The talk of luck and how sometimes games fake it to make it seems fairer to the player reminds me of how certain games tweak their mechanics to make things easier on the player or feel more cinematic.
For example, in Bioshock 1, the enemies will always miss their first shot, whereas Assassin's Creed and Doom have the last part of the health bar actually take more shots/attacks to deplete to make it feel like players are winning by the skin of their teeth.
I'm not positive but I think one of the first examples of a game accommodating players in a more extreme sense was in Crash Bandicoot during the famous boulder chase level where Crash was running toward the screen / player. If the game detected you were having trouble clearing the stage each subsequent replay would slow the boulder down a bit. The goal was to ensure the player wouldn't rage quit thus allowing for longer play sessions.
If it's not the first it's at least one of the best early examples of this mechanic.
Crash Bandicoot is one of the very few platformers that I can actually stand (got to 103% completion). It's just so very well designed to avoid annoying the player while retaining difficulty.
Crash Bandicoot has a highly entertaining development story as well. They straight up violated Sony's hardware rules, and Sony was so desperate, they let them.
I was curious about what rule they violated -- it comes up in part 5:
"The first is Sony’s first viewing of Crash in person. Kelly Flock was the first Sony employee to see Crash live [ Andy NOTE: running, not on videotape ]. He was sent, I think, to see if our videotape was faked!
Kelly is a smart guy, and a good game critic, but he had a lot more to worry about than just gameplay. For example, whether Crash was physically good for the hardware!
Andy had given Kelly a rough idea of how we were getting so much detail through the system: spooling. Kelly asked Andy if he understood correctly that any move forward or backward in a level entailed loading in new data, a CD “hit.” Andy proudly stated that indeed it did. Kelly asked how many of these CD hits Andy thought a gamer that finished Crash would have. Andy did some thinking and off the top of his head said “Roughly 120,000.” Kelly became very silent for a moment and then quietly mumbled “the PlayStation CD drive is ‘rated’ for 70,000.”
Kelly thought some more and said “let’s not mention that to anyone” and went back to get Sony on board with Crash."
That entire Development Story is such a massive gem. Everyone interested in programming, game programming, and video game creation in general should fully dig into it:
Making Crash Bandicoot
----------
As one of the co-creators of Crash Bandicoot, I have been (slowly) writing a long series of posts on the making of everyone’s favorite orange marsupial. You can find them all below, so enjoy.
That's one of the finest and most entertaining "post mortem's" (it didn't die, though so what's that called?) I've ever read.
There's something in it for everyone who enjoys programming, video games, or technical papers.
My favorite four takeaways from the development story are:
1) The mechanic I spoke of above where the game tries to dumb things down for less skilled players.
2) The fact that Crash Bandicoot was originally designed as the flagship game and mascot character and ultimately Sony messed up in terms of making Crash into the Sony Playstation mascot as Mario or Sonic were to the Nintendo and Sega consoles / companies respectively.
Naughty Dog aimed for that as they saw an opening for it and, I think, absolutely nailed that aspect of creating an iconic and lovable character but Sony seemed gun shy about it. I could see, with hindsight, how Naughty Dog could have developed Crash further as a character and branched out in terms of making all sorts of Crash branded games of various genres in the future instead of the few platformers that we got (although they were all well above average).
3) The fact that pit falls, unbreakable boxes, and other in-level obstacles / item boxes weren't just there by chance. The Sony Playstation could not handle too many enemies on screen so the level designers worked hard to craft levels that would ensure enemies would fall into pits or be blocked by boxes from entering into an area that would ultimately crash the game / console from having too many polygons on screen.
4) The fact that Naughty Dog was thought to have "special secret hardware codes" given to them by Sony because comparatively Crash Bandicoot was performing and looking a few levels above anything else other Sony Playstation developers were capable of creating. The team wrote all sorts of specialized tools and programs to help refactor polygons, smart load levels, and ensure that the team was able to have great looking graphics and models on screen that were as close as possible to squeezing out everything the hardware could handle (see item 3 above) and this caused other developer teams to question Naughty Dog and Sony's relationship behind the scenes.
