6/21/13 Episode 39: Randomness

All podcast content by Mark Rosewater

Okay, I’m pulling out of my driveway! You know what that means, it’s time for another Drive to Work.

Okay. So, today I thought I’d do something a little random. Well, I thought I’d talk about randomness. But I thought it would be funny to post “Drive to Work: Randomness” and then just, you know, quote random things for the entire drive. But that’s not what I’m doing today.

What I’m doing today is, I wrote an article many years ago—I don’t know, some number of years ago--called “Kind Acts of Randomness.” In which I talked about the role of randomness in game design. And I thought today I would examine that topic—I mean, I’ll be broaching a lot of things I talked about in the article, but as always I’ll be adding new things in.

Anyway, and my wife—when I said—when I told her I was going to do an article on randomness, she goes, “Oh, well maybe you should drive to work a different way.” And I said, “Okay, yeah, that sounds like a cool idea.” So I am going to drive to work not my normal way. A different way. I don’t know what that means, I don’t know how long this will be—it will be random! So, a little meta to go with my topic of the day.

Okay. So—randomness in game design. Why—why do we have randomness? So let—I—let me—I guess I’ve got to start by defining randomness. So what randomness means is, something that is not—not in control—the player’s not in control of, that some outside force determines the outcome. Now, as I said in the article, and this is important, from a game standpoint, it doesn’t mean that you can’t have influence into it.

You know, I do think it’s just—for example, Magic’s big randomizer is the library. You draw. And that doesn’t mean that I don’t think you can have cards that affect the library. You know, I think you should be able to mitigate randomness to some extent. And, as we’ll get to, I think that the ability to mitigate it makes people much happier with it. But I do believe that randomness means that you the player don’t always know what’s going to happen because of forces outside your control.

So why—why is this important? So one of the podcasts I will get to eventually is going to talk about communication theory. I went to school—communication school, and there’s some interesting stuff that I learned there that I apply, that I’ll talk about. One of the–one of the things it talks about is, the human need for surprise.

Well why? Why do humans need surprise? And—I don’t know, there’s a lot of interesting discussions about, you know, why physiologically humans need it. But humans, while they like stability and it’s important to them, it’s very important to them, they also need to have some (???) the unknown.

Why is that? I don’t know, I guess it has to do with—I’ll take my guess. Physiologically speaking, is that if humans never have a need for the unknown, it keeps them from ever venturing out. It’s why humans have curiosity. That, you know, you want to keep people safe, and you want to build that into their genes, but you also want to make sure that they—they learn new things. And without a desire for the unknown, you don’t have the opportunity for new things. So anyway, built into people—the important part is, a need for surprise. A need for things—you know.

So let’s talk a little bit—what I want to talk about, and I did this in the article is, talk about what randomness does for a game. Talk about the negatives of randomness. And then I’ll talk about how game designers can use randomness to—for the best. To use it to help their game the most.

So, first off. What does randomness do for a game? Well first and foremost, randomness—makes, creates surprise. As I was saying. Humans need surprise, it creates surprise. Why is that important? Because there is novelty in not knowing things. And that—I mean, movies do this all the time in that, you know, it is fun to go into a movie and have a general sense of what’s going to happen, but then you kind of—it’s fun to be surprised. “Oh, I didn’t see that coming!”

And games work in a similar sense. That, you know, one of the general joys of entertainment is, you the audience member, not exactly knowing what’s going to happen. And so randomness in games helps make sure that the games have some surprise. And I would argue that with surprise comes fun. That there is a decent amount of fun of being surprised. Now, like I—I’ll talk about it in a bit. There’s good surprise and bad surprise. But there is—there is—a fun moment.

Like, one of the things for example is, when we made miracles in Avacyn Restored. There was a lot of concern about, you know, :Hey, here’s something that’s completely out of people’s control.” But what we noticed as we watched people play, that it created this kind of, like, this lean-in moment where people would draw their card that’s pretty cool. You know. That’s like “What’s gonna happen,”you know, and creating that moment is definitely something that is very exciting in any game. That you—whenever you have players leaning in, that’s a physiological sign of “What’s going to happen?” You know. Or if people do something and there’s like, there’s a—just a little bit of nervousness because they’re not quite sure what’s going to happen. You know, that leads to fun gameplay.

