Why Chance and Skill is an Important Component in Games

The question we had to answer this week was how chance and skill is important to a game and how the games designers use the skill and chance tool to their advantage.

-CHANCE-  'If a game is easily solvable it loses the game aspect' 

Just like Leblac, Braithwiate and Schreiber (Will be calling these two B&S from now on) dissects the two tools and shows us whats inside each tool that we can specifically use to make a game more interesting to the player.
First off with chance, we have Competitive, which I think is one of the most important of all others. The competitive allows less experienced players a higher chance of winning thus making the players more interested in the game. I have sometimes wondered to myself, when playing chess if i should just throw a dice for an instant win... maybe those times when I have stormed off and knocked the board over may not have occurred if a 'bit' of chance was introduced.
          With chess I have seen many upon many different types of strategies to win a game, but with  Variety a strategy would be useless if a game doesn't allow you to carry it out, either because the dice didn't roll on the number you want, or the dealer didn't give you a picture card. With variety, it forces the players to think outside their strategy box, by not going with their usual way of play, variety increase's the experience for the player as well as their knowledge of the game. From variety you get Enhancing Decision Making

'Essence of most games is the decisions that the player makes.'


I totally think this statement is true, because variety makes you change your strategy plan, you have to make the important decision that can either help you or destroy you in a game. Like in a 4 way Yu-Gi-Oh game, you can help the player who is at the disadvantage (Low on Life points) by attacking the opponent who is killing them, this could gain the confidence of the disadvantage player, who can help but you  give the other player a reason for them to kill you. From experience I tend not to be the nice guy since it always back fires and I generally get ambushed. with this tool, it makes the player more drawn into the game by making them think hard about the decision they are about to make and weighting up the consequences of their decisions.
        Our last dissected tool from chance and luck is Dramatic Moments. I wouldn't say that this is a tool, I would say it is a dynamic of a game. Say you have plan to build a mass load of hotel's on Mayfair, you have just the right amount of  money, you know that players are close enough to soon land on them and you have a slight feeling that the next chance card is going to say Advance to Mayfair, but what is holding you back? The dice are. You have to roll a 5 to land on either Park Lane. You roll, and from the moment the dice leave your hand to the moment they land on a number, that is where the Dramatic moment is taking place.

Now that B&S have taught us what is inside chance, they now move onto the Mechanics of them. The most obvious  one being Dice. We all know that dice are random, but the more die you add to your collection teh more it reduces the randomness since getting two six's is much more easier then getting four six's. Dice also have a cashing out system, which is a blessing in some case's, sometimes you need to get 2 double six's in a row to win the game, lucky for us previous rolls don't effect future ones.
         Another common mechanic is Cards. These are more versatile then dice, but because you have a set amount of card's in a deck, the probability lowers with each card drawn. e.g if you were playing the exciting game of 'The guy who picks the highest card wins, and ace of spades is the highest' if the opponent picks a king of spades, its doesn't take a genius to work out that you will probably lose.
          Surprise surprise, we have a reference to MDA, in this case it's called Hidden Information. Thou it does sound like Fog of war, it has a very different impact. with Hidden information you have the information , you just don't know which information is correct, so what do you do? you ask random questions to the the right one, Guess Who? is based on this mechanic.  Using Hidden information in video games can be a dangerous choice, because if they want to deploy a strategy and a random element which you don't know is about to happen stops them from making a move, it would leave the player annoyed. Just like in FF-XIII where the main character has a special sword which greatly helps you kill a monster, but there is no way of making it help you, the sword's special only happens at random times, for me this made the game very repetitive and annoying.

Children and Gambling Games.
At first I wondered why B&S focused on the two games, but when I had finished reading the section I didn't realize that they both have the same technique used in them to attract players.
        With Children Games the designers mainly (if not only) use chance and luck, since children are not the best at playing skilled games. I have noticed that  when children play games you can tell that they think it is a skill of their for rolling three six's consecutively, by saying words before they throw the dice, or throwing them in a certain way (without looking like they are cheating)
         Of course in Gambling throwing the dice in a certain way would lead to you being thrown out of a casino. With gambling the excitement is not only winning the game, but the physical aspect of gaining money out of luck. Though the cleverness used in gambling is the rather large amount of choice you get when playing, in roulette its your decision to place as much chips on a number, if your decision to fold or bluff at poker, it's your decision to twist or stick. With the amount of choice in a game who wouldn't think that they were in control? But it is just a use of illusion, making the player think that they have a certain 'vibe' going on.