Chance and Skill

For week sixes reading we were advised to read Brenda Braithwaite & Ian Schreiber (2008) Challenges For Games Designers. Chapters 5 and 6. These chapters were specifically about luck and chance, and the importance of how and why they are needed in game. Here I will be describing just that in more detail.

Chance is an element used in board games and even digital games to keep the player interested in the game for a longer period of time. This is done by the chance element giving the player a more varied experience during game play. Therefore increasing the replay value of the game in hand. By also giving a variable experience every time, the game designers can prevent players from mastering the game. Chance can be appealing as to also create tension in games. Lets take Texas Hold'em Poker for example, the longer the players bully each other into submitting more money into the kitty, the higher the dramatic tension factor; however there is skill involved with this, its all down to the luck and chance of the cards drawn. This tool that anyone on the board could potentially have a winning hand causes this dramatic tension.

Chance is needed in many games; games which do not have an aspect of chance at all can become very boring very fast. It then leads the games mechanics all down to skill; let’s take Tic Tac Toe for example. It’s a game that is based purely on skill, and because of the small range of possibility, it can easily be mastered and is easily done. If the game was to have on chance element incorporated into the game then this game would have more replay value as well as be more challenging and fun. So what are the tools we use to create chance in a game? Well here are some:

· Dice (There can be many different outcomes depending on the number thrown, there can also be more dice involved giving a higher chance outcome and no matter how many are rolled, the previous roll will never influence the future roll).

· Cards (Cards can be randomised by shuffling, they can be used as resources and they can also be hidden from other players, or not.)

· Pseudo-Random number generator (This is a digital chance producer and can work for most games, must be made sure that the outcome is not bias in any way.)

And now I will talk about the aspect of skill in a game. Skill gives a player the chance to actually improve the way they play games as it doesn’t revolve around a chance element. These games are usually more competitive as the dramatic tension can be high if two similarly ranked players are matched together. The good thing about skill is that it creates many chances for the player; a player of a game that must make decisions based on information given is a skill. There are many decisions that can be used to create an aspect of skill and here a few:

Meaningless Decision:

• These can become frustration for the player if they do not affect any part of the game and should be removed if this is the case

Blind Decision:

• This means the player has a very limited viewable information, or even none at all
• These decisions are usually connected to gambling

Obvious Decision:

• An obvious decision is pretty obvious. One way will have an extreme positive and another will have an extreme negative. Hey player will always go with positive, if these rules exist in games, the game designer should make them rules instead of decisions

Trade-off decision:

• When a user has a hard decision between two choices that are pretty much equal in stats.

Dilemmas:

• This tool gives the player a sense of danger in every possible way
• The prisoners dilemma is when two players must choose the same answer together without contact and if they both get it right, they share the reward, if they don’t, one can take all the winnings, or they both lose dramatically

All in all I thought this was my favourite reading so far as it has made me think more about games and how hard it is to balance a game between chance and skill