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Luck vs. the control freak - lessons in game design

Touch my stump·9/17/2019, 4:49:00 AM·15 votes·8,706 views

Magic the Gathering's lead designer Mark Rosewater categorizes his gamers into three categories.

  1. The Timmys - looking for fun and exiting experiences
  2. The Jennys - looking to create, explore, and to be unique
  3. The Spikes - looking to win, control, and dominate

According to Mark, one of the reasons Magic has had so much success over the decades is because the game has cards that are specifically designed to make each of these three types happy. Teamfight Tactics is designed the same way. According to Mark's design philosophy, Timmy, Jenny, and Spike react differently to randomness, or luck, within game. Timmy loves RNG because it creates exiting experiences. Jenny is indifferent to RNG because it doesn't affect her ability to explore and be creative. Spike hates RNG because it diminishes their sense of control.

There is one major flaw with this theory. Poker, as a sport, tends to attract the Spikes of the world. This is problematic because poker, as a game, has relatively more moments of luck than moments of skill (once you analyze moment to moment gameplay). Spikes should HATE poker, but instead they love it. As a game designer in training, I have been wrestling with this problem for about a month now, and I have found the solution.

Although Spike plays to win, he does not mind losing if (a) he is able to understand why he lost, and (b) if he feels like he was in control of the outcomes in the game. To illustrate this, a game that Spikes love to play is chess because it is straightforward to understand why a player won/lost, what the player could have done differently to win, and the player feels like they alone are in control of the game's outcomes.

Like chess, poker is a game where it is fairly straightforward to analyze the way a player played his/her hand. Although Spike hates losing to luck, Spike enjoys how transparent all the variables of poker are within game. This allows him to analyze his moves, learn from his mistakes, and become a better player. Figuratively speaking, all the cards are on the table. This allows Spike to feel like they are in control of game outcomes DESPITE there being a large element of luck to the game.

Spikes are control freaks. Poker is a straightforward game where all game elements are easily visible and transparent to the player. This makes Spike feel like they are in control of game outcomes.

Games like Hearthstone and Teamfight Tactics are not as straitforward as poker. As a Spike, I remember how much I disliked Ragnaros because it terrible to lose (and also win) based off of a coin flip. In Teamfight Tactics, I dislike the Phantom trait for the same reason. If the phantom hits your stacked carry, you might lose 25 hp that round and get knocked out. If phantom hits a low-priority target, your opponent might lose 25 hp and get knocked out. Like Ragnaros, the game can become reduced to a coin-flip (under special circumstances, of course).

Unlike poker, Hearthstone and Teamfight Tactics both have game elements that are not transparent or straitforward to the player. For example, in poker a player always knows where their "position" is (position is a term that refers to their location relative to the dealers). In Teamfight Tactics, players do not know their "position" as they would in poker since they never know who they will be battling next. I am not recommending that the matchmaking AI be predictable. However, I am recommending that the matchmaking AI be understandable to average skilled players. In this way, game elements may become less mysterious to players, making the Spikes of this world happy.

Tl;dr: Spikes like feeling like they are in control more than they like actually being in control. Spikes feel like they are in control when all game elements are made understandable to them. This is true for poker but not for many of the other RNG-based games that are popular today (e.g., Hearthstone, Teamfight Tactics, etc.) However, all is not lost, because games like Hearthstone and Teamfight Tactics have MUCH more to offer to the Jennys of the world than poker does.

12 Comments

SupportiveRebel9/17/2019, 10:49:04 AM7 votes

The simple reason why rosewater's theory is incomplete, is every person has a subconscious. The subconscious often seeks a paradoxical outcome. Many spikes, for example, have a secret guilty pleasure for adrenaline and the rush. They get EXTRA satisfaction if they can be placed in an unpredictable scenario, keep their cool, and still emerge victorious, despite adversity. Other spikes just want to predict all outcomes. There are many subtypes.

The takeaway being that different people find satisfaction in a wide array of traits of a game, even paradoxically at times. It's good to have a mix of everything, but above all the variance of the game can never exceed the impact of skill, on a macro level, or the game will ultimately feel pointless and non-competitive.

