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On Luck and Randomness In Games
Gamasutra has an article analyzing random events in games, and how they can add or subtract to a player's experience. It looks at the different ways luck plays a part in games; from landing a critical strike instead of a miss to the scatter of a shotgun blast to waiting for that blasted straight piece in Tetris. "Game developers are sometimes faced with similarly challenging decisions when contemplating whether to include some kind of deliberate randomness. For example, in the video game Unreal Tournament, when a player shoots at a target with the 'enforcer' weapon, the projectile does not necessarily hit the point that is aimed at; a random deviation is added that scatters shots. This introduces a degree of realism from an observer's perspective and no doubt gives beginners a fair chance against more experienced players, but it can also potentially frustrate skilled players."
Its always good to see that people who matter are actually thinking about ways to overcome obstacles.
It also annoys me greatly when a steady handed and well aimed sniper round misses by a algorithm calculated bees proverbial.
--Question Authority--
I used to play FFXI, but one of the things that eventually drove me away from the game was the randomness of nearly everything. It was irritating to go nearly 0/10+ (and I've heard horror stories of worse) on rare item drops while Billy teh n00b would get it on first drop. Oh, and there's nothing more fun than fighting a hard fight and getting nothing as a reward. I can understand the developer's desire to keep certain items rare, but such low drop rates aren't the way to do it. I would have preferred they made the fights harder, not more random.
I recently had the opportunity to hear Sid Meier talk about random events in the Civilization series. It is unfortunate that this article doesn't mention any of his insights regarding player's psychology when it comes to "luck".
Apparently the average player expects to win regularly, even if probability allows for long strings of losses. If you lose two even fights in a row in a game of Civilization, you are literally guaranteed to win the third, IIRC. This is how their "karma" system is implemented.
Additionally, players expect a fight of 30 vs 20 to be much more of a sure thing than a fight of 3 to 2, even though the ratio is the same. Apparently you ought to get some sort of boost when the numbers are higher in order to satisfy most players. This actually makes a degree of sense to me, because I would expect the variance to be less in the first case, but he didn't address the issue and I didn't ask.
This article gives an interesting categorization of the types of randomness and luck that can exist in games, but it appears to do little to address these ideas. This is too bad, really. It might be interesting to see how these hacks affect these probabilistic features of Civilization according to their charts.
Insert self-referential sig here.
For example, in the video game Unreal Tournament, when a player shoots at a target with the 'enforcer' weapon, the projectile does not necessarily hit the point that is aimed at
Personally I think it does the exact opposite. I think Far Cry 2 *may* have done this. But if I line up a head shot (sniper) and put a bullet in the AIs head and he doesn't die, then this makes it seem far less realistic to me--especially when I let loose two shots to be sure and then aim down for a direct body shot and the guy still somehow manages to stand.
Randomness is good, but I don't think making bullet paths random is great. Sure, in real life there is random wind and other influences (projectile shape/smoothness, the barrel, and all that), but at the distances (and speed of projectile) I am talking about it's negligible. Two direct head shots and a just-for-fun/'cause-I-can body shot in quick succession should not fail just to add 'randomness'.
A skilled hunter can still miss a shot, and will be frustrated when the game gets away. If realism is the goal, getting the perfect shot the first time is not the way to go.
Game devs would be well advised to remember they are creating a G A M E - not an alternate reality.
They are subject to the same limitations as story tellers, song writers and actors...their imaginations.
Example 4 - A player of World of Warcraft shoots accurately and delivers a Critical Strike. (Once a strike is successfully inflicted on an opponent within World of Warcraft, it has a probability-based chance of inflicting double damage; any such Critical Strike that occurs is reported to the player by an on-screen text message.)
Except that isn't true. The result of an attack is derived from a single roll. It gives rise to the property of defense being able to 'push' critical strikes off of the combat table by raising the chance to be missed, as the roll needed to score a critical cannot occur.
Yes I have no life.
waiting for that blasted straight piece in Tetris
Random? That isn't random. It comes right after you block off the slot you were saving for it.
...the primary killers of motivation to explore.
