In Defence Of Randomness

for a game that everyone's played and sells millions of copies a year monopoly is a surprisingly terrible game in any given game of Monopoly you not only roll the dice countless times and take a bunch of cards from the random pools in the Community Chest and chance decks but you also have to contend with other players messing up your strategy or coming in to insane windfalls of cash by sheer dumb charms monopolies randomness completely dictates who wins and who loses and as a result it's very frustrating to play and it's generally relegated to the bottom tier of any in old board game rankings in fact monopolies original iteration the landlord's game which was developed by Elizabeth magie was intended to feel arbitrary and rage-inducing to make a point about the inherent unfairness of you guessed in 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 just by pure chance you've been put in a virtually unwinnable situation through [ __ ] enemy spawns or a shortage of critical resources that needs you to slowly starve to death in these sorts of situations the randomness isn't even really a surprise your inevitable loss was generated long before you even started playing of all the rage inducing systems and tools or game designers use randomness is among 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 raise competitive play almost impossible and random generation of items and maps as the lazy alternative to tailor-made content some people most notably the kind of nerd that still plays chess when chess too has been out for years think the randomness in games should be gotten rid of entirely but I actually disagree though orangey is responsible for some of gaming's least fun experiences it's also crucial for creating some of its best roguelikes strategy games rpgs and a bunch of other genres just wouldn't be possible if randomness weren't injecting a little way of chaos in to keep us on our toes well-designed randomness can give us an infinite variety of situations to hone our skills and to help us tell almost completely emergent stories with moments of crushing failure followed by against the odds triumphs believe it or more randomness can even improve the competitive viability of games if used correctly but what actually separates 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 are used about two minutes ago as well as in the stereotypical RNG mechanics randomness is frustrating either because you can't see it coming or because you can't do anything about it and I think that this is at the heart of the issue 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 in depth that let's quickly outline the different kinds of randomness terms I've shamelessly stolen from Jeff Augustine of new dollar G this guy coined a lot of the vernacular I'm gonna be using today and basically everyone who talks about randomness and game design on the Internet is paraphrasing either is talks or is podcast first we have input randomness which is randomness to the curse 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 get to do anything it's probably in poor and earnest and second is output randomness which occurs after you make a decision this will be stuff like chances the hints almost loose systems as you might expect it's the opposite if it happens it responds to you doing something its output randomness then added to those sensible and well-thought-out categories we've got my haphazardly cobbled together definitions for control bore and earnest which is randomness that you can manipulate the result of and reactive or randomness which is randomness that you can meaningfully respond to I think these two are important to quantify because they define a relationship with randomness in a subjective sense relevant to a moment-to-moment gameplay which offers a different perspective than the distant game design a lens of inputs and output which don't always make sense on a granular level but I'll get back to that let's start with react to ball input randomness because it's got the simplest psychology behind it but randomizing 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 breech is a game that feels incredibly fair because although it's got a lot of randomness from enemy spawns to map layouts to which items you'll find in the shops it's all upfront and your decision-making has no such gray areas all the randomness is there to do is give your decisions and interesting context and leave you to respond to the situation in whichever way you see fit games of strategy and planning are Adam fun when the player is able to plot a path to victory and then play out their intended solution without needing to worry about part of their strategy suddenly falling apart or not having any options at all to this end into the breach is actually a little bit cheeky in order to ensure that as many of its game states as possible they're 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 to randomly it's possible the players will end up being forced into boring or frustrating game States purely by dint of how the world is set up many strategy games can leave players at a massive disadvantage from term 1 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 exploration entirely and this works very well in games like subnautica but only for the first playthrough if every map was fixed and perfectly balanced in forex is like civilization players would eventually be able to optimize all the fun out of expanding and constructing the right buildings at the right time very easily and there'd be no incentive for players to trade or go to war because they'd already have everything they need instead the best solution for fun maps is to randomize within limits terraria is a great example here it generates mostly random maps but positions more difficult biomes like the jungle or the 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 got 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 never 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 taking off boxes on your optimised milne order input randomness is also really helpful for games that test the players skill and intellect and this is where controllable Impa randomness comes in really handy see most competitive games don't have the absurd number of possible game states that say chest and so they need some degree of input randomness to vary things up and keep players on their toes however players also need some way to control this randomness and keep it within acceptable limits in order for competitive play to flourish for example in card games like rummy Crazy Eights or whist the quality of your opening hand correlates massively we all likelihood of winning and while some games can create some interesting decision-making out this limitation like poker even they are filled with dud hands or lucky into the window flushes more modern card games most notably those from the Magic the Gathering lineage like Hoth Stone my personal favorite tunnel fix this to some degree but giving players the ability to build their own deck of cards now rather than your initial decision space being totally random players are able to assemble their pool of cards as well as the overall strategy before hand turning simple RNG into something with a strong skill testing element these games are of course still incredibly random but giving players some say in what form that randomness ends up taking 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 and legions being determined separately which could later groups of all bad guys or all good guys good hit and roll games let players choose a fixed number of bad guy rolls which then 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 Impa randomness to wolfram a 3rd person shooter / grinding simulator has a massive reliance on farming randomly sport materials materials in warframe spawn in procedurally generated maps for you to find and collect but if it were possible for every maps be generated with any material it'll be really hard to find the one 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 map gem by choosing which one they want to go to that means in order to get plastids for example you'll need