I just read the whole thread too and this stuff all seems so... over-engineered. I mean, if 6 enemies shooting at the player is too hard, the solution should not be to have only two of them shooting and four running around aimlessly. The solution should be to have just two enemies. Isn’t that better than adding all of this complicated and potentially buggy “if this then that” logic all over the code?
Don’t change the rules, or hit boxes, or speeds of enemies to try to nudge the player towards winning. If the content of your game is not fun, change the content, don’t change math and physics.
The anecdote about Sid Meier hard-coding a guaranteed "win on the third attempt" for a battle with a 1/3 victory probability was very interesting. It reminds me of the way designers of the modern XCOM games have also fudged with probability to mitigate the anger of missing a 85% shot [0]:
> “The fact is, we’re trying to entertain players,” said Solomon. “So how do you deal with a player who’s missed an 85 percent shot? Emotionally, they’re probably strained. We don’t want the players missing multiple 85 percent shots, because then the game starts to feel punitive...That 85 percent isn’t actually 85 percent. Behind the scenes, we wanted to match the player’s psychological feeling about that number.” That 85 percent, according to Solomon, is often closer to 95 percent."
As much as I love the XCOM games, I really enjoyed the refreshing deterministic approach by Klei's Invisible, Inc. [1], another turn-based squad tactics game, in which all valid shots are guaranteed to hit. This places all of the onus on the player to correctly anticipate positioning -- so, basically like chess. There's still plenty of luck involved, with the levels and loot locations being randomly generated. But the "luck" feels more of a fun obstacle to overcome, rather than a cruel arbiter of fate.
On a tangent: the fact that the human mind finds randomness to be unappealing reminds me of another game design essay, "The Nebraska Problem", about the optimal way of generating visually-pleasing grass [2]
“Humans are bad at understanding probability, so lets make it impossible for them to get better by lying to them and reinforcing their poor internal model.”
(I know games are ostensibly about fun rather than betterment, but they originate from the opportunities for betterment that they provide and breaking that connection does a disservice to ... mankind. Not to put too fine a point on it. If you want your game to be fun and the numbers aren’t fun, don’t lie about the numbers, change how you present them.)
I agree. If 85% is not fun, make it 90%. Don’t try to change what 85% means. If as a game designer, you’re finding that random isn’t fun, maybe you ought to consider dropping the randomness and coming up with something better.
It’s not that 85% isn’t fun. It’s that when someone misses an 85% chance 5 times in a row they go on the review boards screaming about how the game cheats.
Any idea what's a better system then? Over 80% is guaranteed? After the first attempt your chance of success doubles?
For example, you'd want it to be pretty much guaranteed a trooper can beat an alien at close quarters with a chain gun and an archer can't beat a helicopter. You want some degree of randomness but you want the rules to be easily understood as well.
I’d prefer documenting the actual behavior/rules. In the Civ example, if the 3rd try always succeeds, display 100%. If the archer vs helicopter attack doesn’t make sense, show 0%. I’m a big boy, I can take the truth. If the monsters run slower when you’re not looking at them, find some sensible way in the story to explain it. Maybe your eyes feed their rage and give them powers when you look at them.
Giving the player an artificial boost when he’s behind is like giving 4 outs to the losing baseball team.
> If the monsters run slower when you’re not looking at them, find some sensible way in the story to explain it
Most games are suppose to feel like an experience though and make you feel a certain way. They're suppose to be scary monsters - less so in a Civ-style games but you're not suppose to be decomposing them into integers and algorithms.
I found that having an RNG leads to a more tense gameplay, the players actions are then a frenetic search to maximize the odds. I thought a purely deterministic system like in Invincible Inc, had less elements of surprise.
Chess is a very low luck game, but it's not zero luck.
There are a lot of ways to have luck without randomness. Simultaneous action selection which forces everyone to guess each other's moves is based on luck, and that goes from Rock Paper Scissors to Diplomacy to Street Fighter.
But for chess, although it is turn based and perfect information, the luck comes from guessing at complexity.
If you ask people to guess a specific digit of pi, say the 1,234,658th digit, they will have to guess. Although there is a method to calculate it, and although you can reduce the required luck by knowing some statistics about the digits of various areas of pi, it will come down to guessing.
