Comment by pugworthy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pugworthy | Hacker News Reader

People do seem to detest the concept of random number generators in games. They feel like the "luck" is completely out of their control.

Yet if you give a player a set of dice to give them perceived control over the random number generator, they are much more happy.

Dungeons and Dragons and other dice-based RPGs are a great example. If they roll a 20, they are overjoyed with the results and feel incredibly lucky. If they roll a 1 they are sad or mad, but chalk it up to bad luck.

But if it's a random number generator that they have no control over, they feel it's "random" and there is no luck. And they blame the random number generator for bad results. Even if it's just the same as using dice, without the physical interaction.

I've always thought that even if you just let the player click a button to activate the random number generator, you give them a sense of control. Perhaps you let them hold the button down for a while just like how players rattle the dice for longer hoping for "luck" in the results.

> I've always thought that even if you just let the player click a button to activate the random number generator, you give them a sense of control. Perhaps you let them hold the button down for a while just like how players rattle the dice for longer hoping for "luck" in the results.

That's the whole concept of these slot machines in Las Vegas. For some reason it seems vital to have the player his "go".

You could make a spinning color-wheel circle that the player places their mouse into whose x & y coordinates on click are multiplied by the hex value of the color that happens to be under the mouse pointer on click to generate the seed for the random number generator or you could just make a button that says, "Click here when you feel lucky". No one would be able to tell the difference.

Oh totally. It's all theater really. Random number generators wrapped up in theater and superstition.

That said, you can't ignore it since it's about perception not fact usually.

And at the same time, sometimes the "it's so random!" complaints are real. I remember finding a bug in Valve's shot pattern code based on players complaining about how our FPS shots were "off". It should have done a concentrated shot pattern, with more shots in the center of the aiming circle than the edges. But it wasn't, and ended up being a total random distribution. Changing it to have a greater weighted chance in the middle greatly improved the "feel" of the guns.

Even then when firing a real gun, nobody ever complains about "random number generators" when they don't hit their target. That's because they really feel like their ability to aim and hold a target in the sites is a critical part of the process of obtaining accurate results.

Again like dice, a situation where the participant feels like they can actually influence the outcome - and in the case of a real gun, they actually can.

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