to go to saturn fo boss pluto eris or planet bum giving players a great reason to shake up the scenery every now and again as well as making finding specific items that much easier of the two kinds of randomness input less dynamic of the two and it mostly serves to set up the parameters of the game before leaving players to get on with the rest whenever Adonis 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 flip side output randomness is all about constant change by having the randomness take place after you've made the 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 rather last moment had gone a game over yeah that was the bad side of Alper Adonis 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 in fact it's this kind of randomness that all the best role-playing games rely on and by that I mean Dungeons and Dragons not final fantasy with a good dungeon master or in the case of video games a talented development team even not getting the dice roll was all you wanted can still lead to interesting storytelling opportunities one of the best more recent video game examples of this is in Disco Elysium where both successful and failed skill checks could have a massive impact on the story in my first playthrough I originally wanted to play as a smooth and ladies man detective but after a poor dice rolls cause me to royally scrub my very first attempt at doing just that I then swore off women for good them games and nothing but trouble see later on I completely lucked out on a conceptualization 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 role-playing as someone who thought that women were the cause of the coming apocalypse that is definitely for reals happening a unique RP opportunity that never would have happened without some randomly driven inspiration deck-building roguelikes like slay the spire roll one step from eden achieved the same sort of appeal on a more mechanical level while these games are built around synergies and optimizing or 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 cars and passives you do get to create interesting emergent synergies on-the-fly in one step from Eden a bullet-hell grid based roguelike RP C its megamouth our net worth for grown-ups I ended up getting a bunch of abilities that hit a bunch of times but didn't really synergize together that will change when I spotted some abilities that increased my spell power which adds one damage to each hit of a spell I'm sure you can see where this is going it wasn't long before a quintupled might damage output and was rinsing bosses in no time at all thanks to my super killing machine gun spells 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 its brutal output randomness a mr. 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 R and G thanks to the work of some clever developers XCOM retains a lot of strategic depth by pitting players against orangey and allowing them to manipulate it a large part of successful XCOM play is the ability for players to twist the odds in their favor and push their luck just far enough to win risk management is just important to tactical skill as being able to calculate moves that advance plain to say flexkom by sticking to high cover 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 multi kill is more often than not girl leads your troops becoming crystal it 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 our position overwatch is more likely to hit than a shot to high cover but it fails if an enemy doesn't move X come see you making loads of these tiny micro decisions every turn to maximize your chances based on constantly shifting parameters also something that exon 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 hit chances and knowing when and where to alter randomness is often much more powerful than simply relying on getting lucky because you're in control really that's just as true for developers as it is for players randomness is an incredibly powerful tool 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 for random outcomes such that it already 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 pseudo randomly meaning that every time you don't get a critical the chance you will get one is increased this is absolutely not how the real math should work but it instinctively feels right to old rubbish brains and ends up being much more fun than going ages without getting a critical here at all this is a change that also lowers the variance of the mechanic helping competitive players to even terms like inputs and output randomness and don't really work when viewed from a subjective lens I said can't 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 deck-building same for accuracy and ex-con you missing your shop could actually just be input ravenous informing your decisions for the next turn randomness is a very complicated subject and it's tempting for developers to let it run amok after all as we can see in loot boxes or games with banned randomness like monopoly even horrendously imbalanced games with no player agency can still manage to trip on dopamine receptors and be fun occasionally but in order to craft something more than a simple Skinner box or a boring algorithm that spits out on fun levels developers need to consider the players role in the experience and players also 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 or bad randomness isn't to go on your gut emotional response because the fact that randomness often doesn't work in the players favor is exactly why it's so powerful instead we need to keep a sense of objectivity and see if that little bit of uncertainty made the game more fun tactical or emotionally resonance 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 60% chance that randomness isn't [ __ ] and you're just bad at video games and there's two-to-one odds of me telling the truth or not there and you can only know if I've been telling the truth after you've liked commented subscribed but only if you're like is an even number hello hi how are you thank you for watching apologies for this video coming out a little bit later than usual I've been working on a bigger project that just happened to eat a whole 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 one's pretty close I recently wants to bury creamers a good enough summary of Kingdom Hearts and despite having played a few of the games I was amazed by how little of the story I actually understood in him so far as Kingdom Hearts story can be comprehended by the minds of mere Moors of course it's very fun it's got some cute animations you should go and watch it if that sounds interesting but of course the real stars of the show are my wonderful patrons if you want to support the channel in this era where YouTube ad revenue is plummeting like a rock then you can do it by a patreon there's a link in the description and in the comments in return you'll get lit will look behind the scenes with update videos cut bits from the scripts and maybe perhaps a sneak peek at what I've got planned for the 200th surface video whoo also if you donate $10 a month you'll get your name read out at the end of the video like these wonderful people who are Alex to launch Alexander Kramer a sir on our own IG for Baxter he'll big chess Bodie Brian Atari Ani Daniel mergers David Tua Trask ooh Dirk Jan Karen bailed doodle hog Evie Mathon Jordan Joshua Binswanger Kai Gillespie Lieberman Lucas slack lunar Eagle 1996 mace winter 54 max filippov Michael conk mr. tea with some tea Patrick Romberg Phil be the bill be Prospero Ray's dad Samuel Vander Plaats Sheldon Hearn Steve Riley strategy in Ultima and ciao okay thanks for watching stay sane out there and I we'll see you around bye

Channel: Adam Millard - The Architect of Games

Views: 303,572

Keywords: Games, Video Games, Gaming, PC Gaming, Adam, Adam Millard, Architect, AoG, Architect of Games, Review, Analysis, Game Design, RNG, Randomness, Dice Rolls, Hearthstone, Monopoly, Monopoly bad, Dota, Into The Breach, Xcom, Xcom : Chimera Squad, Chimera Squad, Magic the Gathering, Mtg, Minecraft, Sid Meirs Civilization, Civ

Id: F5XM2DmUdmw

Length: 17min 48sec (1068 seconds)

Published: Sun May 03 2020