The other thing that randomness does is something—so one of the important things in gameplay is what we call variance. And the reason is that doing the same thing can get boring. You know, if you always do the same thing and every time you do something, it’s the same thing. Now, I’m not saying there’s not some familiarity, and there’s some comfort in knowing things, and as I—when I do my podcast on—on communication theory, I mean a lot of—a lot of communication theory is built around the idea that humans crave doing the same thing again and again.

But, that said, especially in gameplay, because I think when people play games, they are trying to get a little bit out of their comfort zone. They are trying to sort of challenge themselves, and make—you know, and—I think that you want to make sure in games, that you want some variance of gameplay because I think what happens is, if the game plays out the same way too many times, your player just goes “Okay.” I mean, even if they enjoyed it, at some point they go “Okay, I’ve done it.” You know.

And that one of the things that’s let Magic last for twenty-plus years has been hugely high variance. You know. Part of it comes from shuffling the deck, part of it comes from deck construction, but Magic is—you know, Magic games don’t tend to play out exactly the same, you know, all that often, you know. And that one of the things that R&D works really hard at is when we find a mechanic that leads to just repetition, we’re careful with those. You know. We notice, we’re a lot more careful these days with tutoring and things that lead games to be exactly the same every single time.

So the other thing that it does is—one of the things that I think, that randomness gets pinged for, is this idea that it decreases skill. And I believe that that is not always the case. I in fact believe on some level, the opposite, that the ability to react to randomness is very, very skill-testing. You know.

And that—for example, you know, would Magic be a more skill-testing game if you didn’t shuffle your library? And my answer would be “I don’t really think it would be.” I mean, there would be some skill in deck construction, I guess, but then, once somebody understands sort of what—you know, what they’re doing, once somebody understands the order that they have to put their cards, or—they can do the internet and see somebody else doing it—it’s just “Okay, fine. Here’s the order of your cards.” You know.

A lot of what makes Magic very skillful is that you have to adapt. You have to react. You know. And that—here’s the best example. I’ve talked to a lot of pro players, and… I mean, top Magic players. And they pretty much—I mean, there’s always some disagreeing. But the majority agree that drafting is more skill-testing than Constructed. Well, why is that? Well, A. there is more components that go into it. Drafting itself has a lot of skill to it. But also, it just has a high variance, that you have to adapt.

And the reason for example that drafting is interesting is, I can’t just tell you that Card A is always better than Card B. Because sometimes, Card A is better than Card B except in certain circumstances. And trying to understand those circumstances is where a lot of people’s skill comes into play. Or even just in the gameplay itself. One of the things that happens is, if you play Constructed, you kind of learn what’s going to happen. You kind of have some anticipation of what you need to worry about.

But in Limited, all sorts of crazy things happen. You know, especially with like rares and mythics where odds are you’ve never even played against that card before. If you did, you know, you did maybe once, and the deck you had is a completely different deck than the deck you have now. And so one of the things that randomness does is, it allows the experienced player—and not only does it—it’s skill testing, I think that responding to the unknown is a lot of fun. It’s a lot of fun.

There’s something in game design known as flow. McConnell, Jane McConnell talked about this in her book. I don’t remember the name of the book. (Editor’s note: Reality is Broken). But it’s a very good book. And she talks about what flow is, is when you’re playing a game, that you the player feel you’re being pushed at your limit. And that you feel like, you know, like testing the (???) where you are.

The example I give, I’ll give my example of this, is way back in the day, way back in the day, I used to play a game called Asteroids. For the young’uns out there, Asteroids was the game in which you had a little ship, and you would rotate around, and asteroids would come at you, and you could shoot them and break them up. Now, you had the ability to thrust and fly, but the problem was, it was much safer to stay in the center where you could sort of gauge everything and spin around and shoot the meteors. But every once in a while you’d get in trouble and you’d have to thrust.

