Hello! Thanks for visiting this site. I’m Keith Jones, an Associate Professor of Mathematics at SUNY Oneonta. Some things I am passionate about are:
- doing, thinking, and chatting about mathematics;
- teaching mathematics, and figuring out how best to help people see how beautiful and lovable mathematics can be;
- and playing, thinking and talking about analog games, including modern board games and table-top roleplaying games (think Dungeons & Dragons).
Contact
You can email me at keith@inputrandomness.com or at my university email address: keith.jones (at) oneonta (dot) edu , and I am @keithjonesman on Twitter.
Input Randomness?
Most games involve some element of randomness, and (ideally) this makes the game more enjoyable or at least more interesting. With randomness, we can feel as if each play-through of a game is fresh, rather than reiterating a deterministic system. Randomness can add replayability, and help provide a wonderful sense of surprise in a game.
But not all randomness is equivalent. Keith Burgun introduced the distinction between “input randomness” and “output randomness” in games — does the randomness come into play before a player makes a decision or after? For example, in most card-based games, a player draws cards from the top of a deck into their hand, then chooses what cards to play and how to play them. This is input randomness, since the player is able to make a decision based on the outcome of the random action. In many modern games, core mechanisms involve rolling a set of dice and then deciding what to do with them after the values are known, possibly including drafting dice from a common pool. This is another example of input randomness. Some popular examples of this are Kingsburg, Ganz Schön Clever, and Sagrada. (Yahtzee is of course a classic in this genre.) If in a board game or rpg, a player makes a decision, such as “I’m going to attack that goblin with my sword!” and then must perform a random action (such as rolling dice or drawing a card) to determine success, that is output randomness. One delightful example of output randomness is in the horror-themed rpg Dread: whenever a player attempts to accomplish something that may fail, they must draw from a Jenga-like tower of blocks… the tension rises as the stakes heighten and the tower becomes less stable!
Both kinds of randomness have their place in gaming. Still, there is something special about input randomness that output randomness doesn’t exhibit. It provides the player with a certain agency, since the player has more information with which to make their decision.
I love input randomness in games, and I love that we can talk about the games we play and think about distinctions like this and the impact that design decisions can have on the game experience.