Fairness is the unspoken promise of most video games. Controlled by an omniscient and omnipotent designer, a video game has the capacity to be ultimately just, and players expect that it will be so. (Designers also have an incentive to be even-handed: A game that always beats you is a game you’ll soon stop playing.) And yet, when video games truly play by the rules, the player can feel cheated. Sid Meier, the designer of the computer game Civilization, in which players steer a nation through history, politics, and warfare, quickly learned to modify the game’s odds in order to redress this psychological wrinkle. Extensive play-testing revealed that a player who was told that he had a 33 percent chance of success in a battle but then failed to defeat his opponent three times in a row would become irate and incredulous. (In Civilization, you can replay the same battle over and over until you win, albeit incurring costs with every loss.) So Meier altered the game to more closely match human cognitive biases; if your odds of winning a battle were 1 in 3, the game guaranteed that you’d win on the third attempt—a misrepresentation of true probability that nevertheless gave the illusion of fairness. Call it the Lucky Paradox: Lucky is fun, but too lucky is unreal. The resulting, on-going negotiation among game players and designers must count as one of our most abstract collective negotiations. [...]
Olaf Haraldsson, an 11th-century Norwegian king, once wagered a kingdom in a faith-testing game of dice. Olaf was locked in a territorial dispute with the king of Sweden over the island of Hising; eventually the two agreed to settle the matter with a dice throw. The Swedish king rolled two sixes, the highest possible score, and said there was no point in continuing the game. Olaf insisted on taking his throw; a recent convert to Christianity, he was certain that God would steer the dice in his favor. His faith was vindicated with double sixes. The men continued to take turns throwing their dice, twelve after twelve. The matter was finally settled when, during Olaf’s final throw, one of the dice split in two, to show both a six and a one, winning him the kingdom on an unprecedentedly lucky 13.[...]
“As soon as the player becomes aware of any sort of pseudo-randomness, it risks undermining the joy of getting lucky,” said Paul Sottosanti, a designer at Riot Games, publisher of League of Legends, the world’s most-played online game. Games in which you’re given seemingly random rewards often employ a device known as a “pity timer,” Sottosanti explained, which guarantees that something seemingly fortunate will happen to you after a sustained period of misfortune—anything from 10 minutes to an hour, depending on the game. In World of Warcraft, every time players defeat a foe, they hope to receive a “Legendary”—one of the game’s highly powerful weapons. Legendaries have an infinitesimally small chance of being “dropped,” but are also on a pity timer. “Fatigue can set in where a player is just waiting for the pity timer to kick in,” Sottosanti said. “The primary emotion they feel upon finally finding a Legendary is often not joy but relief, perhaps tinged with sadness.”[...]
Natasha Schüll is an associate professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University, and the author of Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas. When a player feels favored by luck, she said, “you can pin it to certain neurotransmitters spiking, and you know dopamine is released. Even the compulsive search and hunt for recreating that sense of euphoria is driven by the reward center in the brain.” Dopamine’s power to turn us into luck-chasers can be seen most vividly in the effects of some drugs used to treat Parkinson’s disease, which, in flooding the brain with dopamine, have been shown to turn patients into gambling addicts.
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