And there was this moment where you were thrusting where you were shooting around and thrusting where things were out of your control and you kind of knew that you were like pushing the limit. Because, like, when you’re in the center, you understood—you had the parameters. But when you’re moving, wow. You’ve just increased the complication of understanding what’s going on tenfold. You know. Because you’re moving and they’re moving and it is a lot, lot harder. But there’s this moment when you would survive, and you were doing it, where like you knew that like you were on borrowed time. That you—like, like, “Oh my God, I can’t believe I’m still alive!”

And that to me is the moment of flow. It’s just in the game where like you’re pushed—you’re testing your limits to the nth degree. And I think that randomness helps create flow. You know. When I know what to expect and I know what’s there, well, okay, I kind of understand it. But when I’m pushing the area that’s unfamiliar to me, that I’m adapting, and, you know, working on the fly, that’s where I think some of the best flow moments come. And I think that’s important. I think randomness helps to create that.

Okay, so what are the downsides of randomness? Okay, so one of the downsides is repetition. And my example of that is, Go to Jail. Which is a card in Monopoly. Now Go to Jail, there’s exciting moments on Go to Jail, and—go to jail, you have to roll doubles to get out. That’s how jail works.

Now, on the plus side, sometimes there’s exciting moments to see if you can get out of jail. And that can be very exciting. But also, there’s the moment where like “I can’t do it, I can’t do it, I can’t do it, I can’t—“you know, where just it creates repetition because it doesn’t allow you to do anything. You know. And that repetition, like I—you have to be careful because sometimes randomness can lead toward repetition. I mean sometimes it breaks repetition and sometimes it can cause repetition.

Also, it can get very frustrating. Because when things are outside of your control, if they go against you too much—you know, a little bit you adapt to, but at some point you just feel like “Man, the universe is working against me,” and you start getting demoralized because you’re like “What can I do? It’s not me doing it. It’s outside factors doing it.”

And for example, I know when people talk to me about mana screw, that mana screw falls into this. And  mana screw has randomness to it, and that the downside of randomness is you just feel helpless. “You’re like I didn’t even get to play! I didn’t get to do anything! It had nothing to do with me.” And then randomness can lead to that, and that’s a very bad feeling.

Also, while adapting to randomness can be very skill-testing, randomness in the wrong way can—I mean, there’s an interesting point about how often you want your lesser experienced player to beat your better experienced player. I will say this, as a game designer, if your lesser experienced player can never beat your more experienced player, you are really, really limiting your game. I’m not saying you can’t make a good game, obviously chess has lasted a long time, but you are very much limiting your audience for your game.

Because you will limit it to people that are willing to lose until they learn not to lose. And that is very hard. There’s not a lot of people that are saying, “I know I’m going to lose for a long time, but eventually I’ll push through that and start to win.” Most people are like “I’ve lost so many times, that’s it, I’m out of here.” And that they need a constant—they need to be, you know, they need a little bit of assurance to say “Hey, hey, things aren’t going to be so bad.” And that if you—the nice thing about having a game where occasionally the worse player beats the better player is it gives them hope.

I’ve talked about this before. Hope is a very, very important part of game design. That you want your players to always have hope. Now, the hope doesn’t need to be a high percentage chance. You know what I’m saying? I’ve talked about this before, about how you need to make sure that the player feels like they have a chance to win. You know.

Hope doesn’t need to mean that I have a great chance of something happening, but it needs to mean I have some chance of it happening. Because essentially, if you want somebody to play your game, you know, that there is some—when a game player starts playing a game, they enter sort of a blind trust with the game designer. And basically what they’re saying is, “Okay, I’m putting my trust in you, you claim you have a good experience for me.”

And it’s the same thing as going to see a movie or going to see, you know, watching a TV show. But the interesting thing about seeing a movie as an example is, most people tend to read reviews or get advice from other people. People don’t blindly go to movies. Now, it’s also kind of true for games. People don’t blindly play games. But anyway, there’s this moment of trust. You’re like “Okay, okay game designer, okay movie director, you know, I’m putting my trust in you, don’t disappoint me.” You know. “Because it’s out of my control, I’m like, you know, I’m giving you control, but I’m trusting you that you’ll deliver.”

