Are Games Getting Too Random?

0:00 From a game design perspective,

0:01 there is nothing interesting about flipping a coin.

0:05 There's no skill expression, no strategy, no unknowns to explore.

0:08 And yet, I don't know about you,

0:10 I'm willing to gamble that there is something about that dead

0:13 simple 50/50 probability that makes it impossible to look away.

0:18 And to push my luck a bit more, I reckon there's decent odds that, ironically,

0:23 one of the only things about human nature that's entirely consistent

0:26 is that none of us can resist a game of chance.

0:30 From all the way back in the ancient days of knucklebones and the royal game

0:34 of Earth to the classical titans of Blackjack

0:36 and Majong to modern cornerstones like Magic the Gathering,

0:38 Dungeons and Dragons, and of course, Luigi Poker on Super Mario 64DS,

0:42 randomness is at the heart of some

0:44 of the most influential and popular games ever made.

0:46 And there is nothing better at grabbing and keeping

0:48 hold of the human attention span than good old-fashioned RNG.

0:52 We find ourselves obsessed with any game

0:54 that has randomly generated chests or packs to open.

0:57 Random levels turn gameplay that would otherwise get stale

0:59 after just a few runs into infinitely compelling variations.

1:03 Stuff like critical hits feel way more exciting

1:05 and powerful than the mathematically equivalent increase in damage.

1:08 We love using dice rolls to determine success and failure in RPGs,

1:11 even when that means giving up control over a game story.

1:13 And even though gambling games have almost

1:15 nothing in the way of skill expression,

1:17 meaningful choice, or even fairness in their design,

1:20 there is just something about chance [music] as a fundamental gameplay

1:23 concept that grabs onto the human brain and will not let go.

1:27 Now, that's all pretty obvious stuff, isn't [music] it?

1:30 Our brains like randomness.

1:31 So what?

1:32 Well, what if I told you that in spite of my earlier pontificating,

1:35 there's pretty good odds that our relationship with chance

1:38 is a bit more complicated than it first appears.

1:41 particularly when considered in the context of all the randomness

1:43 ccentric genres that have been taken over video games lately.

1:46 Everything from synergy building number go up

1:48 games to screen clearing bullet heaven titles

1:50 which were literally pioneered by someone who

1:52 used to design slot machines by the way.

1:54 Not to mention the ever popular rogue likes and loot hunting action

1:57 RPGs are for better or for worse

1:59 [music] predicated almost entirely around chance.

2:02 In fact, you can make a decent case that the theme of the last decade of game

2:06 development between loot boxes and procedural generation

2:08 and adapting gambling mechanics into games has been randomness.

2:12 And it's this shared fixation that explains the compulsivity

2:15 and replay-ability that all of these varied genres possess.

2:19 But there in lies the catch.

2:21 You see, while the last two minutes I've been

2:23 really overemphasizing just how universally

2:25 enticing and compelling randomness is,

2:27 there's one big thing about RNG that I have pointedly neglected to mention.

2:32 Namely, the fact that whilst yes,

2:34 our brains are naturally drawn to games of chance,

2:37 that doesn't mean that chance is actually fun.

2:40 Think about it, right?

2:42 If you've ever gotten excited at the prospect of getting some new gear drops,

2:44 but instantly bored of the prospect of actually using it,

2:47 or midway through a Vampire Survivors knockoff and realize that you're

2:49 just mindlessly clicking the thing with the highest rarity every time,

2:52 or to a new exciting frontier in a procedurally generated world,

2:56 only to realize that it feels basically the same as everywhere else.

2:58 Then you've experienced the fact that chance

3:00 is a powerful but sometimes very fleeting high,

3:03 not unlike meth, with which I'm sure we're all familiar.

3:06 This is the double-edged sword to games of chance.

3:09 Or maybe the other side of the coin is a better metaphor.

3:12 While randomness is a key component to some really fun games and because

3:15 of our huntergatherer mental programming is

3:17 almost always absorbing and engaging to watch,

3:19 it is in of itself not very much fun at all.

3:22 And the real danger of this combination is that while our brains

3:25 are distracted by the constant dopamine drip feed of surprise and anticipation,

3:29 it becomes very difficult to realize just how

3:31 long it's been since we've exercised our skill, made an interesting decision,

3:34 or done anything that makes games actually

3:36 enjoyable and satisfying rather than just attention grabbing.

