Envisioning Randomness is a good place to start for me because Randomness in games is normally a process the produces important results. So, maybe I can break this down into some bullet points. What am I looking for?

- a process whose results are important to me
- i can't tell what the results are going to be
- when the results come out, i can understand why they turned up that way

Then again, I've always liked exposed machinery. Seeing what's backstage, getting to explore the guts.

Seeing the process that generates a proc gen level is somewhat similar - just watching it unfold is beautiful. It allows me to envision a 'random' process. I think observing a level be generated would be significantly more pleasurable if I could dance around on it, halting processes at will... That would feel fascinating.

Starseed Pilgrim has randomness that can be envisioned: its seed growth patterns. Though there is a hidden process - how does each individual tile growth step work? - it can be seen as one entire random process, which is visible and tangible. The process in action can only be stopped, not altered otherwise once started, but it feels like something that can be seen and touched.

Artificial Intelligence is the same way, to some degree. (I'm talking about AI in games.) For the most part AI that people like a lot has some wonderfully unrealistic 'tells', hooks for understanding what is, beneath the surface, either literal randomness, or at least contains some elements of unpredictability. AI that feels unpredictable and incomprehensible feels worse, regardless of whether it is in fact random beneath the surface.

People talk about F.E.A.R. a lot, and every discussion about why its AI was so enjoyable centred around how it allowed the player to envision various facets of the unknown behaviour of the enemies.

- Flashlights, making visible their view cones (a trigger for when the AI changes behaviour)
- They announce what they're going to do / what they're doing, making visible the result of their AI processing (an unknown/invisible process. perhaps not 'random' but certainly unpredictable in many cases)

A lot of stealth games also expose both of these things. There must be more here, but I've never played F.E.A.R. myself.

At the very least we can fool ourselves into thinking we understand it because we can interact with all parts of the system; they are tangible and have a feeling.

In a game with dice, randomness is not a black box - it is a physical system which we can grasp intuitively. We can hold a cube with six faces in our hand and turn it over and over and over again, feeling the potential for chaos and all of the possible results. When we roll a "1", we know what happened.

Roll for your life: Making randomness transparent in Tharsis

Quote from: Zach Gage"If something says you're going to have a 90 percent chance and you fail, you think it's unfair. But if somebody says 'You're going to be successful at this unless you roll a one on this ten-sided die,' and you roll a one, it's kind of exciting."

I can talk about states of mind much more easily than other things, in fact. It's the air I breathe (isn't that true for everyone, though?) and the rest is just . . . distraction. Hmm.

I have to remember to thank Gereon for telling me what it meant.

Unlike most of my other games Starseed Pilgrim was quite emotional... resonant poetry for people who still love playing with systems?

I've been moving away from thinking about literal representations of things, but what if I've been thinking about representing the wrong things? For example, in Oath, I've been thinking about how Favour is not just a game mechanic, it represents a facet of the world -- the shifting favour of the inhabitants of the world of Oath, as well as your relationship(s) to them.

But, Starseed Pilgrim was much more about an emotional experience, a state of ruminating. It was about thought and feeling and cognition. See front step to tianjin - it's much more about a state of mind; it doesn't dwell on the literal existence of where I am or where I'm not; it just touches on those things briefly.

I can talk about states of mind.

the second example is Favour in Oath: Chronicles of Empire and Exile


(writing...)

the first example that comes to mind is this card, Scorched Earth, from the card game Netrunner.


both its thematic/narrative conceit and its role as a function piece of the game excite me, and they coincide wonderfully in one card. that is to say, i cannot really separate the two aspects: it is clearly one element. i can imagine different theming for the mechanics, of course, and different mechanics for the theming... this isn't saying that this card couldn't have been anything else. but they do feel like one piece, well-matched.

each of those sides of the design are exciting to me in a way that creates a positive feedback loop inside my relationship to the card, Scorched Earth.

- it does 4 meat damage, which is a lot of damage. this card could win you the game, as corp. it makes me want to build an entire deck around it.

- the flavour text not-so-subtly implies that the corp is brutal and willing to detonate buildings in order to get to the runner.

----

perhaps a better name for these elements is 'reversible double entendre'. see, the thing that makes them valuable is that while you may come across one aspect first, their relationship is... reversible. sometimes one feels obvious and the other is just backing it up.

it's so powerful that i want to build a deck around it! 4 meat damage is a lot. for those unfamiliar, the other player, the runner, has to discard that many cards or they lose instantly. their max hand size is 5. so this is... a huge amount of damage. ... this relationship to the gameplay aspect is backed up by the fact that the flavour of the card describes and shows the action as being a highly potent action. it's brutal and destructive.

on the other hand, the narrative/theme of the card is really telling me something about the corps and what they're capable of. this is an immediately, obviously unacceptable abuse of power that the corp is trying to get away with. the flavour text appears to be a quote from someone attempting to paint Weyland Consortium as innocent. the sudden brutality of the action is backed up by the fact that the card does a lot of damage.

these two aspects, the double meaning or double entendre, has a 'reversible' quality that causes me to oscillate between them in a way that's very rewarding. (maybe this is just ludonarrative assonance at work but i like this metaphor more - it's not just the marriage of gameplay and narrative that creates a magical whole object, but a specific relationship between two 'sides' of a design element -- the double entendre that cannot be resolved, but keeps flipping over and over, keeping it fresh and worth consideration for a much longer period of time.)

(anyway, in the meantime while i wait to hear back from sylvie...)

what i mean by 'double entendre design element' is something which serves two purposes - this is absolutely not a new idea but it still feels special when one element serves two purposes. i've chosen 'double entendre' because those tend to have two meanings: a public, obvious meaning; and a second hidden meaning.

it's helpful to think of them in this tiered, hierarchical way, because then each meaning has its own role; they aren't equals, they don't have to be the same, they can't be compared... the FIRST is public, visible, obvious. the SECOND private, hidden, secret, rewarding.

but.

they are both important. aside from their place in the hierarchy, each one must also be a fully-fledged design element in its own right for the most beautiful double entendre to blossom. if the FIRST is not well-developed, then it appears to be a dull veil. if the SECOND is not well-developed, then it is not enough to feel worth discovering. but if both are well-developed... well, that's what i aspire to.

note that this is not purely 'game design-y' purposes. in fact i think it's more interesting, more intuitively appealing to me, when a design element's double entendre crosses from game design to thematics.

when both meanings are of roughly equal viability, close but different enough that depending on my mood either one or the other may appear primary or dominant, the element gains a significant degree of longevity. . . i can consider one meaning to overshadow the other one day, but the next i may need to reconsider my position. in this way, an element becomes something which i can't fully put down right away, and because of this i think about it more, and my relationship to it becomes more deep.

i'll try to give some examples next.