And so part of that is game players want a feeling that, you know, there’s hope for them. That there’s always a chance. You know. And randomness, when used correctly, can help make that, but when used wrongly, can take that away. And one of my big lessons today is that randomness is a double-edged sword. You know. That randomness can—randomness is not like this be-all end-all tool that’s just awesome. Randomness is a double-edged sword. That when used correctly can enhance games. But when used wrong, can decrease enjoyment of the games. And—sort of my message of the day is, it’s a valuable tool, but a tool that you have to be careful with because if used incorrectly, it actually lessens the enjoyment of your game.

Okay. By the way, just as a little side note here, I’m driving the back way to work, which I’ve gone a few times, but like, you know how when you go to work normally, like your brain just kind of knows where it’s going, so if I seem distracted a little bit, it comes from me going “Is this the right way? I think I know where I’m going.” Although if I get lost then you guys get an extra long podcast. So maybe a win-win? Or not win-win. Lose win.

Anyway, okay. So what can you do with randomness to—how do you use it to its best? Okay. And I have a couple suggestions. So first off is, try to use randomness to lead to upside. And so let me give you my example is, I used a different example for my column. So here’s my—my (???) is, I’m going to play a game. And my game is, you flip a coin. And if you roll heads, I’m going to give you some candy. And if you roll tails, I’m going to give you some money. So heads, you get some candy, tails you get some money. That’s game one.

Game two, you roll heads, I give you candy and money. But if you roll tails, I punch you in the face. Okay. So—which is a more fun game? Well, in game—the first game, I can’t get money and candy. I can only get money or candy. But in the second game, there’s an outcome where I get candy and money. But there’s a downside, right?

So the first game is fun. It’s fun! What am I going to get? Am I going to get candy? Am I going to get money? It’s fun, it’s exciting, because you like candy, you like money, you can’t go wrong, right? And so that randomness is a fun game! Because I—there’s some excitement. The randomness is playing into the fun part of it is, “Ooh, I like candy, I like money, ooh, which one am I going to get?” That’s an exciting randomness.

The second one, it’s like “Okay, I have a chance for candy and money, but I also—I don’t like being punched in the face.” And so now I’m nervous. Now I’m apprehensive. Now, the randomness is causing me discomfort. In the first case, the randomness was causing me happiness. And the second is causing me discomfort. In both they’re unknown, in both cases I don’t know what’s going to happen, but in the first case I’m anticipating, I’m excited, “Ooh, what’s going to happen,” in the second case I am—I’m reticent. I’m like “Okay, okay,” you know, and I  think a lot of game designers do the second.

And a little of the second is okay, for example we’ll take coin flip cards. Sometimes in Magic, we want to do coin flip cards. Now, I prefer coin flip cards with “big advantage/small advantage,” vs. “big advantage/negative,” right? Because even a small advantage is—in a big—you’re losing--like, if I get, let’s say I’m going to flip a coin in Magic, and I either get, you know, twenty life or two life. Well, two life is kind of—it’s losing, you know, “I could have had twenty life, I got two life.” You know.

But it’s better than “twenty life/lose ten life.” Because if you’re—one side is too negative, human beings will focus on the thing that is the most extreme outcome. Okay. So for example, I tell you you’re going to win money or candy, or you’re going to be punched in the face, I’m focusing on being punched in the face. That’s what I’m thinking about. “Oh, I don’t want to be punched in the face.” I’m not thinking about the candy and the money.

Now, it is possible that you could create an upside so good that the person goes, “Oh, I hate being punched in the face, but oh my God, oh, I really want that upside.” You know. But in gaming in general, I mean, in life maybe you could make that work, but in gaming you kind of want the upside and the downside to be something that they can, you know, the downside is something that’s not so apprehensive that it draws the focus.

Okay. Number two. You want to give players a chance to respond. Okay? So what that means is, that when something—so one of the truisms of randomness is, the earlier you get the randomness into the game, the better. So why is that? In fact, one of the things I often say is, you want randomness in your game, but one of the best ways to get randomness into your game is to start with a random component.