3:39 What this means is that many random

3:41 games are completely absorbing in the moment,

3:43 but ultimately leave us annoyed, drained, and dissatisfied.

3:46 And from an outside perspective,

3:48 it's very difficult to tell which titles are going to do this to us.

3:51 It's quite natural to assume based on this information that the cause of games

3:54 that trick us into not having fun is that some of them are just too random.

3:57 And it's equally hard not to draw a link between the optimization

4:00 of some of video gaming's most obviously exploitative RNG and the rise

4:03 of all those new fangled ch heavy genres that I mentioned earlier

4:06 and conclude that randomness itself is what

4:09 leads to games being distracting but unfulfilling.

4:11 However, I think there's a bit more going on here.

4:14 After all, as I illustrated at the start of the video,

4:17 many of the most famous, long-lived,

4:19 and importantly best games ever wouldn't exist without randomness,

4:22 with some of them having extremely high levels of variance.

4:25 But that doesn't make them any less fun

4:27 to play or any less rewarding to look back on.

4:29 And the same is true for more modern games.

4:31 Many of the best RNGcentric titles out

4:33 there right now are incredibly [music] random.

4:36 but for reasons that aren't immediately clear that hasn't led them into the trap

4:39 of creating experiences that are only

4:41 superficially engaging rather than actually being fun.

4:44 That naturally begs the question, if it's not the amount of RNG used,

4:48 what actually distinguishes good,

4:50 artfully used randomness [music] from randomness

4:53 that tricks us into not having fun?

4:55 Well, if you ask me,

4:56 I think that the dangers of chance as a game design theme only begin to manifest

5:00 when RNG mechanics begin to supersede our agency

5:03 of players and our ability to express our skill.

5:05 Because rather than serving as a way to stimulate and support our play,

5:08 randomness that feels like it has more influence over us as players than we have

5:12 over it ends up making us feel like our decisions and our effort don't matter.

5:16 And it's when games start to feel pointless rather than simply

5:18 chaotic that we lose our grasp on what makes them satisfying,

5:22 leaving us only with that hollow feeling of gambling

5:24 that occupies our stupid base level K-person brain,

5:27 but also distracts us from the fact

5:28 that our higher functions aren't being nourished.

5:30 Eagle-eyed viewers may note that this is the exact

5:33 same foundational psychology that fuels a gambling addiction.

5:36 This is not a coincidence, and we'll get back to it later.

5:38 In short, I think that good,

5:40 well-implemented randomization sets itself apart from shallow

5:43 bad randomization in two key ways.

5:46 First, it creates additional scope and depth for decision-m

5:49 rather than making a game feel more simplistic or shallow.

5:52 And second, it provides consistently novel and important

5:55 feeling results that can capture not just our attention,

5:57 but also our interest and imagination.

6:00 And so in that vein,

6:01 what I want to do is to showcase how good games use chance responsibly,

6:05 both to create types of experience

6:06 that couldn't exist outside of a random framework,

6:08 whilst also avoiding the pitfalls of all too many games that end

6:11 up getting eaten from the inside out by those very same systems.

6:15 And where better to start than the idea that while Chance

6:18 often appears to be a very simplistic and uninteractive gameplay dynamic,

6:22 after all, the whole point of randomness is

6:23 that it's more or less out of our hands, this needn't always be the case.

6:26 As my good personal friend Shadow the Hedgehog is always telling me,

6:29 chaos can be controlled.

6:31 And by opening up the front and back end

6:33 of random systems to be tinkered with by players,

6:35 developers can create a huge amount of gameplay out of basically nothing

6:38 at all and can transform otherwise incredibly

6:41 simplistic dynamics into something way more complex.

6:44 The best way of demonstrating this is to show you a game called Q Up,

6:48 which is a parody of esports games

6:49 that operates entirely around the flip of a coin.

6:52 Three hits and you win, three misses, and your team loses.

6:55 And far from feeling pointless and arbitrary,

6:57 Q-ups matches feel amazing because the game uses

7:00 this dynamic as a foundation for surprisingly strategic gameplay.

7:03 See, each hero has their own unique ability,

7:06 like this guy who cares about getting streaks of wins or losses,

7:08 or this streamer guy who builds up fans, as well as a bunch of gear to buy,

7:11 which all provide passive effects and a big skill grid

7:13 that gets bigger and more complex the more you level up.

