GDC 2010: Sid Meier Keynote - "Everything You Know is Wrong"

Sid Meier (Civilization) gave a great GDC keynote in 2010 where he describes his multi-decade struggle to convey to users ideas like "Stuff that only has a 10% chance of happening still happens sometimes." link to this video Multiply that by a million daily active users and it really works out to "Stuff that has a 1-in-a-million chance of happening will happen to somebody every day". Leading to player reviews like "The game rolled me a 1-out-of-10 SIX TIMES IN A ROW!!! The game is explicitly cheating me!!!" every day. Thus games tend to use random shuffles rather than independent random numbers so as to better align with common misunderstandings about statistics...

…s presented with 3-to-1 or 4-to-1 odds, they expect to win. With 2-to-1 odds, the player will accept losing some of the time, but expect to win at 20-to-10, which is just a larger expression of 2-to-1. When the numbers get larger, the perceived advantage grows. link Here is a link to the actual GDC talk by Sid with the content about probability: link to this video (It…

…en). The later Civ games have taken odds out of the equation, and I think it's for the better. Instead, the amount of damage each unit takes per combat depends on the difference in their strength deterministically. From my own perspective, this is overall more fun than 'randomly' having really strong units lose against weak units occasionally. 1 link to this video…

"Civilization Revolution" does this. Say the player loses a 75% roll, then attempts another identical 75% roll. The game will actually give you better odds for the second roll. I think it's silly -- the game basically lies to you about your odds on the second attempt. Sid Meier talked about it at length in this video: link to this video . It starts around 18:25.

The worst part is that even if the algorithm perfectly computed probabilities and was completely open, humans would take away incorrect information. I am reminded of this talk by Sid Meier: link to this video People don't understand probabilities. They don't accept that if someone has a 75% chance of being guilty, they may very well not be. It happened again with FiveThirtyEight when everybody accused their "70% chance of Mrs Clinton winning" of being wrong, when it doesn't preclude Mr Trump winning.