You’ll notice there’s games that start with a random board or where you start on the board is random or like Magic, that’s, you know, you shuffle your library. The reason that is good is, I was talking before about the skill-testing thing. People want to be able to—if you have a chance to respond to randomness, it’s skill-testing. “Okay, what happened this game? Okay, okay. Now I’ve time to deal with it.” Okay, well that’s fun. That is a skill-testing thing, and that’s like, “Okay, I want to figure out how to deal with this.” And that is a fun part of randomness. I get to adapt to it.

But if randomness is at the end of the game—like, the worst thing in the world is, “Okay, I’m going to win or lose, if I flip heads I win, tails I lose.” You know. And we try to avoid that in Magic where we can. That it’s not fun with like “And the whole game came down to a coin flip.” You know.

Now, the funny thing real quickly is, sometimes people think of the top of the library as a coin flip. But what they miss is that every turn you buy yourself another turn you buy another draw. Like I love the things where someone draws out the game, and then they draw, you know, they draw the direct damage spell to win the game, and the other person is like, “Oh, you’re so lucky,” and like “No! I drew out the game for seven turns! So I could keep drawing cards! Yeah, eventually I drew the card to beat you, but it wasn’t like oh, I’m so lucky, I spent lots of time and energy getting to the point where I got to draw all those cards.” Getting to the card I needed to beat you. You know.

And that—in general, what you want to do is, earlier you put the randomness and let people adapt to it, the more fun. The later you put it, the more that the game hinges on the randomness, the more it feels out of your control, and you get frustrated, right? Because you’ve spent a lot of time and energy playing this game. You’ve spent a lot of—you know, you use a lot of skill. So in the end, if the last—even if, by the way, everything you do is skill-testing, but the last little bit was a random thing that the game decided on—it just makes you leave the game with a bad feeling.

Like one of the things I always stress is, you know, just for game designers is, the whole game is important. But the end of your game, when you leave the game, that is the most—that is the strongest experience that a player will have. That’s what will stick with them. And that’s why one of my truisms—I’ve talked about this before—is, you want your game to end before your player wants it to end.

Why? Because when the game ends, they go “Oh, it’s over already? Oh,” or “I want to play again,” or “When can we…” you know, “That was exciting.” If the game ends after they want it to end, they go “Oof, finally, the game’s over.” You know. In the first, they’re excited. They’re motivated. They left with this like empowering desire to want to play again. In the second, they’re like—they write it off. And maybe they’ll play again, but man you’re making it harder for them. Right? You want them leaving your game wanting more. And so, I say this all the time I talk to game designers is, “End the game before the player wants it to end. Leave them wanting more.” That’s very important.

Okay. So, so you want to get your randomness early in the game. Next. Allow manipulation of the randomness. So what I mean by that is—and Magic does this. For example, card drawing is the most random part of the game. But we give you a lot of tools to affect the randomness.

The same with mana, mana is the other big random—the mana system. But we give you tools to impact it. You know. In fact, one of the things we try to do is, we say “Hey experienced players, mana can have some randomness to it, but here’s a bunch of tools.” And so the better player has more ability to manipulate mana, so yeah. Sometimes it goes against them. But the majority of the time, you know, they lessen when that happens. And that players in general when they feel like they had a chance. Even if—and this is important—they never actually used that chance. You know.

So the fact that the game has means to affect your drawing, even if someone never plays cards to affect their drawing, they feel like “Oh, the game feels fair because there’s an opportunity to do it.” You know. And I think—I think that is very important. You know. That the player playing the game feels from the designer a sense of fairness.

And that what you want to do is you want the random done in such a way that the player goes, “Okay. I could have opted in to impact that.” You know. “Oh, I see it’s random, oh but the game designer gave me tools to make it less random if I desire.” And that it—now it’s up to them. They can use those tools or not use those tools, but you the game designer gave them the tools. And that is pretty important. That you gave them the tools. You know.

That--a lot of goodwill—I’ve talked about before. Like, a lot of the trust of the game player and the game designer is, “Were they fair to me? Was the game—“ You know, the game designer has a huge amount of power. And the game player is like “Okay, I want this person to be fair to me.” And if the game ends, and they feel you weren’t fair, then they’re mad at you. They’re like, “Bleep you.” You know. They’re like “What… what…” You know. “What are you doing, game designer?” You know. “You weren’t playing fair with me,” and the only response they have is, okay, they don’t play your game again.