Touch my stump9/17/2019, 4:49:13 AM3 votes

bump because it took me forever to write that

Milo de Vries9/17/2019, 1:58:18 PM3 votes

While I agree with all of the points in this, I disagree with the conclusion.

The reason Spikes enjoy Poker isn't simply the system allows for a false sense of control - it is that there is actual skill play that allows a player to improve. A good poker player fully understands there will be rng, and as such doesn't risk their life savings on one hand. Poker isn't about winning every game, it is about winning the plurality of games. As long as you take down more hands of higher value than the other seven players over time, you make money.

Likewise, phantom isn't at all a problem for the same reason: In higher ranks the only comps running phantom are glacial rangers and ranger knights. Morde/kindred. You aren't going to put kindred in until there are at least 6 champs on the board, meaning at best phantom has a one in six chance of hitting your carry. If you lose one in six times, then it is just like poker. Sometimes rng wins, but if you are good, it normally doesn't. If you lose to this comp more than one in six times, then phantom isn't the issue.

Furthermore, you can always scout either of these comps pretty early. If you know the possibility of a phantom, you can always choose to balance your items among your champs instead of going for one hard carry. The issue with having a hard carry is you are betting everything on one hand. If that works for you most of the time, and sometimes doesn't, then its a good comp. If it fails to phantom/assassins/hex silence/cursed blade all too often, then its time to rethink the strat.

MaskedMadness9/17/2019, 9:53:32 PM3 votes

I made the same analogy as well and nobody wanted to believe me. Poker is the perfect example because, although it is highly luck based. there is A LOT you can do to sway the game in your favor. AKA MINDGAMES. not to say what i did in my most from a while ago

summing it up. in poker you can actually affect the game with skill with mind gaming and emotion control. TFT offers no form of mind gaming or ability to counter someones action persay

Kei1439/17/2019, 6:59:55 PM2 votes

Why do people just focus on the RNG element and not the skill part?

In poker, that is the ability to read the deck, calculate the possibilities of the enemy's cards and predict what they have based on their body language, reactions, and speech. Bluffing and reading bluff is an important part of the skill in poker and the spikes love that.

Likewise, TFT has skill elements where you make decisions as well. You get a 3 item start, should you hold into the items to get better units or items? place a completed item on a suboptimal unit? Put partial items over multiple units? Decision making and the timing to make that decision is what makes good TFT players good.

People say there's only RNG and no skill in TFT need to just git gud.

Erariodor9/17/2019, 10:02:51 AM2 votes

I enjoyed reading this :)

BestPudgeNA9/23/2019, 1:15:58 PM1 votes

MaRo

OmegaLUL

"The Jennys"

I want off this ride.

Chainman39/17/2019, 5:16:38 AM1 votes

Heres what you left out about poker. If poker was a game based on luck, than you'd never have "better" players than others so to speak. Since it would all be based on luck. Now where i understand what you're saying that luck is a factor, spikes can enjoy poker because of the calculations you can run in your head and playing the odds. For example, if you need an ace to win but we already saw 3 aces go by in the first 12 cards. The odds of you having an ace out of lets say 40 cards on a hand consisting of 5 random cards is small. In which case we would bet the guy who needs the ace to lose. Now if the ace comes out in his hand, does that mean you played incorrectly? No, but he won with luck on his side. The thing is tho he can say he played that game correctly just got unlucky. Now if we apply this to league or teamfight tactics this does not work. Your chance of getting an item is random from mob drops, your position on the board in respect to the others players and which champs are given in a circle at the start of the game are random. These are chances for your opposition or yourself to take a lead without any way to influence the game. The start of the game is fine but the item drops really destroyed the game for me. Now thats not to say you cant win if you dont get the drops but you're at a disadvantage before the game even starts which really puts me off. Theres no odds to play, no way for me to affect it or at least make up for it unless i can get lucky in rerolls or an item down the line. Now i know some of the stratgies of playing the least used team on the board to get the most of them or hyper rerolling early to get what you want before others but again these are strategies to build an advantage not to play against someone who was given a free advantage through luck.