Here's a shout out to all of the devs working to make Steem better... and a little bit about humans and randomness.
First, I want to thank all of the devs who have worked and are working incredibly hard to try and build apps for STEEM. Because my interests lie in the video game realm, I am going to focus on those. But that does not mean I do not respect and appreciate all the work that has gone into the countless high quality and useful non-game apps.
Michael Scott summed it up best when he quoted Wayne Gretzky and said, “You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.”
The devs working on apps have the balls to take the shots while the rest of us sit on the sidelines and dream (and sometimes complain) about what others should do. They put in countless hours trying to build something that will benefit all of us. They are dedicated, skillful, and are willing to forgo sleep in the name of creating something great.
So to say I am coming from a very positive point of view is an understatement. I naturally assume that the game developers on Steem are honest, fair, and have huge long term visions to benefit the blockchain and its community.
Have all of the games been perfect? Of course not. But I agree with Yoda’s assessment that you can learn more from failures than success. As a result, even if a game does not succeed right away, it has still brought tremendous value. That team or the next team can learn from the both mistakes and successes in order to make the next design far better.
There you go. A wonderful love letter to all of the devs working so hard to make it more likely that we will all succeed.
Look out...
But… sometimes these devs seem to forget their intended audience is made up of non-developers. It is made up of people ruled more by emotion than by pure logic. This seems to lead some devs to respond to criticism by trying to convince the one delivering the input that he/she is being illogical and therefore their criticism is unwarranted.
For any game to succeed, it needs as many players as possible. As a result, I hope teams stay focused on the fact that they are trying to attract and keep humans not Vulcans.
The Pleasure Principal (more than just a groundbreaking album by Gary Numan)
According to the work of Sigmund Freud, humans instinctively seek out pleasure and avoid pain. As a result, most businesses try to increase the chance that their customers will get pleasure from their product or service. Very rarely does a successful business respond to a customer’s complaint about their unpleasant experience with “here is a logical reason you should be gaining pleasure from this experience.”
This has come up quite a bit recently in discussions about “fairness” and “randomness”. Some devs may argue that a game is fair because it is random. Therefore, people should be happy to play. But the fact is, humans do not really enjoy randomness. They enjoy the APPEARANCE of randomness.
If you think I am just some moron who does not know what he is talking about, then why not listen to some successful business/development minds who discovered how much customers hate true randomness.
When Apple introduced the iPod Shuffle feature, a huge majority of customers hated it. They found that the same songs played back to back, artists sometimes got chunked together and they were hearing the same 30 songs over and over. Do you know why this was happening? Because the shuffle was totally 100% random. In a truly random sequence, a song could actually play 10 times in a row (or more). It could also never play certain songs in what a consumer may feel is a reasonable amount of time.
The same exact thing happened with Spotify’s shuffle feature.
New York-based Spotify admits it had to change its playlist algorithm to be less random in order to trick its users into hearing what they believed to be random songs. The graphic shows different genre songs (labelled in various colours) spread out evenly to fit the human expectation for 'random' in Spotify's new algorithm (from daily mail).
Did this businesses pull out charts, tables and graphs to prove their shuffle feature was truly random? Did they try to convince the customers that they were wrong for not being satisfied by the beauty of pure randomness?
No.
They changed the algorithm to give the customers what they want.
Steve Jobs could have stuck to his guns and said, “No! I will be the defender of randomness!” Instead, he did the completely illogical thing and his company made a shuffle mode that APPEARED random to a regular human being. And it was wildly successful.
Far smarter people than me have written about this. You can find those here:
I truly hope games on Steem are just as wildly successful as the iPod and Spotify. But this will only happen if people can turn to their buddy and say, “You have got to play this game on Steem. It is so __________________!“
A. provably random
B. long and boring
C. fun
D. frustrating
As always, when all else fails, choose “C”.
Sadly, I do not have the technical knowledge to provide a remedy to the situation. There clearly needs to be a balance between randomness and a game being too easy. My goal here was to merely point out that it may be worth a developer’s time to explore possibilities aside from defaulting to 100% randomness.
No matter what, I am going to keep supporting those brave souls who have the balls to take a shot.
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I work as a data scientist in Dundee, Scotland. Dundee is a HUGE gaming development community, with the University of Abertay having their own Gaming degrees and colleges. One aspect about gaming and with analysing player behaviour is you want high player retention. Using data, the gaming developers here find the breaking point of players (when they quit and never return) and figure out a way to "reward" the player with an achievement right before that happens. The goal is to hook the player early in the game, where they feel they get value out of the time committed. At any point during a game when the effort far out weighs the invested time, players quit. That's why when you play mobile games, the first levels 1 - x are easy, and then progressively get harder. But then at some point in the harder levels, you have to throw the player a bone or make the next level up attainable.
The way to do this is exactly what you are referring to, and that's the APPEARANCE of randomness. You can still have randomness, but very easily attach a probability to it. Increase the probability of x happening, as y is happening. For example, for every 10 fails at a level, the probability of x happening increases by z% (or some algorithm like that.
Thank you very much for this respectful and motivating post.
Is randomness as a factor a very smart element? No, sure not.
There's no discrepancy in this matter.
I'm not advertising randomness, I'm advertising patience. That doesn't mean hours and days (we're just a few weeks online), by that I mean 3-4 months.
I understand that we currently look like pure randomness. There is no doubt about that. Will it stay that way? No, sure not.
Unlike Spotify and Apple, who have millions of budgets, I have to do wonders with a small budget. There's a huge mountain of work ahead of us and this is just the beginning. I have to use the available resources responsibly and efficiently.
It's not that I don't want it to be perfect. I'm a perfectionist. But there is currently no other way without treading on the spot and running in circles.
With each additional module that we roll out, we make the entire image clearer and more colorful.
One pillar that is very important to us and about which we think a lot is teamwork. We will reward teamwork with upcoming modules such as alliances and wonders of the universe. Teamwork pays off. This is an important message that we would like to carry on the STEEM blockchain.
Another pillar is a complex but easy to use battle system that satisfies both, the nerds and the casual players. It's a pretty big challenge and we're not going to make it easy for ourselves.
I'm not sure if I can convey my point as well with this comment as you did with this post.
wow I did not know about the random issue, that's actually a brilliant example of the miscommunication here. I think that since there isnt a layer between developers and consumers like there is with centralised projects people who speak both languages and relay info between one another there's a bit of extra strain on the relationship since no one is there to mediate.
Pains of decentralisation I suppose
Here is a fun, quick, informative video that I had watched before that your post actually reminded me of in a way:
Unlike the video though I am hoping the devs you are talking about in your post are not having ill intentions built into the games themselves.
Gaming industry it self is a huge market . Definatly we can see the blockchain is in the face of biggeners right now. Its a matter of time we will see more people and developers on it and see the market is boom. 👍
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This post is golden, I hope the STEEM games (dice, dw etc) look into this. It can deter the "How did I roll 100 three times straight" or similar questions new players usually ask— not knowing that it's a possible (albiet unlikely) outcome with true randomness.
Great post 👍
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Question! Have you checked out @vimm yet? It sounds like it might be right up your alley, especially the streams I myself have been doing. I'll be streaming some Star Fox 64 on Sunday afternoon to raise money for NAMI.
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Long live steem devs 🙋🏻♂️
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