Jonathan Blow gave a talk recently at Champlain College. The subject of the talk was a game design philosophy in which you ask questions of the universe and then are open and attentive to the answers. In Jon’s view, game systems are like scientific instruments that can reveal complex and fascinating truths about the world. It’s a terrific talk, and you can download the whole thing here.
Jon’s talk made me think of what a couple of brilliant game designers said at GDC.
In two separate talks Sid Meier and Rob Pardo talked about how players consistently misunderstood, and were frustrated by, randomness. For example players, like most people, tend to subscribe to the “gambler’s fallacy”, the mistaken intuition that random events are spread evenly over time instead of clumping, well, randomly as they actually do. This is the fallacy that leads people to expect a flipped coin to be less likely to land heads after a run of heads.
Pardo and Meier both described the same solution to this problem, which was to alter the behavior of the game to correspond more closely to the player’s intuition about how randomness should behave. For example, if you have an event that is 50% likely to occur, and it doesn’t occur, then you make it 60% likely on the next attempt, 70% likely after that, and so on until it is certain. Voilà! A coin that is less likely to come up heads twice in a row, and never has a run of more than 6 heads.
Now, Rob Pardo and Sid Meier are amazing game designers and it’s a privilege to hear them speak. Both talks were full of invaluable insights from practitioners at the top of their profession. But this particular detail really stuck in my head, and rolled around there with Margaret Robertson’s microtalk about behavioral economics and Chris Hecker’s talk about external reward systems, and the numerous discussions of Zynga’s quantitative, behaviorist, social-game design methodology that loomed over the whole conference like Chernabog glaring down from Bald Mountain.
Continue Reading »
18 Comments »
