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

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. :)