Perfect information turn based games introduce luck by hiding a lot of information behind complexity and forcing us to make educated guesses. A perfect information turn based game without complexity is a solved game, for example tic tac toe.
The fact is that there is no interesting game with zero luck. Players just feel differently about different kinds of luck. Knowing that an answer is theoretically possible forces them to acknowledge their limitation rather than the game, even though in reality everyone is guessing and matches are won via luck.
Richard Garfield has an excellent talk about Luck vs Skill that can be found on Youtube.
I enjoyed Invisible Inc. quite a bit. However, the deterministic hits only work because of the two-person team size, the small combat areas and (mostly) melee weapons, the use of stuns and hacks rather than kills, and the forgiving rewinds for players doing poorly. Guaranteed hits in X-Com with a six person team armed with guns would be too easy and would “flatten” the terrain rather than make it something to be navigated.
Contemporary video games are way more on rails and experientially constrained than players know. Basically anything implemented with fair odds will be perceived as unfair to the player. Real life is unfair and players play games to escape to a fantasy world where all that heroic luck you're used to seeing in fiction now applies to them.
> The designers of free-to-play games, by using an intermittent variable to dole out small prizes, found that they could keep players engaged—and spending—for longer.
I'm really glad the article also touches on the loot-box phenomenon. I think it's by far the worst thing to ever happen to game design.
It's exploitative in the same way that gambling in general is exploitative, but isn't bound by the tight legal restrictions that prevent gambling companies from targeting children who might be most vulnerable to these exploitative tactics and more likely to fall into a vicious cycle of addiction early in life, which can have dramatic, literally life-changing consequences.
That said, I can't really deny either that at least part of this trend is self-inflicted on the part of the gaming community at large. Gamers have all but collectively rejected the subscription model where we pay for the games we play on a recurring basis. For games like MMOs that require ongoing funding to develop new content in order for the community around it to thrive, what other funding models outside of the freemium model do designers really have?
The DLC/expansion pack model also worked adequately for some time, and still does for games that involve mostly episodic experiences, but not so much for games that have living worlds and require ongoing development of new content and incur ongoing infrastructure costs. It also comes with similar problems as the model of paying for software upgrades, because developer incentives and users' needs can become misaligned. Oftentimes in this model, bug fixes and quality of life improvements get sidelined in favor of more content/features, and the community becomes fractured across expansion packs, undermining the natural network effects that these kinds of games inherently tend to create.
It's also really difficult to fault freemium games for using exploitative tactics that target players who do end up paying to pay more, when the distribution of people who actually pay for things in these games is often so wildly unevenly distributed that the top percentage of paying players often account for a disproportionate percentage of overall revenue, while the vast majority of overall player-base pay absolutely nothing, and those who do so often wear it as badge of pride, no less.
I've always wanted to build a game myself, but I could never figure out how to align my own need for ongoing revenue to support the development of a game that I might love and end up wanting to keep working on indefinitely, with that of a gaming community that has soundly rejected any funding model that makes it possible to achieve that without resorting to tactics I'd rather not stoop to.
> That said, I can't really deny either that at least part of this trend is self-inflicted on the part of the gaming community at large. Gamers have all but collectively rejected the subscription model where we pay for the games we play on a recurring basis. For games like MMOs that require ongoing funding to develop new content in order for the community around it to thrive, what other funding models outside of the freemium model do designers really have?
World of Warcraft, Final Fantasy XI, Final Fantasy XIV, and EVE Online all still successfully use the subscription model (with varying levels of free trials).
But publishers wanted more money - from people unwilling to pay subscriptions, and from people that would spend at a cash shop in addition to a subscription, so freemium models get added. It hardly seems fair to blame the entire gaming community for the existence of these people, and the profit-maximizing game publishers.
> It's also really difficult to fault freemium games for using exploitative tactics that target players who do end up paying to pay more
I don't find it difficult to fault exploitative behavior just because it's profitable.
> World of Warcraft, Final Fantasy XI, Final Fantasy XIV, and EVE Online all still successfully use the subscription model (with varying levels of free trials).
