For a game that everyone’s played, and sells
millions of copies a year, monopoly is a surprisingly
terrible game. In any game of monopoly, you
not only roll the dice countless times and
take a bunch of cards from random pools in
the community chest or chance decks but also
have to contend with other players messing
up your strategy or coming into insane windfalls
of cash by sheer dumb chance. Monopoly’s
randomness completely dicates who wins and
who loses, and as a result it’s very frustrating
to play and is generally relegated to the
bottom tier of any and all board game rankings.
In fact, monopoly’s original iteration,
The Landlords Game, developed by Elizabeth
Magie was intended to feel arbitrary and rage
inducing to make a point about the inherent
unfairness of, you guessed it, monopolies.
Randomness has blighted more modern games
as well. Have you ever played a roguelike
or survival game with randomly generated maps
and found that, by pure chance, you’d been
put into a virtually unwinnable situation,
be it bullshit enemy spawns, or a shortage
of a critical resource that leaves you to
slowly starve to death. In these sorts of
situations, the randomness isn’t even a
surprise, your inevitable loss was generated
long before you even started playing.
Of all the rage inducing systems and tools
that game designers use, randomness is amongst
the most controversial, people rightly rail
against loot boxes, which use frustration
to manipulate us into spending cash, random
mechanics like tripping in super smash bros
brawl which makes competitive almost impossible,
and random generation of items and maps as
a lazy alternative to tailor made content.
Some people, most notably the kind of nerd
that still plays chess 1 when chess 2 has
been out for years, think that randomness
in games shouldn’t be gotten rid of entirely
- but I disagree.
Though RNG is responsible for some of gaming’s
least fun experiences, it’s also crucial
for creating some of its best. Rougelikes,
strategy games, rpgs and a bunch of other
genres just wouldn’t be possible if randomness
weren’t injecting a little bit of chaos
to keep us on our toes. Well designed randomness
can give us an infinite variety of situations
to hone our skills in and help us to tell
almost entirely emergent stories complete
with moments of crushing failure followed
by against the odds triumph - believe it or
not, randomness can even improve the competitive
viability of games if used correctly. But
what actually seperates good randomness from
bad randomness, it’s just numbers at the
end of the day, right? Well it’s actually
quite simple.
Note that in both of the examples I used about
two minutes ago, as well as in the stereotypical
RNG mechanics, the randomness is frustrating
either because you can’t see it coming,
or because you can’t do anything about it,
and I think this is the problem. Good randomness
includes some degree of player agency, either
giving you the ability to manipulate the randomness
beforehand or meaningfully respond to the
outcome.
Before I go more in depth, let’s quickly
the two different kinds of randomness, tems
I’ve shamelessly stolen from Geoff Englestein
of Ludology, this guy coined a lot of the
vernacular I’m going to be using today and
pretty much everyone who talks about randomness
is basically paraphrasing either one of his
talks or his podcast.
First, we’ve got input randomness, which
is randomness that occurs before you make
a decision - like procedural generation of
maps or randomly generated daily quest objectives
in an MMO, if it’s already happened before
you do anything, it’s input randomness.
And second is Output randomness, which occurs
after you make a decision. This would be stuff
like hitchances or most loot systems. It’s
the opposite, if it happens in response to
you doing something, it’s output randomness.
And added to those sensible and well thought
out categories we’ve got my haphazardly
cobbled together definitions for controllable
randomness, which is randomness that you can
manipulate the result of, and reactable randomness,
which you can respond to. I think these two
are important to quantify, because they define
our relationship with randomness in a subjective
sense, relevant to moment to moment gameplay,
which offers a different perspective than
the distant game designy lens of input and
output which often don’t always make sense
on a granular level. But I’ll get to that
later.
Let’s start with Reactable Input Randomness,
because it’s got the simplest psychology
behind it. By randomising things only before
the player has a chance to interact with them,
games are able to set up varied states of
play and avoid creating frustrating surprises.