7:16 And while all of these effects either derive their results

7:18 from the coin flip itself or are entirely random in a different way,

7:21 the fact that you can combine each of these individually random effects,

7:24 allows the player to build emergent synergies that reflect a way deeper

7:28 optimization problem to solve than the sum of Q-op's parts would imply.

7:32 This is what I mean when I say that RNG used

7:34 well actually increases the amount of gameplay a title has to offer.

7:37 The possibility space of random mechanics

7:39 and the ability to control their inputs

7:40 and outputs creates opportunities for planning

7:42 and synergies that otherwise wouldn't exist.

7:44 And this allows games to capitalize on the fun of being

7:47 high variants whilst also generating new chances for strategy in the process.

7:51 This is the secret ingredient of Balastro

7:53 and also its inspiration, luck be a landlord.

7:55 In Bolatro, for example,

7:56 if you're only playing the hands you'll dealt from an unmodified deck,

7:59 then you're probably going to lose because optimal play is all about leveraging

8:03 all the ways the game gives you to nudge the odds in your favor.

8:06 knowing which card to mulligan to get another go at drawing a better combo,

8:09 how best to use the random pool of jokers to amplify your scores,

8:12 and most dramatically of all,

8:13 how you want to manipulate your deck to literally change the pool you draw from.

8:17 Doing stuff like getting rid of all the reds like a true macccarthyist,

8:20 or filling your deck with nothing but kings,

8:21 like a modern-day American politician.

8:23 Similarly, Luck Be a Landlord might be a roulette game on a conceptual level,

8:27 but the fact that you decide what goes on the wheels,

8:29 even if you can't decide where they end up,

8:31 allows you to control the possibility space of the game,

8:34 making sure that even if you can't guarantee any one adjacency will happen,

8:37 you can still build a board state that you

8:39 have a large degree of macrolevel control over,

8:41 creating satisfying tactics within that random framework.

8:45 Unfortunately, this isn't true for many

8:48 of these successor games to Balatro's Indie Darling Legacy,

8:51 which often forget to give the player enough axis to manipulate their random

8:54 systems in order for our skill to feel more important than the RNG.

8:58 Clover Bit is also a slot machine game,

9:00 but rather than giving you any direct control over the wheels,

9:03 you can really only hedge your bets on a particular symbol or shape,

9:06 and after that, it's up to RN Jesus, making your wins feel kind of unearned

9:09 and your losses feel all the more frustrating.

9:12 You can also see this dynamic in other places, too.

9:14 Dungeons and Degenerate Gamblers is a blackjack take

9:16 on Blatro with some very fun card designs,

9:18 but without giving you much of an ability

9:20 to take mulligans or influence your draws,

9:22 you're still mostly just sort of playing blackjack,

9:24 which means you still constantly get into what feel

9:27 like unwinable game states that you have no control over.

9:29 Something that's excusable in a casino game, but less tolerable in a rogike.

9:34 But it's the surprisingly popular niche of pachinko and/or physics-based number

9:38 glove games that really demonstrate how important being able to manipulate,

9:41 not just watch randomness is.

9:43 All of these games are great fun to see pop off,

9:46 but because you never really have any way to predict,

9:48 control, or react to the physics fireworks display on your screen.

9:51 Your victories just feel like you temporarily

9:53 earn the favor of Jean Baptiste Perin,

9:55 and your defeats feel like there was nothing you could do to prevent them.

9:58 Nubbies Number Factory is one of the better games

10:00 in this regard because it has a smaller board and it

10:02 lets you aim the first shot so you at least

10:04 get some control over the starting conditions of the RNG cascade.

10:07 That's in stark contrast to something like a Bionair which is

10:10 100% chaos and where your peg based positioning barely seems to matter.

10:14 Of course, just as important as taking

10:16 a direct hand in manipulating probability is managing risk.

10:20 By confronting us players with potentially random outputs,

10:22 we're invited to plan contingencies and develop

10:25 constantly evolving heruristics that are much

10:27 more complex than in games where you always know the outcome of your choices.

10:30 The marker for success in any tactics game or deck order isn't

10:33 your plan for when everything goes right and you get exactly what you wanted,

10:36 but how you compensate for and react around everything going wrong.

