Ah, well, I know a good bit about that, as it was studied in the military when I was working there, and why they hired a bunch of us cognitive scientist types in the first place. I was doing straight UI design then -- which we called Human Factors Engineering at the time -- but the research in the next office was pretty neat and so I paid a lot of attention to it. MRI machines were pretty new, and we stuck ourselves -- and lots of soliders -- into the machines. And then you measured 'bloodflow in various regions in the brain', while we had the soldiers do things. It's a pretty good proxy for 'do you find this sort of thing interesting' and in particular 'do you feel as if you are being rewarded'. Blackjack, which is one of the things we studied, is a whole lot like the mini games.
For the middle of my life, such concerns went away, but these days, I am rather more heavily involved with such things as a board member of one of the largest board game societies in Sweden. see:
gothenburgboardgamers.se/ Studying why people find certain things fun, and other things not-fun (and why other people have exactly the opposite preferences) is what we do. And then we teach courses in board game design based on what we have learned. Some of us even get paid.
But back to my earlier days in the military: People who truthfully report themselves as liking to play blackjack, really feel that they want certain cards, and really feel rewarded when they get them, and punished when they bust (go over 21). And they get excited by the whole experience. You can watch their brains react, and tell from the next room whether somebody had just won some chips, or lost a big stack. They like feeling lucky. Some of them think that they are luckier than average, and their egos appear to be tied to the notion of themselves as 'lucky people'. You will win money if you play games of chance against them, and those of us that play games of chance for money always want plenty of those sort at our tables. They aren't rare, at all. Many blackjack-enjoyers think that they are only as lucky as the average, but simply feel satisfaction when the luck goes their way. Giving them opportunities to be lucky makes them enjoy life.
But it is sort of like what Leo Tolstoy wrote in the opening sentence of Anna Karenina: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” It's not
quite that bad. But there are several different flavours of what can go wrong when you don't like playing blackjack, and we were interested in finding out what they were.
People who truthfully reported themselves as not liking blackjack came in three basic shapes. The first shape, really common in the military, indeed more common there than in the general population consists of people who
don't like games. And the MRI bears them out. Their brains are not firing with joy at all when playing backgammon. Some of them like don't like competition, but most of them are ok with that, but would rather be playing sports, or beating their best weight-lifting score in the gym, or improving their skill in the rifle range -- something a lot more
real. They can never get into most games in the first place, and think 'what's the point'. Interestingly, even 30 years ago, you found that the majority of women felt this way about games (or at least
said they felt this way about games, we didn't have as many female soldiers around to test, and female soldiers tended to report liking games far more than women in general said they did, so it wasn't providing useful information on that matter at all). The world has changed and now women in Sweden, at any rate, are reporting 'I like games' at a slightly
higher rate than men are. It's nice news for game designers, as it means that the market has increased substantially. However, I am pretty sure that
xdesperado isn't in this camp, or he wouldn't be enjoying STRPG at all, either.
The second shape are people who feel punished when they have bad things happen to them, but don't feel rewarded when they get the results they want, as a general thing. This was a main focus of the group I was working next to. You cannot motivate people by rewarding them if they never feel rewarded. Turns out there weren't all that many of these sorts in the military, but they made an astonishingly large proportion of the people who were reported as causing trouble in their units. When I left people were trying to isolate 'carries a big chip on his shoulder' as something you could measure. People who feel that life, and other people are constantly punishing them no matter what happens are really hard to work with. But that's not
xdesperado either.
And the third group, and xdesperado and I fit right in there, don't really get the thrill of gambling, period. Gambling is about luck, and we don't particularly enjoy being lucky. There is not enough skill in the equation. So, for instance, I love to play backgammon (and made quite a lot of money doing so, when I was at university) but craps leaves me cold. Luck is involved in both games, but skillful backgammon players will beat the pants off unskillful ones if you allow them to play against each other for more than a few matches. (A match is a set number of games.) There's no such thing as a skillful craps player. However, if you are allowed to bet with other spectators on the likelihood of somebody covering their point -- well, then a craps game becomes very interesting. Since bets tend to come as 2:1 or 3:1 or even 3:2, the odds do not line up with the odds of actually making a 9 before you crap out. They are aligned with 'how easy is it to make the bet, and pay the outcome'. Once you memorise the list of what the odds actually are of making various rolls, you can take all the bets that are in your favour and make a steady income -- provided, alas, your pockets are deep enough that you can weather a run of bad rolls.
However, if you stick me into the MRI machine and watch my brain calculating like mad figuring out what to do with every dice roll in backgammon or every side bet in a craps game, you will understand that the reward and punishment things going on in my head are all about 'my self esteem based on my opinion of myself as a clever person' and none about 'Jesus loves me and sent me a four!". This doesn't mean I cannot find a run of good or bad luck amusing -- but these are amusing in a social, narrative sort of way. They produce an interesting story, some of which I have saved up and will turn into postings in the Book of Genesis some day. But the win will be making you people laugh when you read it. Actually rolling them didn't do that much for me. There is no ego-gratification for me in being lucky.
