I always want to know what can be archived by a game but not a movie. Different from movie, game contains randomness.
In both game and real life, randomness come from 2 aspects:
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Knowledge horizon. The limited information an individual can process / player’s ability of perceiving informaiton. Thus limits how far the player can see into the future.
- Fog of war
- Hardly visible objects
- Hidden hints
- Hidden condition of triggering an event
- Exponential complexity for human brain to perceive
- Execution uncertainty
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Quantum coherence & Chaos. When environmental elements come to contact with the player, it introduce some more randomness (imagine two quantum systems came into interference with each other)
- Random generated environment (map, enemy, treasure box items…)
- Random accessible event.
(* this means the Laplace demon can’t exist)
In the Youtube video The Two Types of Random in Game Design by channel Game Maker’s Toolkit. These two are called “output randomness” and “input randomness”. The video says “While output randomness could lead to frustration, input randomness encourages player to come up with strategy.”
I am fascinated by the knowledge horizon. While the randomness of environment is a physical thing, knowledge horizon is a biological thing. It’s a self reference to player as a human individual. I imagine through game play we can discover how out knowledge is limited in the real life, and we could overcome it in the game. That would be interesting.
Now looking back to the visual novel L’etranger I made, there was only one randomness — the hidden conidition that triggers events. Player is asked to make choice at certain stages of the story. Their choices affect how the story developes and ends. It was not very exciting because the conditions were not really that hidden. The outcome was somewhat predictable — There is no chanllenging coming from the randomness.
Will it be better if we introduced some other randomness into the game? We could create a super complex situation and ask player to make decision in 10 seconds (exponential complexity). We could prepare a hidden condition which can only be triggered by a certain combination of two actions that looks unrelated. Or we could create a situation that requires the knowledge from two sides of people (Fog of war).
To enable player to challenge these randomness, we need to increase the degree of freedom of game play.