10:39 Many games earn a huge amount of depth by giving

10:42 players a limited number of opportunities to avoid or mitigate chance.

10:45 And the choice of where we spend

10:47 stuff like XCOM's guaranteed hit grenades or Boulders

10:49 Gates rerolls doesn't just give us some

10:51 wiggle room when dealing with otherwise punitive systems.

10:53 It rewards skill and planning.

10:55 Weirdly enough dispatch of all games also has this same kind of choice system.

10:59 You can guarantee that practically any mission completes

11:01 by just throwing a full team at it.

11:03 But because you only have so many Z-listers to go around,

11:05 you risk making future missions harder if you send

11:08 beautiful flambe to bail out Jack Septic and Boyce Critical,

11:10 turning what would otherwise be a series of blind

11:12 dice rolls into something with a contiguous sense of strategy.

11:16 But even without the ability to outright mitigate chance,

11:19 simply letting the player pick which risks they want to take forces

11:22 us to navigate the choppy waters of chance entirely under our own power.

11:26 A fun micro genre example of this as a whole game

11:28 are the grotesque side effects and the better well-known buckshot roulette,

11:32 which are all about managing probability as you try not

11:35 to pick the pill or shotgun shell that's going to kill you.

11:37 And where the slightest amount of control over which risk you want to take,

11:40 like being able to test an option or skip a go,

11:42 turns what would otherwise be pure boring

11:44 randomness into an incredibly tense game of wits,

11:47 bluffing, and maths, which as everybody knows is the most exciting thing of all.

11:52 And speaking of making our interactions

11:54 with random mechanics and systems feel important,

11:57 that's another huge element of making RNG satisfying to play with.

12:00 The thing to remember is

12:01 that our attachment to chance is fundamentally irrational.

12:04 It doesn't matter how statistically significant any given event

12:07 is if it doesn't feel different from everything else,

12:09 then we won't remember or care about it.

12:11 What this means is the games need to make the results

12:14 of their random systems evocative enough that we care about them and can use

12:17 them as a jumping off point to make some new interesting choices rather

12:20 than all the RNG just sort of dissolving into a vaguely distracting sludge.

12:25 Procedurally generated worlds are a really clear

12:27 example of this done well and [music] badly.

12:29 The planets in Starfield might be from the joyless

12:31 dispassionate point of view of Todd Howard very different.

12:34 They've all got totally different terrains, entirely distinct color palettes,

12:37 and there are probably more potential configurations of this pirate-based

12:39 template than there are hydrogen atoms in the universe.

12:42 But that means, sweet[ __] all if they all feel the same to run around in.

12:45 And in Starfield's case, they certainly do.

12:47 Because no individual detail or quirk makes any

12:50 given one of these spaces stand [music] out.

12:52 They've all got more or less the same loot,

12:53 more or less the same enemies, and more or less the same vibe.

12:55 It contributes to a feeling that all

12:56 the games individual randomly generated areas just sort

12:59 of blur together in a way that holds

13:01 your attention but inspires no actual thought.

13:04 This quirk of us not caring

13:05 about statistical significance but instead emotional impact

13:08 is why games that feel like they have more satisfying random generation are

13:11 usually the ones operating from a smaller

13:13 but more individually distinct pooler variables

13:15 that as a result all feel interesting and contrast with what came before.

13:19 This is why No Man's Skies procs, for example,

13:22 feel a lot more interesting than its so-called competition.

13:25 It's not that they're somehow more random.

13:27 It's that each planet usually generates with some big

13:29 obvious characteristic that makes it stick in your mind,

13:31 like a cool point of interest or a big scary worm or some crazy weather.

13:35 Each reminding your brain that you've experienced something new and interesting,

13:38 even if this exact feature is probably on a million different players.

13:41 Rogue likes also use this kind of design to their advantage.

13:44 Often the games best known for consistently splitting out interestingly

13:47 generated random levels actually aren't as random as you might think.

13:50 The likes of Spelunky, Hades, and The Binding of Isaac, for example,

13:53 all draw from a pool of fixed pre-esigned templates

13:56 for their rooms that the designers know are going to be good

13:58 and provide a specific kind of challenge that then just

14:01 gets scrambled up a bit each time you load them up.