I am getting more fun out seeing all the art the
fallen has produced, and discovering the actual outcomes here than actually winning the games. Compulsive-me wants to check the text on all the cards for typos. But once I have seen it all, that's about all the fun I am going to get out of it. It's just the way I am, and it seems
xdesperado is built along those lines as well. The skill involved is a matter of choosing certain talents to remove cards from the game -- but as a matter of personal preference, there is nearly always a talent that I would have much, much, much more fun using. (Except for the crew dog low level talent that lets you replace a patrolling card. I'm always drowing in crew dogs in the early part of the game, so I have plenty of room for lots of all of the low level talents).
Which is something to muse about, because in STRPG I play a Pirate a lot. As it stands now, when I want to be a Pirate in ST2, I envision myself picking some other starting profession -- because I don't want to waste a starting trait on something that improves the cash I get when blockading, something I don't intend on doing much -- then pick Pirate as job 2, and stacking the non-blockading Pirate talents.
And head for the skies and start robbing every merchant I can find.
(Once I reach a certain level, at least.)
Robbing merchant ships makes me feel clever. Tough too. But not _lucky_. (Or at least, if I end up feeling lucky, that is not a good feeling. Most of the time that means that I was, foolish but not clever, and survived it anyway.) So I can see being a Pirate as still a fun choice in ST2.
Playing a smuggler or a spy is going to be a problem for people like me. I'm going to be up against 'you need to be lucky, and you don't enjoy being lucky, you enjoy being clever' all through the game. I can see that it is going to be terribly fun to design a ship for maximum spying capability, and then go spying with it, and see if I can come close to beating all the luck out of the mini-game, but after you do that a few times, that's it. The fun is in the ship design, not in the winning.
And there isn't much you can do about this. People come in different shapes and sizes, and whether you find these sorts of games tremendously fun or <shrug> depends on the configuration of your own head. But then
xdesperado and I can find a near infinite amount of joy fiddling with starting crew stats and the like. 'Kicking Lady Luck Around the Block' is something we like doing, lots, and will spend a lot of time just fiddling just to improve our ability to give her a good one by a tiny amount. We find the most wonderful satisfaction in doing so. And this is rare. Most people find this as boring as watching paint dry. But, stick us in the MRI and you will find that we aren't lying when we say we enjoy this stuff.
It's a matter of personal taste. It's like whether you like the taste of anise/licorice or not. Saying 'well, you could stock up on the talents that reduce the number of licorice flavoured candies in your jar' doesn't help when the basic problem is 'Licorice tastes nasty, yes, but I am not all that fond of hard candies either!' Watching whether the random number god has a present for me will never give me a thrill, period.
Our measurements at Gobo seem to indicate that people who want little or no luck in the
gameplay of their games -- which is not the same as wanting no luck at all, people in this camp include those who like randomly generated scenarios, starting equipment, and games like Alien Frontiers
boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/48726/alien-frontiers (one of my all time favourite boardgames, which is all about how to mitigate your dice rolls, there are cards for adding points to dice, and flipping them, etc.)
are far from uncommon in the boardgaming world. They are a superset of those who want their games with no luck, period. But I am not sure how the proportions are in the computer gaming world, or even the mobile-computing game world.
For what it is worth, from my point of view, what I would like in a Smuggler game is 4 cards. First you pay 10000 to get the cards at all. Next, you draw one of them. One says: 'We don't trust you. Go away and don't come back for XXX turns'. One says 'Pay 1000 for access to level 1 market'. One says 'Pay 2000 for access to level 2 market.' One says 'Pay 3000 for access to level 3 market.' (adjust the prices as I think they are too small). None of them makes you sit around and waste your time drawing card after card after card.
Once you have access it is good for a certain amount of time, lots of turns. You can fly around the galaxy, trading and robbing and exploring and churn through a lot of goods in that time. But eventually your initial grav contacts die, or get put in jail, and a new lot shows up, and you have to pay 10000 and make the roll over 4 cards again.
All the other options I am seeing, in the smuggler access mini game, just aren't doing it for me. While I have lots of hard, concrete evidence that there are tons of people who will love the smuggler mini-game, just as they will love the other mini-games, because this is the sort of boardgame they like -- and who will find my 4 card version utterly soulless and dispicable, because they say that too, about board games I like but don't give you a chance to be lucky, pretty much at all -- I am willing to bet extremely large sums of money that
xdesperado, reading this, says -- yes! yes! what a better and more fun mini-game that would be!
It's licorice.
I am not sure we can accomodate both groups of people. A smuggler talent that gives you the ability on a dice-roll of, t.ex '(tactics + negotiate)/2 + charisma' to replace the minigame with the 4 card version as is something I would find valuable.
