A friend linked me to this blog post from Lunarch Studios, an independent video game development company. And it got me thinking about how dependent many turn-based and card-style games are on luck rather than skill.
TL;DR: Many pro video game players in games like Hearthstone are complaining that the game depends too heavily on RNG. Too much reliance on absolute luck (rather than "yomi luck," or mind games) can destroy players' enjoyment.
What do you think?
Randomness provides a way for players of unequal skill to both enjoy the same game versus one another. (To an extent) It also helps egos from getting to crumbled by a loss, as they have easy fallback of it being the random number generators fault, not theirs. Things like that make games with random elements more attractive, and more popular.
In other words, "deterministic" vs "nondeterministic". ie: Chess is deterministic, Yahtzee is not. It's a difficult balance to strike.
Too little randomness and once you learn a game, and if hypothetically your brain had the computational ability to process all the choices there is only one optimal choice given a set of conditions. Where's the fun in that? It only works so long as it remains beyond your brain's capacity ie: Chess vs Tic-Tac-Toe.
Too much randomness if you start feeling like the randomness is all the matters. Your choices don't matter if the hand you were delt was so bad you can't do anything useful with it. I get that a bit in Magic: The Gathering. And Candyland, Snakes [Chutes] and Ladders being pure randomness (a Markov chain, actually) leaves you with no choices whatsoever. No fun in that either (past the age of five!).
Randomness is sometimes necessary to prevent pattern memorization. Sometimes a designer sees patterns as appropriate, and sometimes he or she doesn't. Procedural generation, for example, is used precisely to change things up, to change the challenge.
Randomness challenges your true skill.
Randomness will result in new situations and the correct evaluation and reaction to this new situation strongly depends on the true skill of the player. A random event could result in a disadvantage, but on the other hand the same will occur to the opponent. In the long run the player, which reacts more skillfully to the ever changing situation will most likly be the winner.
I think that a common factor in many successful mobile games is making a game feel like it's mostly skill based when it's actually largely luck based. Flappy birds, Angry Birds and Candy Crush are all games that fall into that category I think.
No one would ever play a game that risked actual money based on the random draw of a card.
Oh, wait -- yes they do. Constantly. In every casino, all over the world.
Randomness is not the problem. Poor implementation of "randomness" is a more likely culprit.
