computer and set different levels of difficulty. I quickly discovered that "Expert" level just meant that the computer got better hands more often -- it had nothing to do with the quality of the computer's strategy. After getting lousy hands several games in a row while the computer consistently drew hands like 4-5-5-6, I simply stopped playing. While "Expert" level was certainly harder, it was also not fun to play.

So, while TFA has a point about statistics being important for game design, that's not much more profound than saying that vision is important for driving cars well.

You call that "mathematical modelling"?!

[6350']

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
Wow. If this is "mathematical modelling", then me swapping the coffee mugs out for wine glasses in my kitchen cubbard would be "advanced sphere packing analysis and optimization".

Game tuning as more art than science. The goal is not to create an interestingly distrubuted difficulty curve, but to create an "easy", "medium", and "hard" amount of enjoyable challenge. Huge amounts of time can be (and frequently are) wasted focusing too-strongly on a "cool" and intriguing difficulty model that some under-experienced junior designer is all fired up about, instead of keeping the focus tightly and solely on the how the game actually feels.

I bet Easy isn't actually easy.

[onion2k]

I'm a bit of a fan of computer games. I've been playing them pretty close to my entire life. I'm 29 now and since the days of the Zx Spectrum I've probably played at least a couple of hours a week, often much more.

Unfortunately I suck at games. My coordination is all over the place. I have NO patience. I play games for a laugh, I don't want to invest a great deal of time learning a game or practising it. I want to pick it up, play for a while, and be entertained. As a rule I always play games on Easy because I don't want a challenge. I don't want to get frustrated playing the same level over and over. I want that feeling of progression like I'm getting somewhere. I can honestly say that if I get stuck for more than an hour in a game it gets turned off and never switched on again. I make a mental note not to buy a game from the same people again.

Easy is for people like me. Lazy, good-for-nothing "casual" players who have no skill to speak of and a life of some sort that means there isn't the time to learn perfection. I expect Easy to be easy. I very much doubt that "mean minus standard deviation" of some enthuiastic professional testers or Beta players is really going to be down at my level.

Please, for the love of Mario, when you're writing a game, sit your mother down in front of it for a few hours and tweak the difficulty of "Easy" to something she can cope with. That way I might buy your sequel.

Alternatively, give me God mode. :)

Re:developers

[paeanblack]

It's not trial and error. It's a binary search algorithm [wikipedia.org] that executed within O(log n) time. :P

Think of it like turning a knob back and forth, getting closer to the setting you feel is best.

That method will only deliver a local maximum of a polynomial function. If your game has any complexity at all, your proposed method is even less useful than trial and error.