Notes on Randomness No.1

Encounters of the Random Kind

Everyday life and the world around us often take routine and predictable paths. But sometimes something unexpected happens. The world is not perfectly predictable— at least not by an individual with our limited perspective and our mental stock of half-understood scientific theories which may themselves be incomplete. And it’s an ongoing debate, partly scientific and partly philosophical, whether the world is predictable on the most basic level. This is all just to say that the world and life around us can surprise us— for one reason or another. Sometimes we like those surprises. Sometimes we don’t. Randomness can be as exciting as it can be terrible. Getting something good that you didn’t expect, can feel very good. Getting something bad that you didn’t expect, can range from feeling merely unpleasant to being truly tragic. And those feelings may be even more powerful when the results are due to chance alone. In the right context, a dice roll can carry as much drama as a three-act tragedy. Chance can be compelling. And, at times, it can almost be too compelling

God may or may not play dice. But creators, artists, writers, game designers, and makers of various stripes sometimes do. Of all media, it seems like randomness is maybe most at home in games given the nearly pre-historic character of certain components such as dice. Decks of cards, which are nothing less than little stacks of randomness, and the games associated with them probably rose to prominence sometime after the rise of early modern printing techniques. Then came the highly structured formal systems in 19th century wargames (which would wind up being very influential for the invention of modern table top games in the 20th century.) Games and randomness have gone hand and hand for very long time. And lately in cultural history, there’s been a give and take relationship between games and the other arts. At least since the modern era, different types of randomness have been harnessed to make art objects in a highly intentional way. For example: writing by dice roll, card draw, and cut and paste, painting by splatter, or making music by recording a tape’s physical disintegration.

Modern games and gameworlds are often shot through with randomness. Designers can write chance into their systems to help shape many features of the experience. Chance may decide who wins, who loses, who survives, who thrives, what happens in the end, and what’s even in this world in the beginning., It’s well-known that randomness has its dark side and can be put to use in manipulative ways intended to slowly drain someone’s bank account: slot machines, gacha mechanics, booster packs, and loot boxes. In these notes, I want to look at the more artistically respectable uses. When used artfully, randomness can be used to create an aesthetic effect, to elicit a particular emotion, to allow for some stark narrative possibility, or to make something new.

In many game genres, randomness rules. On center stage or behind the scenes, randomness is often at work. Even where we don’t expect it to be. What decides whether a receiver catches a pass in Madden? Probably a bit of randomness. When we look at the inner workings of the role-playing genre, for example, we often find some partly random mechanism at work. And that’s true for games with fixed items and handcrafted worlds and environments. It’s even more true for games that rely on and experiment with all kinds of procedural generation.

During the SNES, PS1, and PS2 eras, console RPGS were one way I passed the time. The Final Fantasy captured my imagination and never quite let go. The sheer sense of wonder and discovery and adventure those games had for me as a kid has maybe never been matched. If you’re going to waste your youth, at least save the world a couple times in the process.

And, though I had almost certainly come across the use of randomness in videogames before —one type of randomness common in that era made a strong impression on me. I don’t remember which game I was playing, I don’t remember where I was at—my own house or someone else’s. I mostly remember the confusion and surprise. I was making my character walk across an open field surrounded by pixelated mountains. And then a strange sound tore through the soundscape and the music changed. And then there was another scene, which looked as if the camera had zoomed in. And now a monster was standing in front of my character. A monster which, moments before, was utterly hidden, invisible, unknowable. And my child’s mind was just thinking whaaatt is this…. And, worse, the hostile creature was just too strong. I was not prepared for this. I was probably going to die.…no this can’t be happening. I tried to flee. The little coward on screen moved his legs as if running in place. Nothing happened at all. I could not flee. There was no escape. I failed to understand why they would list such a pointless action on the menu as an option. Maybe just to taunt me. I did not realize, at that moment, that even my desperate attempt at self-preservation was controlled by chance.

So my past self found out that randomness can be used to make monsters and fiends and other malicious things appear ex nihilo. The idea that there was some dark set of dice controlling what terrible things I would face in this world (or at least the darker unsafe parts of it) was strangely fascinating. Turn-based role-playing games of the era were largely dominated by this style of encounter design— random encounters.

As the player explored the wilder parts of the game, no threats, enemies, or monsters would be visible. And yet they were there. As you walked, there was some chance, with each step, that you would get into an encounter. You did not know when or what type of enemy or how many there would be. But on some step it would happen. At any moment, strange creatures could materialize out of thin air. Just to try to kill you and your friends. And sometimes they did.

Since most games somehow tied the chance of an encounter to the simple act of walking around, it sometimes felt like you were punished for moving. And if the encounter rate was too high or the algorithm too cruel—you began to dread each step. As a kid I would try to find hidden rituals that just might help avoid the encounters. Like just taking a step then stopping for a second then starting again. Or only moving diagonally. Or trying to hold down different buttons while I walked. Or opening a menu every five seconds hoping that reset some kind of timer. And sometimes, for awhile, I thought one of these magic rituals would work. I had overcome fate and could move at will, entirely unchallenged, around this world—but it inevitably turned out that it was just a good run. The run would end and then randomness would rule again.