And what you want is you want the game player to feel like the game designer, you know, challenged them and—it’s not that the game player doesn’t want to be challenged, or have to work for things, or get—never wants to be frustrated. But they want to feel like it was done in an honest attempt, where the game designer was working with them and not against them.

And that’s a huge—once again. I’m going to stress this. The game designer is supposed to be the ally to the game player, not the combatant of the game player. You know. You the game player—you the game designer are not supposed to fight the game player. You’re not trying to keep them from winning. Your job is to make their journey fun. Not keep them from getting there, not—you know,

I mean, yes, you’re supposed to throw obstacles in their way, because part of what you’re doing is making it something that they have to overcome, because that’s a lot of the joys of games, but your job is not to frustrate them, your job is not to—your job is to create this experience of allowing them the opportunity to react and overcome that. And randomness is a good example of this which is, randomness used correctly allows excitement and fun and lets them react to it. Used badly, it makes them feel bad, it makes them feel helpless. It, you know, makes it create variance that they don’t want. Or repetition that they don’t want.

Okay, finally, another—big thing for people to be careful about in game design is what I call the icons of randomness. So the two biggest icons of randomness are dice and coins. And the reason is, what does a dice exist for? It’s a tool of randomness. Now a coin—a coin, obviously you can spend it to buy stuff. But the idea of “I’m going to make a 50/50 decision and flip a coin” is so ingrained that both those items are used to create a sense of randomness. And so you have to be very careful when you use them.

Now, I’m not saying you can never use them, because I think used correctly—I mean, Magic uses coin flips from time to time—we use dice rolling in—let me talk a little bit about dice rolling. So Unglued had dice rolling, and it—it fared poorly in our godbook study. But it’s funny that I look back—I think one of the mistakes I made was the same thing. I wasn’t using randomly correctly.

So for example, a lot of the random cards I did were like “Roll a die. Something happens, one through six.” And the problem with that kind of card is, well how do you use that card? I don’t know what it’s going to do. I can’t plan around it. I can’t build around it. And it’s kind of frustrating. It’s like “Well, I hope six happens…” You know.

And the ones that I enjoyed a lot more were the ones in which there was some variance, but I knew I was getting something. Like—and this is referring to what I was talking about before. Like I actually thought Elvish—Elvish Impersonator, which was you rolled two six-sided die, and one was its power, one was its toughness. I thought that card was a very interesting card.

Now, every once in a while you get hosed, you got the 1/1 or the 1/2 or something, you know, but the neat thing about it was, I wasn’t quite sure what—I always got a creature, you know, and I had to sort of adapt to what the creature was. Where I felt something like Urza’s Science Experiment, where it’s like I just didn’t know—strategy, schmategy. I didn’t know what it was going to do. Like I didn’t even put it in my deck because I had no idea what’s going to happen.

And I feel like one of the big lessons—looking back on it is, I think I threw the baby out with the bathwater in  the sense that I go, “Oh, people don’t like dice,” and what I didn’t do is sort of the lesson I’m saying today is, “Oh, no no no, there’s the interesting—there’s interesting variety, you know, randomness, and there’s unfun randomness.” And I think that I—in Unglued, interestingly, I wasn’t using my dice as well as I could to try to make the dice play something that was fun.

Anyway. More—me observing my own path and looking at things. But anyway, my advice on the icons of randomness—dice and coins—is—and spinners, by the way. Spinners would be the third icon of randomness. Is that you have to be careful. If your game is associated with that, you’re fine.

For example, Magic is a trading card game. It has cards, it’s going to have a deck. That’s a given. You know, like, it’s funny, because like you throw dice or coins and people go “What?” But like shuffle your deck, “Oh, well of course you’ve got to shuffle your deck.” And it’s like, “Oh, well we’re a trading card game,” well, there’s an expectation of a deck of cards. That’s just a given. You know. And the fact that you would shuffle a deck of cards—well, most games with cards shuffle cards. Almost all games with cards shuffle cards. So that’s a given. You know.  If you were playing a board game, you get dice. You get dice in a board game. You know.