Into The Breach is a game that feels incredibly
fair because although it’s got a lot of
randomness, from enemy spawns, to map layout,
to which items you’ll find in the shops,
it’s all upfront, and your decision making
has no such grey areas. All the randomness
is there to do is give your decisions an interesting
context, and leave you to respond to the situation
in whatever way you see fit. Games of strategy
and planning are at their most fun when the
player is able to plot a path to victory and
then play out their solution, without needing
to worry about part of their strategy suddenly
falling apart, or not having any options.
To this end, Into the breach is a little bit
cheeky - in order to ensure that as many of
its game states as possible are actually solvable,
the game places enemies in particular places
and throttles the amount that can spawn or
attack at any given time so as to prevent
the annoying possibility of an alien destroying
something and you literally not being able
to do anything about it.
By generating maps or levels too randomly,
it’s possible that players will end up being
forced into boring or frustrating gamestates
purely by dint of how the world is set up.
Many strategy games can leave players at a
massive disadvantage from turn one by not
giving them access to crucial resources, and
as I mentioned earlier, many survival games
necessitate blind wandering just to find the
resources you need to get started.
In order to fix this, developers could design
the maps by hand and remove the random element
to exploration entirely, and this works very
well in games like subnautica, but only for
a single playthrough. If every map was fixed
and perfectly balanced in 4Xes like civilisation,
players would eventually be able to optimise
all the fun out of expanding and constructing
the right buildings at the right time very
easily, and there’d no incentive for players
to trade or go to war because they already
have everything they need.
Instead, the best solution for fun maps is
to randomise within limits. Terraria is a
great example here, it generates mostly random
maps, but positions more difficult biomes
like the jungle and dungeon far away, and
never generates the infectious corruption
or crimson too close to the spawn. This gives
players the fun of exploring into mysterious
terrain every time, but without overwhelming
them before they’ve gotten a proper sword,
or allowing skilled players to skip a bunch
of progression without putting the work in.
In the same vein strategy games usually give
players an equal amount of resources in their
starting location, but not the same ones - meaning
players will have to plan around shortages,
or deal with other players in order to get
what they want, which is much more fun and
interactive than sitting in a corner ticking
off boxes on an optimised build order.
Input randomness is also really helpful for
games that test player’s skill and intellect,
and this is where controlling input randomness
comes in really handy. See, most competitive
games don’t have the absurd number of possible
gamestates that, say, chess does, so they
need some degree of randomness to vary things
up and keep players on their toes, however,
players need some way to control this input
randomness to keep it within acceptable limits
for competitive play.
For example, in classic card games like rummy,
crazy eights, or whist - the quality of your
opening hand correlates massively with your
likelihood of winning, and whilst some games
can create some interesting decision making
out of this limitation, even the likes of
poker are filled with dud hands or lucky instawin
flushes. More modern card games, most notably
those from the magic the gathering lineage
like hearthstone or my personal favourite
eternal fix this to some degree by giving
players the ability to build their own decks
cards. Now, rather than your opening strategy
being entirely random, players are able to
assemble the pool of cards and their overall
strategy beforehand, turning simple RNG into
something with a strong skilltesting element.
These games are of course still incredibly
random, but giving players some say in what
form that randomness takes goes a long way
towards cutting out a lot of the frustration
of an obvious loss, because you know that
you can probably improve your chances by building
a better deck.
Hidden role games like secret hitler also
benefit from giving players the ability to
control input randomness. Rather than each
player’s allegiance being determined separately,
which could lead to groups of all bad guys
or all good guys, games let players choose
a fixed number of bad guy roles which get
distributed randomly, usually with hidden
cards, leading to a much fairer game with
much more interesting stakes.
More modern styles of games benefit from controllable
input randomness too. Warframe, a third person
shooter slash grinding simulator, has a massive
reliance on farming randomly spawned materials.
Material in warframe spawn in procedurally-generated
maps for you to find and collect, but if it
were possible for every map to be generated
with any material, it’d be really hard to
find what you actually want. So, quite cleverly,
the devs gave each planet in the game its
own, much more streamlined loot table and
let players manipulate the mapgen by choosing
which one they want to go to. This means that
to get some plastids, for example, you’ll
need to head to Saturn, Phobos, Pluto, Eris
or Planet Bum, giving players a reason to
shake up the scenery every now and again,
as well as making finding the thing they want
much easier.