The most recently released game in that list is Final Fantasy XIV, which was released in 2010, almost a decade ago, and the rest are about a decade older than that. A _lot_ more MMOs since then have tried the subscription model and failed. It may have worked in a few rare cases in the past, and some of those might still live on today through sheer inertia, but I think it's reasonable to claim that subscription is generally no longer considered a viable model for new MMOs.
I'm not saying some publishers won't find ways to extract more money from players by adding freemium features on top of subscription games if they could. Of course some would, greed knows no bounds. But I am saying that they can't afford to charge a subscription fee to begin with, if they want their game to become successful in today's climate, even if they intend to use that as their only source of funding, forgoing freemium features entirely.
> I don't find it difficult to fault exploitative behavior just because it's profitable.
I think I made it pretty clear I find those practices despicable too. But if your only option is the freemium model, you don't really have much of a choice but to discriminate based on who's willing to pay and how much. That's literally the only way the model can work, by definition.
The games are old, but they're still live. So it could just as well mean that the subscription MMO market is viable but saturated, so they're expanding into non-subscription. There's nowhere near enough evidence to go right for the players-won't-pay explanation, when there are literally millions of subscription-paying players.
I'd argue that the drawn out deaths of those MMOs shows how creatively bankrupt the MMO market is - people aren't leaving for new MMOs, they're staying with old ones till they get bored, because there's nothing better out there.
That's one way to see it, and it's certainly not unreasonable to see it that way.
But looking at it another perspective, you can also argue that making MMOs with persistent worlds that can only be supported by subscription has become so risky of an investment that nobody is willing to experiment with drastically new paradigms/mechanics because historically an overwhelming majority of those who tried have failed, which could be what led to the creatively bankrupt landscape we have today.
It's impossible to know which perspective is more accurate because it's clearly a chicken-or-egg situation. But one thing that we can observe today is that practically (or maybe actually?) nobody even tries to make MMOs with subscriptions anymore, and new MMOs today end up defaulting to freemium (and all the morally bankrupt behavior that the model leads to), whatever the reason for that might be, and I think that's a shame.
> I'd argue that the drawn out deaths of those MMOs shows how creatively bankrupt the MMO market is - people aren't leaving for new MMOs, they're staying with old ones till they get bored, because there's nothing better out there.
Indeed. I like MMOs, but there's just nothing up my alley at this point and I'm waiting for the revival of a 15 year old game (WoW Classic) or the spiritual successor of an even older game (Pantheon).
I think it's a bit extreme to say it's exploitative but it's certainly a philosophical dilemma. At what point does improving user engagement become a bad thing? People _love_ to gamble and play games of chance.
Buying random drop rolls does seem in poor taste. Though I never understood why you would pay to not play the game.
> It's exploitative in the same way that gambling in general is exploitative, but isn't bound by the tight legal restrictions that prevent gambling companies from targeting children who might be most vulnerable to these exploitative tactics and more likely to fall into a vicious cycle of addiction early in life, which can have dramatic, literally life-changing consequences.
Yet. There has already been a lot of controversy over lootboxes and how they're basically promoting gambling to kids, and they've already been banned in certain countries (like Belgium) and drawn fire from governments and gambling comission officials in others.
There's a pretty good chance that at some point, these types of practices will get cracked down on hard, that'll they'll likely affect age ratings more in future and (like with GDPR and privacy or accessibility and the internet), they'll lead to lawsuits.
Mario Kart is notorious for "rubber banding" techniques that make it easier if you are bad at the game. Other examples:
- Enemies move at a speed proportional to how far behind you are. Hacking the game and putting yourself way ahead causes enemies to drive inhumanly fast. See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0JV-kMYLYCo
- Only the person in last place can get blue shells from item blocks.
As a kid, I remember playing a racing game where you could just wait for the AI to cover one complete lap (on the three to go). Since you were so much behing, the AI would become very slow. After being overtaken, you could start racing and it was easier to win this way than really racing from the start.
After discovering this trick, the game was ruined for me.
I wonder if we as tech creators can utilize these techniques to actually do good for the person, their life, and humanity as a whole, instead of begging for their attention in the virtual/simulated, could we help them with their real life goals?
This reminded me of an IndieHackers episode from a few weeks ago, where they interviewed the founder of https://pioneer.app/, which attempts to use gaming mechanics to motivate people to work on interesting projects and be more productive. It's a really cool idea that has the potential to do a lot of good for the world imo, so I have hope that this _can_ definitely be done.