An example I used in my article—it’s a very interesting one, so I will bring that up. Which is, so I worked with Richard Garfield on—we made, it was called Star Wars Trading Card Game. Wizards of the Coast made it. And what Richard’s vision for it—what happened was, Richard designed the game system, of which I was on the team, and then I led the core set design, essentially. And so Richard’s vision of it was that it was a miniatures game but with cards. That it functioned like a miniatures game. And so the idea was every card had on it the ability to do damage. And that defined—it set how many dice you got to roll, essentially.

And so what happened was, when you’re having fights, “Oh, well, you know, my spaceship is fighting your spaceship and oh, I have so many dice that I get to roll.” And so there were a—there was a lot of dice rolling. There was a lot of dice rolling. Because it was a—essentially he made a miniatures game. It was a trading card game with a miniatures sensibility.

And here’s the interesting thing. Players really rebelled against it. They didn’t want to be rolling that much dice in their trading card game. And, like I said, it created this very interesting dynamic, which is, if I have to roll one die, that is a lot more random than if I have to roll ten dice. And the reason is, the more dice I roll, the more chance I have to offset, you know, the highs and the lows. Because, as—I mean, real quickly into probability—if I roll a six-sided die, you know, a million times, it’s going to average 3.5. That’s the average—I mean, that doesn’t exist on the die. But it—if you—the average of the rolls will be a 3.5. Because that’s the middle. The lowest you can roll is a 1, the highest you can roll is a 6, the average is 3.5.

The more dice you roll, the closer you get to that average. The fewer dice you roll, the more variance you can get because if I roll just one die, well I could roll a 1, I could roll a 6, you know, any one die I have an equal chance of rolling anything. You know. It’s just with time, you know, I’m going to lean toward—I’m going to learn toward the expected value.

And so in that game, we were rolling a lot more dice. And so the funny thing is, that the randomness in the game was actually less than many other dice games. But the public perceived it as more because they were rolling more dice so like dice is such an icon of luck that lots of dice must mean even more random. You know. And that was a very interesting, eye-opening thing about how people perceive, you know, random objects. That they have a lot of weighted value in them.

And that’s another thing I would say to game designers in general, which is every object you include in your game comes with baggage that has nothing do to with you or your game. And you have to be aware of what that baggage is. You know. In Magic, the corollary in Magic is, that card types for example come with baggage. You know, that Magic’s twenty years old, and that people have come to expect that certain card types mean certain things.

And that doesn’t mean you can’t play against the expectation, but, you know, be aware your audience has invested—like, when you sit down to play a game, once again I talk about like you’re player putting trust into the game designer, that they have expectations and that you have to understand their expectations. That doesn’t mean you can’t break their expectations, but that comes at a cost and you have to value that cost. You know.

It’s okay to shock the player some amount of the time, or make them, you know, like one of the things I’ve learned in Magic—this is a very interesting thing, which is every year we can do something different. Every year we can do something that Magic hasn’t done before. But after we choose that thing that’s different, everything else needs to be the same. And my example here is, I’ll talk to my sitcom background.

So in a sitcom, you have three things. You have a cast of characters, you have a location, and you—a place, and you have a style of show. A kind of story that you tell. And so every week, people come, it’s the same characters, in the same location, doing the same kind of story.

Now, you can stretch yourself. On any one week, you can change one of those three things. You could change up who the people are. You could change up where they are. You could change up the kind of story you tell. But if you’re going to change one of them, you’ve got to keep the other two the same. You know. And this is true in games as it is in storytelling, which is people crave comfort as much as surprise. You can’t just surprise them, you must have comfort.

It’s funny, when I get to the communications—my communications theory, the podcast, comfort and surprise are two of them. So it—people need their comfort. So surprise is awesome, but you’ve got to surround the surprise with comfort. And in Magic what that means is, we can make you do something you’ve never done before, but everything else is a known quantity that you understand. So that that isn’t disorienting. You know.

I mean, one of the things we could do in Magic is, we could make every year completely disorienting. I can change so many things you’re like (???) You know. I can even—I can do this. I can take a year where every change I made is something Magic has done, but do them all in one year, and you wouldn’t recognize the game. You know. And that—that’s not good. You know.