Why should I climb the tallest tower in the furthest castle, if I get the same stuff as from the chest behind the entrance door?
Why should I conquer the strongest enemies and explore their castle if I'm better off killing millions of rats, then open a chest in the tavern cellar?
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Really?
I don't think so. The National Rifle Association in the United States has slapped their logo on various games that did a very good job of replicating the real-world problems involved in shooting accurately. IIRC, there have been games covering benchrest, hi-power, and varmint (if you're a shooter, you'll know specifically what those are).
Those games got panned by the gaming press as boring, boring, boring. They actually required people to think, account for all the variables, and then be satisfied when they merely score a correct hit. Just like real life. The gamers, however, wanted things to move faster. They wanted more Bang! Splat! Oof! to go with their game play. The notion of actually taking something close to real-life time to set up a shot was, to them, just needless tedium.
So, no, I don't think if you make the difficulty of in-game shooting more accurately mirror real life, gamers will be happy.
Then again, if you give them an infallible auto-aim, they'll complain about that, too.
Hmmm.
I'm really glad my livelihood doesn't depend on making decisions about these kinds of things.
Team Fortress' randomness is more structured than you'd think. Critical chance goes up as you play well and down as you play poorly. While it might piss you off from time to time, it tends to have an overall positive affect on gameplay.
It's part of Valves 'Forward Momentum' system. The problem of many other games is evenly matched teams will often result in stalemates while unevenly matched teams will result in the weaker team being crushed over and over. Valve has addressed that issue by rewarding the winning team with slight advantages. Critical chance is one of those advantages.
However this system would be pretty unfair if it didn't operate under some level of randomness. Otherwise the losing team would just continue to lose pretty much all the time. Things can still be turned around by a random critcal rocket or sticky grenade and then as a result momentum gets switched in the other teams' favour.
The system is designed to make the game much more enjoyable to the casual player without completely removing the advantages of simply being a better player.
I recall that the original Doom did random amounts of damage (since the designers were also roleplayers). This was most evident for the berserk pack, where you might do the same damage as an ordinary punch, but occasionally your fist would cause demons to explode. Also the shotgun would usually kill an imp in one shot, but not always. I loved this style of randomness, as it makes the game a little different each time, and not completely deterministic.
Meanwhile, I like the idea of adding a random direction to a shot fired. It means that a pixel perfect shooter doesn't always get his mark, but on average he'll still be more accurate than a poor shooter. I don't think I've ever heard anyone complain that their machine gun has spread, so unless it becomes too random, why worry if it affects the rest of the weapons? In real life there are plenty of factors that make guns not shoot the exact same spot every time.
Finally, (being someone who enjoys tabletop roleplaying, and also a researcher who mainly deals with stochastic simulation), randomness is a great way to allow people to play games without substituting the character's abilities for the player's. If your character is supposed to be good at shooting, and you point him at an enemy, then he'll hit more often if he's good. If you give your mook a gun, don't expect him to shoot accurately just because you can move the mouse to the right spot, because your character isn't very good at it. Conversely, he'll sometimes make a shot which is very difficult, but less often than the trained sniper (the same argument applies to other activities than shooting guns).
Dedicated to randomness. Maybe.
Random? That isn't random. It comes right after you block off the slot you were saving for it.
You mean like in this game?
That link doesn't implement Tetris properly (even ignoring the dimensions issue). When I was playing wisely, it gave me 27 Z pieces in a row (since Z pieces can't fit into each other and form lines, this is a guaranteed game-over); the only way out is to place one in a worse place and form a hole. As a link below points out, modern Tetris implementations limit the number of repeat blocks and ensure a good distribution within the random selection; you're guaranteed a straight piece at least once every thirteen pieces and no more than two of the same piece in a row.
Also, my Firefox on Linux fails to show my score; I had to count lines. I keep getting better, but I'm losing interest now that I've hit 17 lines (and I'm forced to place pieces sub-optimally to get out of loops of the same piece).
I think a better choice is the more famous one, as mentioned a few years ago here on Slashdot, Bastard Tetris Hates You. Downside: You can't play it online.
Yes, I played waaaaay too much Tetris back in the day.
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