Sid Meier's Psychology of Game Design
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN people cite it when discussing perceived randomness, luck and player experience in games, and say more designers should heed it.
What it is
Civilization creator Sid Meier's GDC 2010 talk on applying psychology to game design. He discusses player perception, randomness, and win states, and why designers must account for how players experience events.
Recommended by 4 HN commenters across 4 different months, 2016 to 2019.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec mlindner · 2018-12 · on “Sandspiel – A falling sand game built in Rust and WebGL”
Many games don't have win states or shouldn't have win states. More people need to listen to what Sid Meier has said on this. That HN article was written by someone who did not know what they were talking about. [this video]
Recommends timo614 · 2016-10 · on “What Sid Meier’s Video Game Empire Got Right and Wrong About ‘Civilization’”
Agreed; the point of the game is to make you feel like a God. Sid Meier gave a talk at the GDC: [this video] In it he explained how Civilization tested random negative events that could shape your world. He mentioned how this had a negative effect on the player experience and many times people would just grab a past save to avoid them IIRC.
Recommends codetrotter · 2019-03 · on “How Designers Engineer Luck Into Video Games (2017)”
> The anecdote about Sid Meier hard-coding a guaranteed "win on the third attempt" for a battle with a 1/3 victory probability was very interesting. You might enjoy these videos as well: [LINK] [this video]
Recommends ringshall · 2019-07 · on “Ask HN: Why are modern music players so bad at playing music in random order?”
This talk by Sid Meier is a good description of the problem of true randomness, from a game perspective: [this video]