14:03 This gives the impression that each room is

14:05 totally different because they've all got their own

14:06 unique thing going on, like this obstacle course

14:08 or this swarm battle or this poop temple,

14:12 whatever, which keeps them feeling much more distinct in comparison

14:14 to a game that generates levels with much more variance,

14:17 which paradoxically will often end up feeling the same.

14:20 Far from just being emotionally evocative and memorable, though,

14:23 interesting spiky randomization provides an important gameplay purpose as well.

14:27 By being notable instead of bland,

14:28 the outputs of random systems can in turn force

14:31 us to make new choices and interact with new systems,

14:33 often catalyzing some more random outputs,

14:36 which starts a self-sustaining cycle of interesting decisions.

14:39 This is the engine that powers the emergent

14:41 storytelling of stuff like Rim World or Paradox games.

14:44 You can't control when your kids are going to suddenly die or when

14:46 some flesh beasts are going to turn up and eat half your dudes,

14:49 but these random moments force you to interact with other chaotic systems

14:52 as you recruit sketchy wanderers to help you pick up the snack

14:55 only to find out they're being chased by a zombie horde or start

14:57 an ill- fated war to hold on to your ancestors crumbling empire,

15:00 keeping the story moving and unpredictable.

15:02 The same principle is also what makes the improvised

15:04 buildcraft of many rogue likes and deck builders work.

15:07 Getting a really powerful item or passive in the bizaar,

15:10 for example, which is an excellent deck building auto battler,

15:13 opens up a bunch of new potential synergies

15:14 and strategies that shape your decision-making going forwards.

15:17 And the game was dramatically improved when

15:19 the devs decided to basically give players a free,

15:22 incredibly powerful enchanted item near the start of each round because

15:25 these items serve as a great jumping off point for your future strategy,

15:28 helping your playthrough to feel much more unique.

15:30 The same is true for other drafting based games as well.

15:33 Stuff like Slay the Spire or Magic of the Gathering sets are specifically

15:36 designed to only contain cards that synergize

15:38 interestingly with the rest of the pool.

15:40 So no matter what combination of cards the game spits out,

15:42 you'll never get a bunch of generic blocks of stats you don't

15:44 know what to do with, you'll always get at least a few

15:46 options which seem to immediately stand out as potential inclusions that will

15:49 in turn shape the identity of your deck in interesting ways.

15:52 Conversely to all this, when random generation takes the form of loads

15:56 of little tiny outputs rather than a few big obvious ones,

15:59 the results of very granular systems have

16:01 a tendency to kind of regress to the mean,

16:03 which leads to that boring feeling where it's

16:04 impossible to really care about any given one.

16:06 I'm going to earn some enemies here,

16:08 but I felt this very strongly in two recent indie

16:10 darlings in the form of Mega Bonk and Ball X Pit.

16:14 In Megaong, because most of your upgrades

16:16 are sort of vague incremental improvements,

16:18 and because you get so many, way more than other survivor style games,

16:21 your brain quickly learns that it's way too much effort trying to work out

16:23 if 12.8% better AoE damage or 30% crit damage is stronger every 15 seconds.

16:28 And so, you just start mindlessly clicking the thing

16:30 with higher rarity because you won't really notice either way,

16:33 leading to an impression that your decisions don't matter.

16:36 And in Ball X Pit, you get a bunch

16:38 of really visually cool and mechanically distinct upgrades,

16:41 but they never really change the way you play or the way you make decisions.

16:44 Outside of a handful of mostly quite bad balls,

16:47 the ideal trajectory is always the same.

16:49 And so long as you're picking up all the gems and boosters,

16:51 it doesn't really matter what you end up using your balls

16:53 into, as demonstrated by the fact

16:55 that the unlockable character that makes decisions

16:57 literally at random isn't really much of a handicap at all and kind

16:59 of ends up exposing how brain dead the game strategy really is.

17:03 There is, of course, a correlary to the idea that chance-based

17:06 games need these big important feeling temples,

17:08 and that's that if games lean too much on this stuff,

17:10 they kind [music] of wrap back around

17:12 to 99% of the outputs feeling meaningless and boring.

17:15 Born lands may very well boast 69 fart squillion guns,

17:19 but because the interesting handmade legendary guns are always better,

17:22 the actual pool of weapons you would choose to use is usually more like 30,

17:27 which isn't even half of 69.

