CHAOS ENGINE

We’ve all experienced moments in games like this: wandering deep in a dungeon, you encounter an ogre. It’s beaten you nearly to death, but you’ve one hope left. In your pack is an unidentified potion that you picked up in a room a few minutes ago. With no other option, you drink it, because it could save the day if it’s a potion of life. Or it might be a potion of hallucination, which will mean that in your final moments you’ll see the dungeon walls pulse with imagined colour, and the ogre apparently turned into a tuft of grass as it finishes you off. Your fate in this game of Brogue is in the hands of randomness.

Here’s another: your veteran assault soldier is standing right next to a sectoid, ready to fire with her shotgun. The game says you have odds of 90 per cent to hit, and yet, when you hit Fire Weapon, she misses. Your turn is over, and the sectoid kills her. In this XCOM mission, randomness again rules your fate.

Since their inception, videogames have used randomness to add a dose of unpredictability to the cold sureness of computer logic. Will the enemy do this, or that? Will your final axe blow take down your assailant, or will they get the last hit? Will you get the special item, or the booby prize? It can make games interesting and mysterious; it can put your heart in your mouth and make you punch the air with relief. And today, randomness is being used more than ever.

It’s instrumental in Roguelikes, where it builds procedural worlds. An entire genre has exploded around the randomness of card draws, from Hearthstone to Slay The Spire. It’s also turning up in competitive games, which have traditionally resisted randomness. Fortnite couldn’t work without it; Dota 2 has introduced more randomness to its ruleset than ever before, while new competitive games such as AutoChess are built on it. “I love randomness,” says Zach Gage, developer of random-soaked solitaire games Fliptop Solitaire and Card Of Darkness, as well as Really Bad Chess, in which he introduced randomness to one of the most sternly deterministic games of all time.

There are many reasons why, and they touch upon the vast shifts in how games are made and played. Randomness is intricately bound into the rise of indie developers, in the economics of in-game purchasing and methodology of games as a service, and it plays into the culture of game spectating on YouTube and Twitch. It speaks to the growing sophistication of game design as a craft, as it brings new ways to make randomness fun, engrossing and rewarding. But it