Of the two kinds of randomness, input is the
less dynamic of the two, and mostly serves
to set up the parameters of the game, before
leaving players to get on with the rest. When
input randomness works, it creates near-infinite
variety, but doesn’t interfere with skill
testing elements or strategic decision making,
making it perfect for mastery driven or competitive
titles. On the flipside, output randomness
is all about constant change. By having the
randomness take place after you’ve made
a decision, players are forced to surrender
a large portion of their own agency to a faceless
uncaring random number generator. As you might
expect, this can cause a lot of problems.
Have you ever been in a situation in an RPG
where you’ve missed a crucial attack right
at the last moment and gotten a game over,
yeah, that was the bad side of output randomness
at work. But, with a few small changes, punitive
output randomness can be transformed into
a great way to test players skills of improvisation
and risk management, as well as serve as a
story generator for tales of tense recoveries
and unlikely victories.
It’s exactly this sort of randomness that
makes all the best role playing games work,
with a good dungeon master, or in the case
of video games, a talented development team,
even not getting the diceroll result you wanted
can still lead to interesting storytelling
opportunities. One of the best more recent
videogame examples of this is in Disco Elysium,
where both successful and failed skillchecks
can have a massive impact on the story. In
my first playthrough, I originally wanted
to play as a smooth ladies man detective,
but after poor dice rolls caused me to royally
screw up my first attempt at doing just that,
I then swore off women for good, them dames
are nothing but trouble. Later on, I completely
lucked out on a conceptualisation roll and
ended up discovering spooky facts about the
true nature of reality. Naturally, I put two
and two together and spent the rest of the
game roleplaying as someone who thinks that
women were the cause of the coming apocalypse
that is for reals definitely happening, a
unique RP opportunity that never would’ve
happened without some randomly driven inspiration.
Deckbuilding rougelikes like slay the spire
or one step from eden achieve the same sort
of appeal on a more mechanical level. Whilst
these games are built around synergies and
optimising your deck of cards, you’re never
going to be able to get exactly what you want
- the challenge of the game comes from improvising
around what cards and passives you do get
to create interesting emergent synergies on
the fly. In one step from Eden, a bullet hell
gridbased rougelike rpg…. It’s megaman
battle network for grownups I ended getting
a bunch of abilities that hit a bunch of times,
but didn’t really synergise together. That
all changed when I spotted some abilities
that increased my spellpower, which adds one
damage to each hit of a spell. It wasn’t
long before I'd quintupled my damage output
and was rinsing bosses in no time at all.
Reacting to randomness can create brilliant
twists and turns that you can’t see coming,
but it’s hard to turn this approach into
something that feels like it requires actual
planning, that’s where controllable output
randomness comes in. My beloved Xcom is a
game that’s famous for it’s brutal output
randomness, a missed 80% shot can lead to
a soldier you’ve spent ages developing getting
filled full of lasers, but there’s more
to the game than hoping you don’t get screwed
by RNG. Thanks to the work of some clever
developers, XCOM retains a lot of strategic
depth, by pitting players against RNG and
allowing them to manipulate it.
A large part of successful xcom play is the
ability for players to twist the odds in their
favour, and to push their luck juuuust far
enough to win. Risk management is just as
important a tactical skill as being able to
calculate moves in advance. Play too safe
in xcom by moving slowly and only taking high-percentage
shots will mean you’ll get overwhelmed very
quickly, similarly, going miles out of your
way to chase an incredibly unlikely single
action multikill is also going to lead to
your troops becoming chryssalid food. The
trick is knowing when to push your luck and
when to hold back. Flanking enemies gives
a substantial aim boost, but can leave you
out of position, overwatch is usually more
likely to hit than a shot into high cover,
but it fails if the enemy doesn’t move.
Xcom sees you making loads of these tiny micro
decisions every turn to maximise your chances
based on constantly-shifting parameters.
Also something that Xcom players have to consider
is knowing when to eliminate randomness entirely.
