Why Retro Rules
explorminate.com
explorminate.com
Sometimes, games being capricious is exactly the right thing. Though I find it frustrating when I feel like a game is "cheating" (like other Civs science advancing at a much higher rate than mine in Civilization games). There's some kind of balance in doing imbalance right. It maybe needs to go both ways...bad things and good things need to happen in surprising ways.
I haven't spent a whole lot of time thinking about game design, and the only games I've ever actually made were for the C64 and Apple II nearly 30 years ago, but reading this, and the article about Jeff Vogel's games, and thinking about the kinds of games I play forever...Nethack, Civ (including older Civs now and then). They are games that can be vicious and shocking in their lack of concern for the player. I dunno what that means about me or about game design. But, I kinda want to play some Nethack now.
DCSS tried to be like chess, nethack feels more like an actual place that might exist without the player.
This also applies to modern 4X games, like endless space. Perhaps that is one reason for the success of Dwarf Fortress, you definitely get the feeling that the player is an afterthought - right down to the very UI, the game hates you.
Today's design is so superficial, that a large chunk of applications/games/ui is just fluff and sometimes distracts from the main experience.