One of the things about Magic, the reason Magic’s done as well as it has for as long as it has, is not—I mean, it’s funny. People always focus on the fact that we keep changing the experience, and part of that is important. But we also have kept consistency. That, you know, if you play Magic and go away and come back to it, it’s still the game you know. I mean, things have changed, but at its core it’s still the game you know. Anyway, deviating a little bit from randomness in my random talk today.

So anyway, my last thing was talking about being aware of the icons you’re using, and that if you’re using icons of randomness, you have to be careful how you use them. And be aware that there’s a perception from your audience that it comes loaded. You have—the dice are loaded. That the imagery and what it means to people has meaning. And you the game designer have to take that into account.

Okay. So I—I think today is—I’m not looking at my clock but I’m guessing this is a slightly longer podcast. So I’m almost at work, I’m driving the final road, so I realize I need to sum up here. I—I think what—the essence of today’s thing is, is that randomness is a potent but dangerous tool for a game designer. And the reason is, it can do great good, and it can do great bad. That randomness used properly creates the fun, creates the excitement, creates the—the adrenaline rush, you know, it does allow the skill testing to happen.

Used correctly, randomness is one of the great spices of gaming. But used wrong, it makes you spit it out. My salt analogy. Used correctly, it enhances the flavors. Used incorrectly, you know, like I’ll tell you a little story here. So when I was a kid, I never cooked much. And so one day, we were doing some fundraiser something, and I was very invested. I wanted to contribute to the fundraiser.

So I said I was going to make brownies. So I took my mom’s recipe, which was all handwritten in pencil, and I was making it. So I had the batter all ready, I was about to put it in the oven, and my sister walks by. My sister’s named Alysse, a year younger than me, and my sister said—puts her finger in the batter, she asked me if she could taste the batter, I said yeah, she put it and she spit it out.

And she’s like “How much salt did you put in that thing?” And I said, “A fourth of a cup.” And she’s like “What?” “No, look at the recipe, it’s a fourth of a cup.” She goes, “No, no, no, that’s…” you know, it was a T. My mom had curved the T. She goes, “That’s teaspoon. That’s not cup.” I go, “No, it says cup.” She goes, “You don’t put a fourth of a cup of salt in anything!” You know.

And… and I use this as my parallel, which is—a brownie with no salt would probably not taste as good. But a brownie with a fourth of a cup of salt tastes about as bad as brownies can taste. Randomness is the salt in the brownies, which is—used correctly, used in the right amount, it can really enhance. You know. Salt does a great job of bringing out the flavor. Randomness can bring out a lot of the essence of a game and really make it shine. You know.

Game designers should not shy away from randomness. There’s a lot of fun in randomness. But, you have to use it carefully. You have to use it in the correct way, and—my truism, as I talked about in my article, is randomness makes games fun, but the appearance of randomness tends to upset the game players. Especially more, you know, core game players. And so a game designer that’s doing his job is using it—is using it correctly, is putting it in the right places, and is not shining to bright a light on it in that it’s kind of more subtly doing what it’s doing rather than more blatantly doing what it’s doing. Because if it gets too blatant, it turns the audience off.

And so the job of a game designer is to find ways to subtly get the, you know, subtly get the randomness into the game for all its enhancements, for its, you know, its salty goodness, but not in such a way that it draws too much attention to itself. You know. The second you can taste salt in the batter, that’s—that’s not a good sign.

You know. And so really, my take-home for today, as I park in my parking space, is randomness is not to be feared. Game designers do not fear randomness. Randomness is your friend. But it is a friend you have to watch carefully. I’ll do metaphors today. Randomness is a very important tool, but it’s a tool that has to be used properly. And I’m hoping today to stress that—that when used properly, it really is something special that helps games. But that when used incorrectly, it can be just as damaging as it can be helpful.

Anyway, I am now at work, and I had an extra-long podcast today, because my random way to work was ten minutes longer. So a little bonus for all of you. Anyway, thank you very much for listening to the podcast, and it’s time to go make the Magic.