1. Uncertainty in Games

Being the holidays, this week has been hectic for me. I decided to finish a book I got last year called Uncertainty in Games. It's part of MIT's Playful Thinking Series, which currently has just two books, but is worth checking out.

The book was a very interesting look at different and sometimes surprising sources of uncertainty in popular genres of games. For example, classic Mario games have no random elements. The game levels and enemy locations are exactly the same every time you play through. All of the games' uncertainty comes from the player's ability to time their actions correctly as they run through the levels. Strategy games such as chess rely completely on a player's opponent for uncertainty.

Zynga's Facebook games are interesting because the company makes money from uncertainty. Players have an amount of uncertainty in their every day schedules, so they never know if they will make it back in time to perform the next action that they need to take. This keeps players coming back on a daily basis, and in some cases paying real world money to correct a missed opportunity. In the long run, it is the uncertainty in the story line (if you would call it that) and future improvements that keep players returning to the games. An "I want to know what they will add next," sort of addiction. Of course, there are small random bonuses that players occasionally receive, but these have a very minor effect on the game.

In fact, most games are designed in a way such that randomness has relatively little effect on anything. In war games such as Risk, every battle is determined by the rolling of dice, an intrinsically random event. However, throughout the course of the game, the outcome of the die rolls will regress toward the mean, statistically evening out. This is a purely mathematical concept and doesn't require the player have any knowledge of it. It does mean that while the victor of every battle is randomly determined, the uncertainty in these types of games (and most games where a die roll or card shuffle provide a level of randomness) lies in each player's ability to out-strategize the other.

In the end, there is no tried and true rule to determine how much or which type of uncertainty to incorporate into a game, but many of the most popular and fun games have many layers of uncertainty that have been finely tuned to craft an entertaining and enjoyable experience.