Leveling up seems to be quite common, especially in RPG’s. It seems logical in a game or series of games, that your skill increases and the the game experience becomes more challenging to match. Does it actually reflect realty though? We all get older and slower as life goes on, but we do (hopefully) tend to get smarter which can more than compensate for our declining physical abilities. What if a game worked this way? A player starts out strong and gets weaker as the game progresses. They must master the intricacies of the game or learn new skills to compensate for the decline of their starting abilities. This could be accomplished with initial starting abilities in an RPG style game or possibly with a finite amount of Cash or Resources in a economic or euro-style game. Has anybody tried this in a game yet?
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.
One and a Half hours into the play-test of what’s supposed to be a 45 minute game, the players didn’t want to quit. It’s a great sign, when the players want to see the final outcome. In fact. was doing my happy dance inside my head when this happened. The game has a few kinks at this point, but it seems to be firing on all cylinders. Happy Days!
We ran into an energy shortage at the end of the game which intensified the game-play but also caused it to drag on very very long. This can be fixed. I will introduce a deck of cards which will control the generation of energy throughout the game. The end condition has to be tweaked as well as as the number of ships for each player and a few other things. The Pirate theme doesn’t quite fit so I will be changing it to scavengers or something more suitable. It is worthwhile to spend some time on the graphics to make it more clear and shore up the theme a bit, now that this game seems to function well.
I will also introduce different types of energy with special effects, as well as reworking the dice tokens a bit. The Marauders market mechanism I planned on adding may not be a good fit for the game. I can encourage more player interaction through other means so the player negotiations will emerge more organically. This will have be in later revisions, for now I just have to fix what’s broken.
It looks like the scrap pile is getting a little bigger. Fight Night has finally gone down to the mat and was counted out. The mechanisms were still really cool, and I’m sure I can re-use them in another game, but not this one. Fight Night had it’s moments, but there was a severe thematic disconnect which doomed this game to mediocrity at best. I’ve seen quite a few bouts, and I have never seen anybody squat down and punch somebody in the knee. This is what the mechanisms of the game were basically asking you to do. Although it was funny at times, this disconnect stopped the players from really immersing themselves into the game. The timing and the intensity may have matched a real fight, but the actions never seemed quite right. Lesson learned.
As anybody who has invested regularly in the stock market can tell you, this market is anything but rational. At least not in the short term. It is subject to some severe swings, and behaviors that can only be described as psychotic. How can a company like McDonalds be worth 25% less in a short period? I don’t recall seeing a few thousand stores suddenly disappearing into the void. How can a company like Tesla be valued higher than GM when it is miniscule in comparison? How can 3D printer stocks see a rise of over 1,000% , just to come crashing back down in value within 6 months. This doesn’t sound like rational behavior to me. The rational market theory states, more or less, that the fair market value of a commodity will be determined by supply and demand. I’ll believe this if I ever see it!
Experiments were performed by Dan Airely to explore how initial market values are arrived at, and the results are quite surprising. You can check out chapter 2 of his book “Predictably Irrational” for more detail on this topic. It turns out that the initial price of an item is often completely arbitrary. Once we see this price (We don’t even have to agree with it.) we latch on to it and it affects our perceived value of this item and anything associated with it. The item’s true value, or the cost to create this item, could be considerably different from what we’re willing to pay for it. The initial value of any item is strongly associated with the item and influences all future decisions we make regarding it.
We also have another strange quirk when we are establishing a value.If we are paid to acquire an item, this is considered work and we tend to ascribe a lower value to the object. If we have to pay for an item, we will value it more highly. The Item doesn’t change, but our perceived value of it could vary quite a bit. In one board game where we have to pick-up and deliver items, and another game where we have to purchase items and speculate, we likely view the two markets in completely different ways, even if both of these markets were fluctuating in the same manner. The value is skewed by the fact that we are doing a chore or accomplishing a mission, rather than speculating and taking a risk.
How do we establish this arbitrary value? A random card flip or dice roll would do the job, but it may not be very satisfying. Players might, perhaps, make up a value, but this could quickly get out of hand. (The game “QE” does this). The answer must lie somewhere in between. Players can be given rough guidelines, initial recommendations based on the game state, and enough freedom to set a price they think the other players are willing to pay. The player setting the price should, of course, have some way to exploit this newly priced item. The other players should also have some way to access the item besides dealing with the player initiating the value. This might keep things in balance. Let’s create a hypothetical example.
A pick-up and deliver game, set in the desert, where players are free to buy and sell goods by travelling to the various cities. The market will be driven by transactions, where every offer to sell would reduce the value of a commodity and every offer to buy would increase the value. Random actions will also affect the market, but the general market always trends upward in the long run. Players set initial prices by travelling to different cities and establishing trading centers for certain goods. A player can choose from a range of initial starting prices, with the more remote locations allowing players to set higher values. The player initiating the trading center could become the agent for that city and other players can trade through the agent for a fee. Players can also travel to the city to deal directly. As more cities trade in the same commodity, the prices could tend to decline. This might make for an interesting game where values are somewhat arbitrary, and players have to try and determine what the other players are willing to pay.
In the above example, players will probably lend credence to the arbitrary starting values, even though they know the values are artificial. The fluctuating market will hopefully result in some wild market swings, especially with the random events occurring regularly to shake things up. The player interaction and trading should also add some variability to the game as players might demand high prices based on potential market values. The key component of this game would be the initial values set by the players opening up the trade centers. This could make for an interesting market economy.
The bottom line is that a predictable market economy and values that are obvious will probably make for a boring game. Add a few random events, arbitrary values that can’t be clearly predicted, and a dash of irrational player behavior and you might just have some real fun. 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.
Recent Comments