On Luck and Randomness In Games 156
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."
Incorporate Psychological Hacks (Score:5, Informative)
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.
WoW combat table (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:Always nice to know (Score:3, Informative)
Amen to that. Exterior ballistics is quite complicated. I deal with bullets at 4000 fps, and I can tell you that predicting the performance of any particular powder brand+load/primer/bullet shape+weight/barrel combination is next to impossible.
If you want an overview of exterior ballistics, read this [exteriorballistics.com] treatise. Specifically, this section gives the horribly complex equations of flight. Note that the ballistic coefficients [exteriorballistics.com] are determined empirically, and any particular bullet has different BCs for different velocity ranges.
Re:Valve notorious for randomness (Score:2, Informative)
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.
Re:Better physics is desirable? (Score:4, Informative)
Yes, no, sorta, and not really.
This stuff is really complex. Drop figures can't be accurately calculated straight across from flight time. You can get really close but "really close" isn't good enough if the ranges get long enough. Generally, bullets generate a small amount of aerodynamic lift so bullet drop is always just a tad less than a simple time of flight calculation would indicate. At extreme distances and widely varying velocities, that lift can induce enough uncertainty to be interesting. Atmospheric variables can induce enough additional uncertainty to make things *really* interesting. That's why very-long range shooting is such a fun sport.
"Stacked Odds" is more stacked than Tetris allows (Score:3, Informative)
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 [rrrrthats5rs.com]?
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 [pineight.com] 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 [slashdot.org]. Downside: You can't play it online.
Yes, I played waaaaay too much Tetris back in the day.