A Chance to Play Fair: Considering Randomness in Modern Game Design

Randomness is often used in games, the roll of the dice or the draw of the card. These actions serve different design functions: the excitement of an unknown outcome, challenging the players to react to different scenarios, or encouraging the replay of the game. But how do design decisions make randomness in games fair for all the players?

Games have different number of random actions within them, anything from snakes and ladders to chess. However, it is not simply the percentage of random actions within a game that determine how fair they feel to play, it is the players’ agency within the game that matters.

In a dice rolling game, what if someone keeps rolling sixes, or in a card game someone draws all the low value cards? These extreme potential outcomes are the situations that should be considered in order to create a fairer game with a higher feeling of agency for the player.

In the end should a game provide players with a close to equal chance of success no matter how extremely unlikely the outcomes of random events are; should it be the choices that they make with those results that determine the measure of their ability?