Designers Engineer Luck into Video Games

Computing Aesthetic’s video is just one of nearly 20,000 such YouTube clips labelled with the words “Peggle” and “Lucky,” uploaded by players so amazed at their good fortune in the game that they were moved to share the achievement with the world. “In Peggle, the seemingly random bouncing of the balls off of pegs is sometimes manipulated to give the player better results,” Jason Kapalka, one of the game’s developers, admitted to me. “As soon as the player becomes aware of any sort of pseudo-randomness, it risks undermining the joy of getting lucky,” said Paul Sottosanti, a designer at Riot Games, publisher of League of Legends, the world’s most-played online game.

Source: nautil.us