Shots at Random: Luck Be a Lady Tonight

Since I started the Shots at Random segment, outlining several different issues to write about on this topic, I started thinking about why exactly it was that so many mechanics are generated randomly in the games we play. Random generation has several advantages, it brings a sense of uncertainty to the player, as well as encouraging the player to put in more hours in the hopes of making that lucky strike. All of that is well and good, at least from a game designers perspective, but when random calculations come into play for things like weather or generating room fixtures in a dungeon, neither of which affect the players at all, it makes you start to wonder.

The tendencies can easily be traced back to the random tables from fantasy pen and paper games that video games have borrowed from so extensively throughout the mediums history. There are pros and cons to assigning details like the above mentioned to chance, but in order to do it correctly you need to put the work in. The bulk of creative work is forming connections between different elements of game play, when you're outlining a game generally you have two or three big ideas, set piece fights or interesting mechanics and the rest of the game is fleshed out by finding a way to link these ideas together. Good games have interesting levels and engaging mechanics, great games find ways to combine them into one experience. Every game designer should be an expert in drawing links between several distinct ideas, synthesising a new product from the combined initial concept into a complete game.

To synthesize our own two premises, using randomly generated elements in a game isn't necessarily any better than carefully constructed elements when going about synthesizing the larger plan of a game. In fact adding in elements at random provides a challenge to game designers, forced to draw connections between elements they can't tweak to make the synthesis easier for them. If you commit to sticking with these random elements, you'll have to face the challenge of explaining how these goblins were able to tame a dragon, or why the good guys symbol looks a lot like the bad guys iconography, just rotated forty-five degrees clockwise.

This might seem like a daunting challenge, but remember that you don't have to spell it out explicitly, players often create their own story as to why these elements exist side by side and all you have to do is provide enough detail so they can start making guesses. Do not fall into the trap of assuming the player will draw their own conclusions and offer no explanation at all, there should at least be a hint of what's going on, even if it's just a snatch of dialogue, or better yet several conflicting possibilities to get the more interested in finding clues to determine which it is, making them more interested in your game world provided that they eventually get more information. In fact sometimes it's a good idea to use random elements to force you to branch out from plots, characters and mechanics you've become over reliant on. If you find you're always making the same kind of game, randomly generate a list of things to add into the game and stick with it, it might not be your best work, but you'll get more comfortable using other techniques as a result.

Possibly the best application of this kind of productive chaos is to shake the industry out of one of it's worst habits, one that it's become more than a bit complacent about over the years. Looking back over video game history we can see that a huge majority of game protagonists and come to think of it characters in general have been white males. This has a lot to do with how heroes are portrayed in the media, the average picture of an action hero is a white male simply because they dominated the culture for a long period of time and as such created a lot of the examples of what we think a hero is. These examples are so prevalent they become the norm, which people copy and continuing the cycle which allows this vision of a hero as a white male to perpetuate itself. There is nothing wrong with having a white male protagonist in and of itself, but the only way the imbalance in perception is to give a fair shake to characters of other genders and ethnicity.

To get around this tendency to use white males a small and simple step can be added to the development process. When designing the story for a game, most developers or writers have a few basic ideas of how the plot is going to go, major areas they want the player to visit a few exchanges of dialogue they have in their head and most definitely a few ideas of some actions they want the character to take. Rarely however do artists have every single facet of the characters life nailed down when they initially start plotting out the game often just mentally picturing the generic white male they've become so familiar with. As soon as you get to this point, before you give the character a name, but after you've figured out the key actions and dialogue points, stop everything you're doing, go find a quarter and flip it. Heads the character will be female, tails it's male.

Don't change any key plot points or reconfigure the action sequences as a result of this new information and try to keep the dialogue as close to how you originally imagined it as possible, nearly any action or motivation you can assign to one gender can be applied to the other. Not to say that both sexes are entirely interchangeable, but those differences seem to come out in the small details area of characterization, the general shape of the character holds up pretty well for either, what motivates them, how capable they are and how they react to a given situation shouldn't change with their gender. What a shift in gender does change is the context of those actions, the dialogue, story and action take on different meanings depending on whether the character is male or female and you should be aware of that and try to bring it to the player attention to add depth to the character.

The same arguments can be made for race, unless the setting somehow precludes it. By pretty much lifting the ethnicity categories from the US Census, you can get this handy chart with some slight modification, (otherwise Native Hawaiians would be grossly over represented, although a game about Native Hawaiians would probably be really cool to play), and adding an extra category just to make things even and more specific. When fleshing out your character, find a regular six sided die and roll on the table below:

1. Arabic or Middle Eastern Descent,
2. East Asian, (Russian, Chinese, Indian etc.)
3. Black
4. Caucasian
5. Hispanic
6. Native Peoples, (Aborigines, Native Americans, Native Islanders, etc.)

Now not every game should assign race and sex randomly, if you're intentionally setting out to make a statement about either of those two subjects being very deliberate about race or sex can really help hammer home the point you're trying to make. However if you're not looking to make a statement and you don't really know where to start, why not use these random variables and make your characters more than just your average white action hero?