So, a few weeks ago, the director of my game design course told me she’d be willing to let me run a small course on game mechanics next semster. Sweet! I’ve complained about the lackluster education this degree gave us about how to actually make games when it comes to rules and mechanics, so this is some attempt to remedy that fact myself. Problem is - I gotta think of a syllabus now.

More than that, I need to now make lectures about mechanics and have them be both understandable, interesting, and useful. I managed to do one of those a while back, but now I need to have… I am unsure on the amount actually. I’m banking on around 6. Still - more than 1. And even that one I feel I’ll need to redo.

I sat down to make the presentations and realized I’m actually unsure of what I want to say, so today (and probably a few more times on this blog), I’ll just be writing a giant list of thoughts about game design, so I can later parse my mess of incoherent babbling and convert it into something useful.

First topic on the agenda: LUCK!

WARNING: The following post will be wildly incoherent and messy, likely reading like I am talking to myself. This is because I am talking to myself.

So, luck. Luck, luck, luck. I wrote some notes before doing this about the topics I’d want to discuss, and what I wrote about luck is:

• Luck and Skill
  • Luck and Skill are opposed on individual mechanics
  • Luck and Skill are orthogonal on the broad perspective of a game
  • People love luck but hate to admit it

So let’s go over these first. Typically when people talk about luck and skill there’s the implication that these are opposing forces, right? That if a game is more luck-based it is necessarily less skill-based. And that is true to some extent, right? If we define “skill” as being “how frequently a given person can bring upon a desired set of circumstances, typically via some sort of training”, then luck is diametrically opposed to this, as it creates uncertainty. It makes the given person less likely to bring upon their desired set of circumstances. But I don’t think that’s exactly what people mean when they say ‘skill’.

Well, sort of, I think that people think of skill as a trait a game can have more or less of. Not as a percentage, but as something that two skill-based games can have either more or less of, compared to eachother. Think of Tic-tac-toe and Chess, right? One of these is more “skillful”. But why? Neither has any random elements, they’re both fully open info. So clearly this “skill” isn’t just how often a given player can bring upon a desired set of circumstances, but rather how… difficult? not difficult. Maybe how much there is to learn in a given game to give you an edge over your opponent. In Characteristics of Games they called this the “skill ladder” - a “ladder” of players of a given game, where every “tier” up the ladder has a 60% or more chance to beat people below them. The more steps on this ladder exist, the more “skillful” a game. I think that makes some sense, right, when you play a pvp game your success only matters in respect to who you’re fighting, so if there’s always someone you can get better at, that’s… “more skill.”

So in that sense, they aren’t really opposed to eachother, right? There’s plenty of games with very tall skill ladders that have plenty of luck, like Poker, or any roguelike. If anything I’d argue luck compliments skill in this area, because it forces players to learn more than they’d otherwise want to. If a game is fully deterministic, right, you can just not bother learning certain areas of the game if they’re of very low importance or if you know how to shut them down ahead of time. It makes it so you need to be good at less things overall. If luck forces your hand to situations where using these niche mechanics would be favorable, it lengthens the skill ladder, because there’s more ways to learn and beat other players.

So yeah like, luck and skill seem opposed but aren’t really when we discuss the way people typically think of skill. On the individual mechanic scale they’re opposed, but broadly they’re complimentary. Interesting but weird.

Now the next part that people love luck but hate to admit it… Yeah it’s pretty straightforward. Well, people would be the wrong word, experts would be more accurate. In the hardcore audience of pretty much any game, people fucking HATE random elements, dude. Look at Smash Bros right, there’s a reason tournaments ban items and only play on final destination while when I play with my mates we spam smash balls like it’s no tomorrow. They see the items as adding variance and being able to take away from their displays of skill, which isn’t necessarily wrong, but… even if we move past my disagreements with that base concept, hardcore players tend to forget the reason why luck is present in games, and how it adds to the experience.

….How does it add to the experience actually? I was gonna go on a tangent of how it helps lesser players win more, therefore making more people play the game and enjoy it therefore increasing the game audience, but that feels too specific to multiplayer titles and also assumes the location of luck in very specific places. Might come back to it later.

One thing that I think may be worth discussing would be the separation of luck into three categories (also from characteristics of games):

• Random Elements: mechanics which create some unpredictable result during gameplay, like dice or cards
• Von-Neumann Games: situations where players create a simultaneous decision, being only able to guess what their opponent will do, like rock paper scissors.
• Human Ignorance: situations where the player technically has all the information but it is either unreasonable or unfun to come to the proper conclusion, resulting in a guess, like guessing between the two best moves in a game of chess.

Technically the first category fits into the last category in some sense, like, technically a supercomputer could predict what a die roll would land on and it’s just human ignorance that we can’t predict it, but… uhhhhh what am I even gonna say about these distinctions? Is there anything fundamentally different or interesting to say about them? I am unsure there really is.

I could say that Vonn Neumann games are considered to be more “palable” to the hardcore audience than pure luck games are, because technically you are making a decision (even if it’s completely arbitrary), but what then? What’s useful about this knowledge?

Let’s think. Random elements fully remove control from the player. This can be good. Von Neumann may be more palpable to hardcore players because you can essentially roll a loaded die in your favor, but the “tryhard” way to treat every decision like that would be to plan for and calculate every possible result, which is a headache, and in reality even calculating only two may be more annoying as opposed to knowing with certainty.

The Human Ignorance bit could be interesting, because I could tie it into a point about how all luck is just a form of hidden information. How there doesn’t actually need to be randomness or even anything arbitrary for it to be percieved as luck.

If I make a GIF with three doors that ask the user to pick a door, and then reveals only one of the doors had a key behind it, is it luck? It’s deterministic, repeteable, nothing in it was random, but it still is lucky. Merely because I didn’t know the answer. Because I could figure it out without knowing why I figured it out. The act of making a decision without knowing all the information involves a gamble, and that’s luck.

And that might be what people like- ehhh i’m going into philosophy. This isn’t what I’m doing, I wanna stick to rules.

I don’t know what I’m gonna say about luck. I had some other topics there that I had more bullet points on. Maybe I’ll shelve this and go to something else i have more to write about.

That seems like a good plan.