All That Noise

According to the renowned psychologist, Daniel Kahneman, we make bad decisions when we confuse Noise with Bias. Noise is a collection of random occurrences like dice rolls, or randomly drawn cards. Bias is a correlation between related events like the sun shining and the ground warming up as a result. We are wired to recognize patterns and correlations because it would be too inefficient for our brains to ponder every possibility for every little action and event. As a result, we see many patterns that simply aren’t there. This leads us to believe crackpot conspiracies and behave like irrational children by putting our dice into a “dice dungeon” because they are misbehaving. This irrational behavior is fine within the bounds of “The Magic Circle” of your current board game or RPG, as long as you remember to come to your senses when the game is over.

I remember one example which illustrates this confusion clearly. It is (or was back in the 80’s) a statistical fact that light blue and yellow cars got into the fewest traffic accidents. Could this be because they were easier to see? Before you go out and have your car repainted, lets take a closer look. It turns out that yellow and light blue are the most common colors for police cars and cabs. In other words, professional drivers are less likely to get in accidents than amateurs , which makes perfect sense. The yellow and blue cars were noise, and the true bias is the correlation between professional divers and traffic accidents.

Noise happens quite frequently in games and is often mistaken for meaningful events or patterns. It takes some effort to truly comprehend a random dice roll. How often have you thought “The Dice Hate Me” because you rolled a string of ones when you are expecting sixes. (“Bad Dice” “Lock them Up”). Streaks of the same numbers are are a common manifestation of random dice rolls. Most of us expect an even distribution, but this is not random. Random rolls include long strings of the same number as well as a mix of random numbers. The patterns we see are nothing more than wishful thinking and we tend to forget the varied mix of rolls because we are looking for specific numbers. We look at horse racing forms, trying to predict the next upcoming random event, as well as the previous winning numbers at the roulette wheel to try and discern some magical patterns that everybody else has missed. We seem to have a need to find meaning in random events; a meaning in all this noise.

This irrational behavior is nothing to be ashamed of. In fact, it might be used to generate a very entertaining game experience. Provide an interesting narrative, throw in a few random events, and with just the slightest nudge, you might send your players off on an interesting and unique adventure. Various game scenarios can seem plausible if players receive enough random information to start constructing a working theme or character roll in their imaginations. Players will naturally ignore what doesn’t fit and focus on what does fit the role constructed in their minds. There are probably many ways that a game or RPG scenario designer can use this strange human quirk to create a rich game experience.

I am not an expert, nor am I a successful in publishing games. (Yet!) I am just trying to figure things out and hope you enjoy my occasional rant. Feel free to comment if you agree or disagree, or even if you just want to say hi.

Roger M