Hey all. Okay, we’re not using “Randomness” anymore. Or, this is a proposal to use some different terms, for different, specific things. The word “randomness” is really overloaded with a lot of different uses and I find that it’s sometimes difficult to talk about different kinds of variance in games in a way that is both clear, and also doesn’t sound like you’re trying to criticize a game when you perhaps aren’t. My favorite videogame is “Hearthstone: Battlegrounds” (not regular Hearthstone, which I hate, but the autobattler within the Hearthstone app), and it is highly, highly “random” by most definitions of this word. I think this is meant more for conversation than my last article on randomness, which I still think is good and useful in a different way.
Unpredictable: This is the blanket term for any mechanism that the player is not meant to be able to deterministically predict. So this would include everything from card draws from a random deck, damage ranges (you deal 5-10 damage), or anything else that would normally be called “random”. I would also personally include execution here as something that is unpredictable (you cannot predict that you will correctly input the dragon punch inputs this time), and also simultaneous actions as well. This is kind of our basic replacement term for “randomness” that I’ll be using in this article.
Chaotic: I think this would be an experiential descriptor that describes the feeling of a game wherein a lot of unpredictable effects are happening frequently enough, that it feels difficult to pin down the game state in a solid-feeling way. I want to be clear that to me, a game being chaotic could be a good thing or a bad thing. I think that if you want to evoke the feeling of a fight or a battle, at least some degree of “chaoticness” helps. Many games that are themed as battles but lack chaoticness, end up feeling more like puzzles and losing that aesthetic feeling of chaos.
Volatile: This is a term that is used to describe high-impact unpredictable mechanisms. So, it’s less about the odds of success, or the frequency of the unpredictable events, and more about the impact that the unpredictable event has. So “you deal 6-10 damage” is less volatile than “you deal 0-100 damage”.
Erratic: This could be a term that describes a system that is non-uniformly unpredictable, that goes from highly predictable to highly unpredictable in a way that itself feels somewhat unpredictable. Nothing comes to mind for me as an example of this but I’m sure it exists. Think of a game that mostly feels deterministic and controlled but then suddenly there’s this crazy mini game where the whole table gets flipped.
Luck-Based / Unfair: These would be two terms that are describing the mostly emotional experience of playing a game that has a lot of high variance unpredictable events happening. If it’s a one player game, you might be more likely to use “luck based”, since you’re playing from one player’s perspective, but for multiplayer games you might see them as more “unfair”, given that we tend to start thinking about concepts like “fairness” once there are several people involved.
“Slot Machine”: This is for a game or system whose skill ceiling is also the skill floor, or close to it. Games or systems that are “totally random”, like a coin flip. You don’t really see that much of this in video games but it’s worth mentioning, especially with the rise of gambling games in mobile games.
Feel free to propose some more. What do you think of these?
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