Grenades and melee attacks, both of which
come with some pretty hefty restrictions,
can offer either guaranteed damage, or can
change both allied and enemy hitchances, and
knowing when and where to alter randomness
is often much more powerful than simply relying
on getting lucky, because the player is in
control.
And really, that’s just as true for developers
as it is for players. Randomness is an incredibly
powerful too in the game designers arsenal,
but regardless of which type of randomness
you use, or how you choose to let players
interact with it, randomness needs to be constrained,
and to ultimately serve the player experience.
Sometimes that means altering the variance
of a random outcome such that it only helps
the player, other times that means using it
to impede them in order to make a point. And
in a few specific scenarios, players might
even need to be lied to about the random chances
in their game to make the experience more
fun. Critical strikes in Dota, for example,
are weighted pseudorandomly, meaning that
every time you don’t get a critical, the
chance you will get one is increased. This
is absolutely not how the maths should work,
but it instinctively feels right to our rubbish
brains, and ends up being much more fun than
going ages without a critical hit. This is
a change that also lowers the variance of
the mechanic, helping competitive players
too!
Even terms like input and output randomness
don’t really work when viewed from an objective
lens. I said card drawing at the start of
your turn was input randomness, but you could
argue it’s actually the output randomness
resulting from decisions you made during deckbuilding.
Same for accuracy in XCOM, you missing your
shot could actually just be input randomness
informing your decisions for the next turn.
Randomness is… very complicated, and it’s
very tempting for developers to let it run
amuck, After all, as we can see in loot boxes
or games with bad randomness like monopoly,
even horrendously imbalanced games with no
player agency can still manage to trip our
dopamine receptors and be fun occasionally.
But in order to craft something more than
a simple skinner box or an boring algorithm
that spits out unfun levels, developers need
to consider the player’s role in the experience,
and players need to gain a bit of perspective.
Randomness is sort of inherently unfair, but
just because something is uncertain, that
doesn’t mean that it can’t be skill testing
or isn’t worth playing. The trick to figuring
out whether a game has good randomness or
bad randomness isn’t to go on your gut emotional
response, because the fact that randomness
often doesn’t work in the player’s favour
is exactly why it gets used, instead we need
to keep a sense of perspective and see if
a little bit of uncertainty made the game
more fun, tactical or emotionally resonant
in the long run. Only by understanding the
nuances of our relationship with chance will
we be able to clear its bad name, as well
as know which kinds of randomness to avoid.
Basically what I’m saying is that there’s
about a sixty percent chance that randomness
isn’t bullshit and you’re just bad at
video games, and there’s two to one odds
of me telling the truth or not, and you can
only know I’ve been telling the truth after
you’ve liked commented and subscribed but
only if your like is an even number….
Hello Hi How are you, thanks for watching!
Apologies for this video coming out a little
later than usual, I’ve been working on a
bigger project that ate up a bunch more of
my time than I thought it would, my bad!
As for my recommendation for a cool youtube
thing you should maybe check out - I usually
recommend stuff from channels that are smaller
than mine but this is too good to pass up
- I recently watched Barry Kramer’s A Good
Enough Summary of Kingdom Hearts and despite
having played a few of the better games, I
was amazed by how little I actually understood
the story, in of so far as Kingdom Heart’s
story can be comprehended by the minds of
mere mortals. It’s very fun and has very
cute animations - go and watch it.
But of course the real stars of the show are
my wonderful patrons. If you want to support
the channel in an era where youtube ad revenue
is plummeting like a rock, then you can do
it via patreon, there’s a link in the description
and comments. In return you’ll get a little
look behind the scenes with update videos,
cut bits from the script, and maybe, perhaps,
a sneak peak at what I’ve got planned for
the 200 subs video, oooooooh? Also, if you
donate $10 a month, you get your name read
out at the end of the video like these wonderful
people, who are:
Alex Deloach
Alexander Kramer
Aseran
Auno94
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Big Chess
Bohdi
Brian Notarianni
Daniel Mettjes
David Dumitrascu
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doodlehog
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Strategia in Ultima
Chao
Okay thanks for watching, stay safe out there,
and I’ll see you round, bye!