17:29 This serves to make even the coolest

17:31 of loot explosions feel disappointing because you're really only

17:33 looking for legendaries with everything else being an implicit

17:36 downgrade and thus a sign of bad luck.

17:39 Path of Exile, another looty game,

17:41 fixes this to a degree by having its unique items,

17:44 the highest rarity, provide niche effects that you

17:46 can't get anywhere else that enable interesting builds,

17:48 but are kept to a roughly equivalent power to regular

17:51 old or rare items that drop much more frequently,

17:53 making a much higher proportion of the loot actually interesting and keeping you

17:56 in the frame of mind of playing

17:58 a video game rather than just gambling on swords.

18:01 Which brings us to the uh rather large elephant in the room.

18:06 See, this whole video I've been describing

18:08 the shallow but hypnotizing kinds of chance

18:10 that makes us feel like we've wasted our time playing a game as a design flaw,

18:13 as something the game should avoid using.

18:15 Because, as loads of great titles prove,

18:17 randomness can be compelling [music] and satisfying at the same time.

18:20 But for many games, and for many developers,

18:22 that hollow feeling you get from having spent hours doing nothing but chasing

18:26 the fleeting dopamine rush of hitting a high roll is a feature, not a bug.

18:30 I've been avoiding directly referencing real life gambling too

18:33 much because I'm scared YouTube are going to demonetize me.

18:35 But you need only look at the scary footage of old people being

18:38 hypnotized by slot machines while simultaneously being

18:41 totally[ __] miserable to understand the fact

18:43 that a sense of dissatisfaction is often what gets you to come back

18:46 to a game much more reliably than you having had a complete fun experience.

18:50 So many games are fundamentally predicated on deliberately hooking you

18:54 in with attention-grabbing RNG that provides

18:56 no interesting decision-making or unique outputs.

18:59 just the flashiest, most distracting rolls of the dice possible.

19:02 And it's not because they're accidentally designed this way,

19:04 but because if their randomization systems were fun and satisfying on their own,

19:08 you wouldn't need to supplement your enjoyment with another injection of cash.

19:12 It's absolutely no coincidence that basically all

19:14 gacha games have mind-bogglingly over complicated progression systems.

19:17 It's impossible to feel like you have any agency

19:19 in, broken scaling that minimizes the impact of individual strategy,

19:23 and really, really syplay.

19:24 It's all to get you back to the poles where

19:26 you can sift through a bunch of garbage you don't care

19:28 about for the slim chance of some fleeting novelty and the chance

19:31 to waggle a slightly different anime teenager for a bit.

19:34 And look, I know gacha games and other

19:36 free-to-play stuff that keeps you hooked on the same

19:38 boring chores so you keep paying a sub

19:40 fee or whatever are kind of easy targets here,

19:42 but when you're dealing with design that's so destructive so

19:44 as to literally ruin people's lives in the name of money,

19:47 then I think we deserve a few cheap shots every now and again.

19:51 Furthermore, this is just as true for supposedly

19:53 ethical games you only pay for once.

19:56 I've been trapped in more than one abusive relationship with a regular

19:59 title that used all the same manipulative tricks to get

20:01 me to come back to the slot machine over and over

20:03 because our brains are incapable of looking away from random systems.

20:06 And the more times we fail to get what we want out of them,

20:09 the more compelling they become.

20:10 I wasted hours on Elder Ring Night Reign before I realized

20:13 that it wasn't really for me because the promise of the next run

20:15 being different coerced me back into doing something that I didn't really

20:18 enjoy very much and usually ended with me getting pounded into dust.

20:22 And I put a quite frankly embarrassing

20:24 amount of time into Hearthstone Battlegrounds even before

20:26 they added all the microtransaction stuff because

20:28 the promise of getting to roll an absurdly

20:30 overpowered combo kept me coming back in spite of the fact that seven out

20:33 of eight of my runs were dull

20:34 losses and they were all pretty foregone conclusions.

20:37 This is why I think that our relationship

20:39 with chance is an important issue worth discussing and clarifying.

20:42 It would suck for manipulatively designed shallow

20:45 games to rob us of the opportunity

20:46 to have some really fun experiences that can only exist in a random framework.

