Probability Drama
One interesting and fundamental difference between traditional games and videogames is the videogames’ ability to meddle with information in a powerful way. Take an ordinary card game, one with hidden cards in a stack and a good deal of luck involved. In such a game, the shuffling of the deck sort of sets the premises for the game. The shuffle can be bad or good for you and you will never know until it’s too late (and you can’t do anything about it). In games of perfect information, where all information is available to all players at all time, this is not an issue. But wait a minute… “not an issue?” How is the randomness of a shuffled card-deck an issue at all?
Card Games
In a way it isn’t. Card games with hidden information and shuffled decks are build on the fact that there is an element of randomness and luck to the game. When you play with a few friends, this can be lots of fun. You can probably easily envision the social interaction that follows when some gets a “bad card” in a game. Frustration and anger are probably common feelings and some of the common actions following within the playing group are most certainly words of encouragement, or teasing.
In the social card-game there would be little point in altering the randomness on the cards. In fact, if the deck is shuffled bad it is instantly spotted and accusations of cheating will hail across the table. This, I believe, is a bit strange. Think about it in this way:
The shuffled deck is available to all players giving them all equal chance.
Even a badly shuffled deck will premiere a random player (unless it’s deliberately tampered with) and there’s no way to tell who it’s gonna be. So playing with such a deck is really equally fair to playing with a deck that’s shuffled better.
Note though that I only said “fair”. There’s a series of other aspects of this. First of all, no one enjoys playing cards with a deck that is badly shuffled. The reason is that the game can become predictable really quickly. When we play games with a large portion of chance involved, we expect the game to deliver an even flow of randomness. If the game suddenly starts behaving otherwise, we get irritated and the game looses its appeal. We feel that the game becomes more “solitair-like” in a sense, where the chance is just present in the beginning when Mother Fortune selects who of the four players should get the long string of Aces, Kings and Queens in the fifteen rounds to come. In short, we feel cheated.
We react the same way when the game, purely by chance, delivers cards that appear non-random. This is, of course, within the nature of randomness. If I roll a dice long enough, I ought to get some series like 5, 5, 5, 5, 5, 5 and if we look at it in the long run, it’s perfectly natural. However, when those fives show up, one after another, the game we are playing feels all but natural.
So there’s a good deal of psychology involved here.
Videogames
Now, let us think a little about videogames. Those games differ from the social card game example above on several points. First of all, the game is often played against a computer, or with a computer acting as a play-master. Most videogames are also designed to be played by one single player. The computer can provide the proper opposition, even though it is often rather dull to play against simulated human players (in a videogame about poker, for example).
So, imagine a single player game, one that’s really simple and that we all know. It’s called “Memory” and is played with square little cards with pictures on them and is about finding pairs.
In the game “Memory”, the player sets up the board by spreading out the cards, or arranging them in a grid (6×4 cards, for example) – back side up. The player then picks a card, turns it and looks at the picture on it. Then another card is selected and looked at. If the two don’t match, then they are put down again (on their original position) and another try is made. This game can be played on a computer by a single player. The challenge then is to find all the pairs in as few number of tries as possible.
Now, think a bit about how this is typically implemented. In a board-game version of “Memory” we shuffle the cards and spread them out on the table, then begin to play. In the videogame version, the program will probably do something similar. It will shuffle a virtual deck, create a 2 dimensional array, a set of lists or whatever and then put one card on each position. The game logic then allows the player to point at cards and turn them according to the rules. But the whole thing is static once the board is set.
But does the board need to be static? Well, we couldn’t just shuffle the board about at some interval, can we? The game is about remembering the position of cards and if those cards suddenly change places without any warning, the game will most certainly suck as a game. However, there are cards throughout the game that has not been seen. When the game starts, all 24 (or whatever) cards could be shuffling around like crazy on the virtual table. And we wouldn’t know that since we can only see the back-side of the cards. It is only at the moment the player decides to turn a card that the game needs to decide what card should be shown. The same goes for every card that is not yet turned.
Why then don’t we look at ways of using this “trick” that only the videogame adaption of “Memory” allows us to make? Clearly, there are drama connected to the outcome of randomness in games. Players get frustrated when chance work against them and they are happy when they get lucky. Furthermore, players are frustrated when randomness does not look all that random.
In the “Memory” example, it is easy to see that the game can do two tricks to accomplish a better (or different) gaming experience:
- Reorganize cards to prevent that pairs are found at random.
- Reorganize cards to help the player find pairs “at random”.
An AI can overview the game and decide what route to take by altering the odds in real-time. This is somewhat similar to a “drama manager” that keeps track of what the player does and tries to make a dramatically efficient experience. In the “Memory” example, the drama is really simple since the player can be taken between feelings of luck/happiness and misfortune/frustration. That may not be enough to motivate the effort needed to create a “probability drama manager” for “Memory” – the payoff is perhaps to small. But the game is a good example of a system where the computer can be active in parts of the gaming where it traditionally could not. And we can now start thinking of other places where this “probability drama” method is applicable. Just to name a few:
- RPG loot dropping
- RTS combat “dice roll” situations
- Bullet hits in shooters
- Weather exposure in flight simulators
- Zombie wake-ups in a horror game
Of course, there are risks involved. A player who feels that the computer is altering the odds will cry “cheater!” instantly, so an implementation need to be extremely well tuned and thought out.
In the straightforward implementation of “Memory”, the game is driven by chance only and that is fine. But then again, nowadays we have the processing power and we have an ability to make something a little bit more psychologically fine-tunes – so why shouldn’t we?
