Doing the maths

It's not just RPGs and shooters where timing is balanced on a knife-edge between success and failure. I wrote The Maths Behind 'Fun' thinking about pacing across games like bingo, slots, and RPGs. Behind almost everything that feels good in a game there is a set of numbers doing a very deliberate job. Probabilities, curves, timings, drop rates, scaling. The player feels emotion - the system is…