This happens a lot but usually picking the supporting extrinsic rewarding parts of game design like achievements and levelling rather than thinking about how game design can make activities intrinsically more rewarding.
Also I think that for a lot of people videogames really do have positive effects which enrich humanity.
And the vast majority of times I've seen attempts at that, it ends up being some combination of distracting, condescending, and irrelevant to what I was trying to do.
Well that just isn't true at all. Educational games span as wide a gamut in quality as any genre. You just need to know where to look. Sites like https://explorabl.es/ provide rich educational material in interactive form.
Is there a particular case you find lacking? What are you trying to learn?
I think we're considering very different categories, and I probably should have been more specific, sorry. I was thinking about "gamification" in products whose primary focus is not education - in the worst form of what I'm talking about, it substitutes for help or documentation.
After my comment I gave it some thought and figured that's what you meant in the context of Duolingo, which is a great example of this. I've tried in vain to convince others they're wasting their time (it could be spent more efficiently) but they feel like they're "winning" something so it's futile.
Gamification is usually meant for creating addictive behaviors but I think some of it was in earnest effort. I can see how the idea of "Nobody ever wants to learn, let's try to make learning a game" makes sense from above, but it's hard to actually implement correctly. And at some point, some new manager with ideas about gamification for profit's sake inevitably joins the company.
Neurofeedback therapy seems like a good candidate for that - helps train people to self-regulate/calm their brains by engineering a computer game that makes them feel good (by giving them rewards when their brain is in the right state).
Meanwhile my destiny 2 spawn rates make it feel like bungie has tuned the game for maximum "you won't ever get to experience the cool thing that all the streamers say you need" ;)
My first thought was about NetHack. That game is ruthless, and has no qualms about letting the RNG screw you over. If you make 3 attempts at something with a 1 in 3 probability of success, you'd better be prepared for that 29.6% chance of failure.
And don't even talk to me about breaking mirrors...
Off by one on video slots. Penny slots where you win 70 times on 100 simultaneous bets. 'Skill' at dice throwing in craps. Winning a free drink when you look like you are fixin' to leave.
Building addictive products looks hard but rewarding.
Something similar that I applied to the games I made: adjust bounding boxes to always favor the player. If it is a platform that they can fall off, make the bounding box bigger. If it’s an enemy bullet, make it smaller.
If you ever played mario party it always seemed as though those in the lead would have worse luck on rolls. I think they were trying to keep the game competitive.
I remember getting infuriated with the recent Super Mario Party because so often it would have a player (who might be in 1st or 2nd place) collect a star, and then choose the next star spawn point close enough away that the player was able to reach the next star point while completing the same turn, being able to buy 2 stars in a single turn! What the hell?
If I were the designer I'd make sure to pick a next star position far away from the previous point on the board, or at least make sure it couldn't be reached that very same turn by the same player. That just seemed lazy.
All ARPG's are massively relying on randomization for both map layouts, enemies and rewards. Weapons in FPS games have random accuracy. Same in RTS games. How about the random generated worlds of minecraft? Also sandbox games like SimCity and The Sims are full of random events.
As a game designer I have to disagree, but you do kinda have to massage the randomness to the player's benefit sometimes, especially since players will see things that didn't happen sometimes ("the computer player got all the good cards and I got only bad cards!" ...you got the same cards, just in a random order, that's literally not possible).
Randomness can make a game endlessly replayable (or at least until you get bored of the game), but there is something to be said for constructed levels as well, as they can keep the game interesting and not make it seem like it's just more of the same. If both are feasible I try to include both when I can (like random maps and designed maps).
If we're talking tabletop games, though, there are some people that just hate randomness for some reason, to the point where even a random but full information setup will anger them. And yet they don't want to play combinatorial abstract games, which are better suited for that. I don't get it (I do love abstract games myself, but I'm also fine with randomness)
In competitive multiplayer games, then sure, randomness is almost always disliked, and any form of luck mechanics are usually loathed by the fanbase. See for example how unpopular tripping was in Smash Bros Brawl, or how items tend not to be enabled in tournament play.
