Month: July 2011

It is very likely that something unlikely will happen. There are many unlikely possibilities, and many things happen, so at the meta-level you should not be surprised that you are frequently surprised. This is a probability refresher for players and fans of weighted random number generators with attached narratives, although it applies generally in life. In a world with seven billion people, one-in-a-million events happen all the time.

Many people see something suspicious, meaningful, portentous, etc. in unlikely occurrences because they are over-specifying the event and ignoring the population of possible events. There probably is no conspiracy against you, nor did they change the accuracy code in your game.

I call the event “over-specified” because you are pondering how unlikely the particular event is rather than the likelihood of a member of that class of events. What is the chance that the car in front of you will have your spouse’s birthday in its license plate number? Pretty small. What is the chance that at least one car in front of you today will have a number that is somehow interesting in its license plate number? That is a long list of possible unlikely events, and while it might be surprising to notice a particular one, we have a lot of winning numbers in that lottery. Remember that this particular unlikely event is not the only one that you would have found surprising if it came up.

The “population of events” is how many chances there are for something unlikely to happen. We forget how very, very many of these there are. My standard example is having streaks of misses in a game. If you have a 90% chance to hit, the chance of missing 5 times in a row is 1 in 100,000. That is pretty unlikely. But if 2 million people are playing WoW every day, and each of them attacks once every five seconds for an hour per day, several people should have that 5-miss streak every minute. If even a small percentage complain about it, it will sound like a constant cacophony about horribly buggy code in the game’s to-hit rolls, but it is just a perfectly normal result of a random process with a lot of trials. Flipping back a paragraph, the more you drive, the more chances you have to see unlikely license plates, and then add in everyone else who might tell you if s/he saw one. Given enough rolls of the dice, incredibly unlikely chances become absolutely certain.

: Zubon

For your linking convenience the next time someone indicts the developers for perfectly predictable streaks in random number generators without suggesting why this streak is meaningful, or for instances of “it’s a sign” more generally. Try not to stomp on anyone who finds simple joy in noticing license plate numbers, so long as s/he is not making major life decisions based on them.

I recently played The Wonderful End of the World. It is a cousin to Katamari Damacy, with less depth, variety, and humor, but it is still whimsical and benefits from PC controls. It is inexpensive and has about 3 hours of gameplay, or at least that is how long it took me to complete the game, get an A+ rating on every level, complete all the achievements, and mess around a bit with modes and options.

There need to be more “roll up the world” games. There are a few points that you look forward to in a well-designed level, and these could fit well in our MMO world.

• Barrier Becomes Fodder: If you start by picking up paperclips on a tabletop, hemmed in by books, you must later pick up those books. If you start in the garden, rolling over the garden gate to start consuming the city is a critical moment. In your MMO, if something stands between your newbie zone and the “real world,” the player should get a chance to destroy it. Slay the ogre at the edge of the valley or destroy the alien ship that is sending in the enemy forces. Show the first mini-boss from the first instant and crush him.
• Rapid Growth: You change the scene by giving the player a line of things to consume very quickly. Depending on the size, this could be a line of gumdrops, a row of hedges, or a parking lot full of cars. You rampage over them, and suddenly you are playing on a different scale. The later, bigger levels may have a few iterations of this, moving from “smaller than a human” to “I wonder if I can pick up that volcano” in 3 minutes. The lines also serve to guide the player, steering them from one part of the map to a new one that provides new growth potential. It gives the player a moment of feeling really awesome, facilitates the scene change, and provides a trail of breadcrumbs. The player ends one phase of life on a high note and has a running start as s/he sees the next tier of available.
• Return to Start: You broke through that barrier on your way out, but at some point you must go back so that you can see how much you have grown. You start out dodging ducks, but you come back for the boats in the pond. You pick up the table you started on. Some levels make this the finale, but others make it the half-way point, and the last level might do it repeatedly as you pick up the ducks, the boats, the entire garden, the entire block, the entire island… The earliest levels may be too short to do this, but the later levels should include going back over the same territory and picking up that house, garden, etc. where you played the first few levels. Besides highlighting how awesomely huge you have become, it makes the game world feel like a more coherent place. The hero’s journey ends with the return home.

: Zubon