Sid Meier and Rob Pardo of Blizzard gave a couple of talks recently at GDC 2010, and they inadvertently talked about similar things; fudging the math away from “truthful” math under the nose of the player, usually to the player’s advantage. Meier, for example, reported frustrations in playtests when players lost fights where the game had given them a 50:50 chance to succeed, and even more so when they lost consecutively. Mathematically, it’s a completely reasonable scenario but that didn’t matter to the beaten and battered player. They decided to fudge the math that actually increased chances of success after failures above and beyond what the statistics would report (the player’s unit strength vs. their opponent’s). Players responded well, and now the game launched with that system in place.
The debate here is that fudging the math like that seems to be undercutting the strengths of gaming to pushing players’ abilities and thought process to higher levels than before the challenge is presented and their experience has stagnated for it. Jaron linked a good overview of that argument on the Game Design Advance blog here. The points being made there are valid and I don’t disagree with them at all. A good game, like a good book or a good movie, isn’t afraid to keep shoving you towards its own intentions, no matter how uncomfortable you might get, until you start to learn, grow, and better yourself through its obstacles (or stories or messages or whatever).
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