On the other hand, less competitive multiplayer games and single players can have randomness work well. Few complain about randomly generated levels in single player games (at least on a 'this is unpredictable' level, roguelikes are basically entirely random, many sandbox games have random systems of events that could happen at any time and party games tend to be heavily based on random mechanics overall.
Let's be more specific. The concept in both games is securing equipment which can aid you. Randomness only applies to your drop line and loot dispersal.
After you get your gear, randomness is no longer in play other than the circles of death. A shot to a player's head should always connect. There's no element of randomness when engaging with another player.
If there was a noticeable random element of accuracy in your weapons, the community would drop PUBG in a hot second. Fortnite's scene isn't nearly as competitive so it's possible there is more leeway for random combat, but in PUBG dependable combat is a MUST.
Bullet spread is present in every modern FPS, with most weapons and not just in hip fire mode.
Bullet spread as a stratagem isn't random because the idea is that you can choose: Quick, reactionary hip fire or slow, focused aiming? One guarantees a hit at the expense of speed, the other guarantees speed at the expensive of maybe not hitting. But no one using hip fire will be angry that their gun might have missed, because the system is predictable, non-random and non-changing. However, if we were talking about a system where sometimes your aiming is precise and sometimes it isn't, with no clear rules, then your strategy begins to depend on randomness instead of interfacing with it.
That's why randomness isn't "paramount" to the combat of PUBG. This is why the game is successful. Bugs nonwithstanding, once a player secures loot they can form predictable, actionable strategies that do not depend on RNG. If this wasn't the case, and randomness bled into combat itself, nobody would play the game.
They aren’t competitive in the sense of being an e-sport with ranking/ELO, competitions, prizes, leagues, paid salaries, etc.
Yes, they have some prizes in some events with popular players, but they aren’t really competitive in the same sense as, say, MOBAs, strategy games or FPSs.
The fact that a game has PvP does not mean it is competitive in that sense.
I think the issue isn't randomness in general, but rather randomness where part of the outcome space is just "you lose" instead of being a different challenge that you can somehow overcome. Even then, it depends on the overall flow and UX of the game; if it's cheap enough to try again, even a pretty bleak outcome space can become tolerable or even interesting (cf. slot machines).
I think this is more true for highly competitive games. Speedrunners are often found lamenting "RNG". Even in the physical world, the most contentious moments in sports arise from "bad calls" by the ref.
I think Randomness has a role to play in games like Poker. Its role is to create unknowns the player has to use statistical reasoning to overcome. However, not all games rely on randomness as a crutch for removing information.
A great example is Diplomacy[0]. Instead of randomness, you have asymmetrical information, for which you have to use the same type of statistical reasoning. This is much more satisfying than randomness, because there is substance behind the veil.
There are 7 players, and each starts with 3 or 4 units. The outcome of an attack is determined entirely by numerical superiority. If you attack with more units than are defending, you win. However, because there are so many more players than units, and all orders for a turn are resolved at the same time, you don't know what's going to happen because you don't know what other players are going to do. Will your allies actually support your attacks, or will they backstab you and defend your opponent instead? People can make your attack or defense fail simply by not writing the order to support you, because you don't have enough units to do it alone. Therefore, the outcome is dominated by cooperation between players. You don't know what will happen only because you don't know who's lying.
And this gives you a way to overcome the "random" element by finding out who's really lying using... Diplomacy!
Mafia is another game that relies on asymmetrical information instead of randomness, if you forgive the fact that roles are randomly assigned. This is a less pure example, because there is some element of randomness. However, the information game is still more important, because the randomness is limited to setting up the board. Poker uses this kind of randomness, because once you shuffle the deck, the result of drawing a card is not random. Procedural generation is a mixed case, but I think it usually falls into this bucket as well.
In general, randomness is good when it is used to hide information, but it can become very frustrating when it is used to create information independent of any other causal structure. Randomness is bad when it destroys the narrative a player is forming about their experience. If the causal structure of your game is capable of hiding information without relying on randomness, like with Diplomacy, then you don't need any.
I should have specified I meant video games, because I can think of a few tabletop / card games which completely remove randomness. I've never heard of Diplomacy and that looks pretty cool.
