Determinism and Gaming

Determinism, or the belief that everything is calculable according to mathematics, is a prevailing viewpoint in modern Western humanist philosophy.  People like determinism because it is predictable.  It allows people to feel like they can control the universe.  This feeling of control makes them feel more confident of future outcomes and thus better able to deal with abstract circumstances.

Most games are deterministic, at least on some level.  Determinism in games implies that the use of pseudo-random number generators (PRNG) is minimal.  It means that when you attack the same problem with the same solution you will always get the same result.  This plays into players' expectations and behavior in that they will typically only move when they know they will win.  For some games this is a positive trait to breed into players, while in others it produces boredom and monotony.  In the case of an MMO, the inherent irrationality of players produces some randomness, regardless of whether the game itself is deterministic or not, so the need for non-determinism is less necessary.  For FATES, most of this game will be deterministic.  If you build a farm on a given planet multiple times, it will produce the same amount of food for a given employment and power level.  If you design a starship, it will cost the same amount of resources (excepting currency) to produce every single variant of that starship design.

However, determinism is boring.  It also doesn't allow us to experiment in the fields of artificial intelligence and statistical system control, and part of the reason for the existence of our company is to allow us to provide funds for our team to improve their knowledge of every area that interests them.  So, in FATES, there will be a number of non-deterministic pieces.  For alpha, there will be no non-deterministic features, because that makes debugging significantly harder, and we want to produce a bug-free game for trustworthy alpha testing.  However, by the beta phases, we will be introducing a non-deterministic engine into the combat mechanics.  This is the 'black swan' event generator that I described in the combat mechanics post earlier.  This event generator will fundamentally rely on a pseudo-random number generator with a low-probability, high-impact outcome to randomly modify the combat losses on both side to redetermine the outcome.  This will add some non-determinism to the game, and make it more interesting.

For now, the combat mechanic event generator is the only planned non-deterministic feature.  I expect that the markets and diplomacy will exhibit non-deterministic behavior simply because people and their choices are deeply involved, but these will not be possessed of non-deterministic design.

Hopefully, this improves your understanding of the role of fundamental philosophy in game design and allows you more insight into our design decisions going forward.

Until next time.

á na márië,
gumshoe, out.