(4.75 out of 5)…or take a Chance card
While playing Monopoly, you land on Community Chest. You draw a card and it reads: pay a $10 fine or take a Chance (footnote 1). What do you do? Why, you take a Chance card, of course. There is something inherently fun in receiving a random reward. That short moment of anticipation just before you know what you’re going to get, is a worthwhile experience.
The best example of this in a computer game I know are the villages in Civilization. When you enter a village in Civilization, you don’t know exactly what you’re going to find. You might find some money, or someone might decide to join your army, or you might receive an ancient scroll of wisdom (footnote 2). On the other hand, there’s a chance you unleash a horde of barbarians and that could very well lead to losing your unit. But even with that risk, I never pass up an opportunity to investigate a village and I know a lot of other players can’t resist the temptation, either.
If you can work some kind of random reward into your game, you’ll make a lot of explorer-type players very happy. By placing random rewards on the right places on a map, you can even influence the path a player might take through a level. Of course, it has to be clear to the player that a random reward is waiting for them for that to work. Also, I think random rewards work best if the player has a choice of whether to go for the random reward or not.
One more example of random reward. In Timeshock! Pro Pinball, you can activate a scanner. Once you do, the machine picks a random reward for you (footnote 3). With a bit of extra effort, you can also get a super scanner. With a super scanner, the machine picks two random rewards for you and you get to decide which one of the two you like to receive. It’s simple and effective.
Please, share your favourite example of random reward in a computer game by leaving a comment.
footnote 1: According to Wikipedia, the ‘take a Chance’ card doesn’t exist in the U.S. version of Monopoly anymore. The U.K. version appearantly still has it, and I know the Dutch and Belgian versions do, too. Why the designers decided to take the card out is beyond me. Back to the main text.
footnote 2: Or is that a scroll of ancient wisdom? I can’t remember. Back to the main text.
footnote 3: I suspect many pinball tables have a similar kind of random reward. Back to the main text.
(1 votes, average: 5 out of 5)
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William Willing said,
Comment • August 11, 2006 @ 14:36
It depends on the game. In Civilization, exploration isn’t your main goal. The rewards you get from the villages help you build your Civilization. There are only three different rewards you can get from a village (if I remember correctly) - money, army unit, technology - but that’s okay, since you want them because they help you achieve your goals, not because they are cool by themselves.
In Weird Worlds, exploration is the main goal of the game, so what you find should be cool and unique, otherwise: why keep looking? This puts more of a burden on the designer, because now (s)he has to come up with all these different rewards.
chico said,
Comment • August 14, 2006 @ 19:21
Trackback:
http://nongames.blogspot.com/2006/08/links-trip-randomness.html
“(…) On a side note, I must admit that, during the last months, I thought about removing the link to Casual Game Design, for its lack of updates. Well, I’m glad I didn’t - it’s back with an interesting post on chance and random reward - a subject I’ve tried to approach here.”
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GBGames said,
Comment • August 11, 2006 @ 14:19
I was about to say that I’ve never seen that card in Monopoly. B-)
I wonder about the random reward mechanic. Maybe the awards are randomly assigned to different villages in Civilization, but you will eventually find all of them. Once you know what is possible, does the randomness instill a sense of exploration?
Then again, I know that in Weird Worlds I enjoyed finding the Damocles, which wasn’t available in every session.