20:50 But in order for us to be able

20:51 to distinguish between good randomness and manipulative randomness,

20:54 we need to be able to confront

20:55 the uncomfortable reality that effective design used in service

20:58 of art is more similar than we'd like

21:00 to cheap psychological manipulation that you'll eventually grow to resent.

21:03 So, when you next find yourself getting sucked into the rhythm of a surprising,

21:07 exciting, and compulsive random game,

21:09 take a second to think about why you're really there.

21:11 Are you having a fun time because randomness is letting you

21:13 make interesting decisions and provide you with cool new things to do?

21:16 Or are you grinding away at a repetitive

21:18 skill box dragged along by your hypnotized subconscious?

21:21 Only you can know for sure,

21:22 and I reckon the answer is going to be a bit different for everyone.

21:25 All that matters is that you keep an open mind and a rational perspective.

21:28 Just look at that 99% chance and see it as nothing but pure maths.

21:32 just one possible permutation of a random system

21:35 and then you're going to turn the game off,

21:37 take your PC outside AND SMASH IT TO BITS WITH A BIG[ __] [laughter] HAMMER.

21:41 PHEW.

21:42 HELLO.

21:42 HELLO, and welcome to this frosty holiday after the video segment.

21:46 Now, hold on, hold on.

21:47 I know what you're thinking.

21:48 Where's 2025 games you should have played?

21:50 Don't worry, it's coming on time.

21:52 You're not going to miss anything.

21:53 Chill out.

21:54 But while you're here, how about taking a look at some cool people who you

21:58 really ought to be made aware of, such as Harper J.

22:01 An excellent games writer who's recently gotten

22:03 back into the biz after a sojourn

22:04 doing real work and is now back to writing some of the most intelligent,

22:07 incisive analysis in the entire biz.

22:10 Harper has, in my opinion, the definitive read on more gaming culture topics

22:13 than I care to count and just recently has

22:16 written some fantastic thoughtprovoking [music] stuff about the culture

22:18 of quote unquote prestige games surrounding Expedition 33,

22:22 as well as the controversy behind infamous, canceled,

22:24 and very good game horses and how weirdly the game sort of preemptively comments

22:28 on the conversation surrounding its own censorship.

22:30 Harper is great and she doesn't get anywhere

22:32 near as much attention as I think she deserves.

22:34 So, please do go and give her stuff a read.

22:36 Of course, the real cool people, the radical cats, the smooth,

22:40 bodacious son of a guns who you have to thank for the fact

22:43 that this video and all other videos on the channel exist at all.

22:46 The people who give this channel money via YouTube

22:48 and Patreon are responsible for me staying on the air.

22:51 And I am ever more aware of how truly truly grateful I

22:54 am to them for their continued support during the busy holiday period.

22:57 If you'd like to support the channel and join them,

22:59 you'll get early access to videos, behindthe-scenes content,

23:02 extra game design musings that the general public don't get to see.

23:05 So, there's a lot of stuff to go around and I think it's a pretty good deal.

23:08 And of course, if you spend $10 a month on Patreon,

23:11 then you'll even get a special voiced shoutout

23:13 like these cool people who are Agent Maxwell, Alli Wright, Andrew Lebrono,

23:19 Ala [music] 94, Baroness, Caroline, Bobby Constantine, Amend,

23:23 Cosmix 360, Daniel Medz, Daniel Ersin, Durk, Jan Caribbeld,

23:28 Diglettier, Delli, Ectton, Edward, Franklin Woods, Edwina the Space Bun,

23:34 Eric Walston, Eugene Bulkin, Fullaxi, Furious Hulk,

23:38 Gascll how heck it's Noah I support trans rights Jacob Dylan Riddle Jinkaloid

23:45 Justin Dent Kevin help us combi leap here everyday Luke Kakoran Mason 54

23:53 Maxim Philippov Mark Valant may contain

23:56 fox-like substance Mika Oi Michael Cike Oxong

24:01 Mike Ox medium Jesus Christ Nate graph

24:04 Oliver Marhoa Patrick Roberg Peter Thomasick Redditex,

24:09 Regal, Wedex, Seslux, Silver Fulfy, Tyler Duncan, Timothas,

24:14 Beex, Whimsical Wisp, Zack Brandt Meer, and Ciao.

24:18 Okay, that's it from me.

24:19 See you very soon.

24:21 Bye.