Week 6 Reading Notes - Chance vs Skill

Chance

Chance is an important element of a lot of games, as it allows the game to have a much wider audience and makes a lot of games more fun. Chance appears in many games where we wouldn’t have even noticed it; it makes boring, mindless decisions more interesting to the players.

The Role of Chance in Games

Delaying solvability

Solvability affects how compelling a game is, because when a game is solvable easily, it means the players can see the ending; like when a player can easily see that they’re going to lose, they are much more likely to walk away from the game.

Making play competitive for all players

A lot of games need to be made equal for everybody playing, and by adding an element of chance to the game, it becomes less reliant on skill and therefore even the weakest of players stand a chance of winning.

Increasing Variety

When a game has an element of chance, the player’s choices are widened significantly by adding a larger number of situations which can come about at any time.

Creating Dynamic Moments

When waiting to see if a plan or action has succeeded or failed, it can be a very tense moment. Even without strategy, random processes playing out can be compelling as well.

Enhancing Decision Making

When there is a random element in games, there’s never a tactic which always works. Some moves in games like chess are small but safe, whereas there are others which are risky but reward greatly.

Mechanics of Chance

Dice

Rolling a single die is about as random as you can get. However, when rolling two dice, the outcome is not nearly as random. The more dice you roll at once, the less random the outcome.

Cards

Cards are very versatile game elements. They can be used in many ways; they can be shuffled, played face-down, be used as resources, or even be used to track game information.

Hidden Information

When non-random information is hidden from a player, it’s still random from their perspective. In games like Go Fish, each player knows what cards they are holding, but the opponents make wild guesses because they don’t know themselves; to them it seems random.

Other Game Bits

Lots of other forms of randomness are variants of the above. Spinners are like dice, flipping a coin is like a two-sided die, a dreidel is like a four-sided die, and cardboard tiles from a bag are like a deck of cards.

Skill

Enhances choice in games by allowing the player to know whats going to happen when they make a move

Chance can make a game feel unfair and frustrating, or boring as the player has no control over what happens. This is because chance doesn't have any interesting decision-making.

Decisions

Obvious decisions

If a decision has an obvious answer with no thought put into it, it should be automatic so as not to distract the player from more interesting decisions.

Blind decision

A decision which you have no information on, so no matter what you choose you won't be in control of the game; it’s just a random decision.

Meaningless decision

A decision with no right or wrong answer, it doesn't affect the game in any way. You could get a choice in a game, but whichever choice you choose ends in exactly the same result.

Trade-Offs

Trade-off decisions are when you pick one decision, but it means you have to lose whatever the other decision offers. This would be like getting a choice over a knife or a gun before a fight. No right or wrong answer, just tactics. Risk vs. reward trade-offs offer you higher risk and reward, or lower risk and less rewards.

You want to keep the players locked into the game by constantly making them make decisions, the more frequent their decisions, the more immersed they will become in the game.

Key mechanics of skill

Auctions

Auctions allow players an opportunity to get something for cheap, but it also means you could end up paying more for an item; they also help create tension as they reach the climax. Auctions allow you to alter supply and demand. Closed auctions are when each player takes it in turns to bid, and whoever drops out loses. Open auctions are when anybody can drop in and leave a bid for an item; both types are tense because each player may have different reasons for bidding on an item in a game, they may put up a ridiculously high price, but if they get said item they may win the game. Should you still go against them in the bid?

Abilities

Objects which give you limited opportunities so you may have to use them wisely and with the right timing. 

My Thoughts On The Chapters

After reading these chapters, I know realise the great importance chance and skill have on games. I think for a Games Designer, it's crucial to decide whether you want your game to be skill-based, chance-based or a mixture of the two early on, as it affects the gameplay in such a way that your target audience could change drastically depending on which you choose.


There are a lot of ways to utilize chance and skill whilst designing games, but it seems very hard to get a good balance between the two. I learnt this when doing our iterations on Friday's lesson; when trying to give a chance-based game an element of skill it was extremely hard, whereas giving a skill-based game an element of chance was far too easy, and we couldn't get a good balance.


Overall I enjoyed reading the chapters and I've now got a good insight into the roles of chance and skill in games, as well as the mechanics I need to implement to achieve them.