It does seem that if you remove randomness entirely, what you're left with is a game whose strategy revolves around information symmetry/asymmetry. Either it's a game where all the rules are known and players are on equal footing, or it's a game like Diplomacy where rules and game state are known initially but players can create information asymmetry to use to their advantage as the game progresses.
I don't think there is a meaningful distinction between board games and video games in terms of gameplay. Many board games have been turned into video games. Battletech and Warhammer have both tabletop and computer implementations. Civilization is just a complex board game. Diplomacy is more often played by email or through a web app than it is played tabletop, so it might as well be considered a video game. Magic: The Gathering has been turned into a video game as well, with microtransactions and matchmaking and everything you would expect. Hearthstone is a MtG clone that never even had a physical incarnation: it is nothing but a video game.
Chess is a good example of a game with perfect information for both sides. There's a variant of chess that was popular for training military officers in the 19th century called Kriegspiel that has Fog of War. It is played with 3 boards and a moderator. Each player has a board with only their pieces, and the moderator sees both sides. Players tell the moderator their move, who figures out the result. This is precisely the sort of thing for which we now use computers when playing strategy games of all kinds.
The fundamental principle of randomness, in a Bayesian sense, is that it represents a lack of information. There are two ways in which randomness can be used in games. It can be used to set up the initial conditions for the game, such as with procedural generation; or it can be used directly as part of the conflict resolution mechanism. When it is used in the latter sense, such as by having your success determined by die roll, it creates an illusion of hidden information, but it's hollow. In the case of a game like Kriegspiel or Diplomacy, there is an actual state that can be probed through clever gameplay, and probabilistic reasoning enhances your ability to do that. But when the state doesn't exist, and you model the result of missing information with a die roll, all you have to work with is the law of large numbers. When there is no hidden state about which to make inferences, it can make a game feel shallow.
Here's another example: Starcraft. If you are playing 1v1 on a 4 player map, there is some randomness in spawn positions, but ignoring that, the game is very deterministic. Units deal a specific amount of damage, pathfinding works a particular way, there's no randomness in chance to hit, or movement speed, or construction time. But there is a huge amount of hidden information because of Fog of War. At a high level of play, players may see very indirect hints of what the other player is doing, and by knowing how long it takes to build everything, they can figure out what the opponent is doing, with precision.
"If he has 8 marines at 3 minutes, he must have built early Barracks and he's not teching! I better prepare for an early attack." I don't remember the exact timings anymore but there are a lot of tells like this. A lot of the strategy of that game revolves around scouting and denying information, and making attacks at an ideal timing where the opponent has sunk the most resources into gaining an advantage (such as tech for more powerful units), but hasn't yet gained any benefit. I can't think of any randomness in Starcraft beyond the 4-position maps in 1v1, which players hate!
Instead, the main principles are hidden information, and dexterity. It is very difficult to control every unit precisely unless you have 400 actions per minute. Randomizing action resolution isn't important because it is physically impossible to play perfectly.
> I don't think there is a meaningful distinction between board games and video games in terms of gameplay
The topic at hand was how randomness is undesirable in video games.
> Chess is a good example of a game with perfect information for both sides.
If we're discussing perfect information with respect to Game Theory, Chess is a good example, though my favorite example is Tic-Tac-Toe because of how simple the ruleset is.
As for a 2x2 game with Fog of War and truly no randomness, I would suggest Advance Wars. Spawn locations on maps are always predictable, though a player can create hidden information by not deploying in every available spawn location.
dunno, random maps are a fundamental aspect of survival games and other where the challenge lies in optimizing the result more than the result itself, like tycoons.
I misread the title as "How Designer Engineers Luck Into Video Games", and immediately thought why would they be talking about being lucky when the every month some report comes out that makes it sound like the whole industry is burning. Haha.
This actual topic was far more interesting, and that Twitter thread link posted by CM30 is gold.
For example, in Bioshock 1, the enemies will always miss their first shot, whereas Assassin's Creed and Doom have the last part of the health bar actually take more shots/attacks to deplete to make it feel like players are winning by the skin of their teeth.
There's a whole list of examples here:
https://twitter.com/gaohmee/status/903510060197744640