Cognition, randomness, and deception

Frank Lantz, responding in the comment thread of a blog post he made today:

I would like to encourage game designers to stop thinking of players as subjects of psychological experiments and think of them as collaborators, fellow researchers in the experiments games allow us to do on ourselves.

The original post concerns talks by Sid Meier and Rob Pardo at the most recent GDC concerning randomness and player psychology. (Here’s a good summary of both talks.) Lantz concludes that there’s a danger in adjusting models of randomness in games to be more in line with human intuition, and asks: “Shouldn’t games be an opportunity for players to wrap their heads around counter-intuitive truths? Shouldn’t games make us smarter about how randomness works instead of reinforcing our fallacious beliefs?”

Long time Warp Skip colleague Ben Zeigler wrote today on a similar topic, detailing all of the instances at GDC where game designers were urged to deceive and prevaricate. Ben’s more sanguine about deception in game design than Lantz, comparing the whole deal to professional wrestling:

The vast majority of [professional wrestling] fans are completely aware that it’s all fake and planned, but they don’t care. They are completely willing to suspend their disbelief, and in return become part of the show. The experiences are real even though they’re based on a foundation of deception, and that’s at the core of gaming as well.

Both articles are good reads. Go read them. Lots to think about.

—Adam