(Though apparently there are exploits which do rely on some of these—my still too smooth child brain could not crack the code. The exploits which actually work often do so by resetting a type of counter. Some via step manipulation, others via menuing.)

In some games, the sheer number of encounters felt staggering. And it made their worlds feel like absolutely hostile hopeless places created by relentlessly malicious gods. If the gods of this world were benevolent, surely it would be a little less brimming with invisible fatal threats. Traveling through the wilderness to the next town could feel like a grueling gauntlet. And in some games, the encounters were almost truly random— the algorithm allowed an encounter to happen on any step in a hostile zone (or at any moment.) Some algorithms had no grace period or anything like it. And this was a horrible realization. I remember taking a few steps out into the wilderness, getting thrown into a battle, fighting turn after turn, almost dying, but ultimately surviving. The rousing battle music faded away and those familiar victorious sounds took their place. I felt relief wash over me as the game screen transitioned back to the world map and the landscape was spread out before me again. I took a couple more steps towards my destination—just to get immediately thrown into another godforsaken encounter.

And that is not a single memory. That is a category of memories. That have all blurred together. Kind of like the screen when you get into a random encounter. And sometimes, I swear, it was just one step.

In many games, encounters in an area were infinite, endless, limitless. So long as you kept running around on the screen, you would never stop getting into encounters. And this could be more than a bit depressing when you were lost for long periods or confused about what switch needed pulled. On the other hand, this limitless character of the system would famously allow an unbelievably persistent player to reach the max lvl of 99 in FFVII by running around the first area for 500 hours, as reported by Jason Schrier in this Kotaku article on the feat.

Infinite loops of encounters were theoretically possible in some select. In Phantasy Star, so I’m told, whenever you flee from a battle your character always takes two steps back. But said two steps could send you back into a battle from which you might flee and then take two steps back and so on. And ever since hearing that I have had a morbid impulse to find a copy and see if I can trigger an arbitrarily long encounter loop like this. In some games, the encounters were not tied to steps, but to intervals of time. Even standing still was not safe—the monsters would find you. Idle hands and devils and all that.

And, when I experienced it at it’s most oppressive pitch, I hated all this randomness and yet apparently loved it in equal measure—these were the games I kept playing and replaying, sipping, gulping, and firehosing them down days at a time. There was something fascinating in it all despite the frustrations.

Fortunately designers started crafting more sophisticated algorithms behind the random encounters in an attempt to make the experience feel less punishing and cruel while still feeling random enough to make things interesting. Often this meant sacrificing randomness in the purest mathematical sense— encounters could not occur on literally any step or at any moment. Grace periods were introduced. So some steps were less likely to have an encounter or even banned from having an encounter altogether. Encounter rates were dialed back. Some algorithms even capped the total number of encounters that could occur in a given area—if after ten fights in this room, no more encounters were possible. All those changes—lowering encounter rates, adding grace periods, capping encounters by area— made the randomness feel less cruel. A final way that the player can be made more at home with the randomness is by giving them some slight control over it. More on this in a bit, but yes some games do allow the player to modify the system behind the encounters

Beyond changing the algorithms and giving the player more control over the randomness, core elements of a game’s design can help make a random encounter system shine.

If a combat system bores us to tears moment to moment, then random encounters are not going to fix that problem and will probably make it worse. But when the combat system is challenging, brilliant, innovative, strategic (see Octopath I & II, FFX, FFX-2) or snappy, silly, and pleasant (see Super Mario RPG and Like a Dragon)—then the random encounters can create a space to just soak it all in. Sometimes wandering around getting in fights listening to those beautiful OST’s becomes essentially grinding for it’s own sake—like going for a swim. The goals pursued are little more than thin justifications for the activity of playing these little battle puzzles for an extra hour or two.

Designers quickly learned that a wide variety of visually and mechanically interesting enemies with different encounter rates can really bring out the best in these systems . Especially if some enemies are really rare and challenging or have unique puzzle-like quality or drop something exceptionally significant or certain enemies can be recruited/caught. In short, anytime we are going select what happens on the basis of a dice roll, that’s really only going to be interesting if interesting things can happen in the first place.

But why random encounters in the first place? What does this system add to the game that would not be there otherwise?

In a word: uncertainty. Not knowing something can be interesting in the right context. Greg Costikyan’s wrote an excellent book which is a kind of typology of the different types of uncertainty, about the role those types don uncertainty can play in crafting particular types of experience, and the ways uncertainty can just make a game a richer experience.

And one type of uncertainty is brought about by randomness in design. Random encounter systems clearly do create uncertainty. And about a few different things.

In most games that feature then, random encounters typically are limited to dangerous areas. These are often dark strange places like dungeons or catacombs or ruins or corporate HQ or maybe wild places like the forest or a cave or the tall grass. When you first enter a dangerous area, you don’t know what sorts of things you’ll be fighting , you don’t know their strengths and weaknesses, you may not know quite how powerful they will be relative to you. You don’t know exactly when and exactly where you’ll have to fight them (though you know it will be soon enough and in this general vicinity.) You don’t know, over the long run,  exactly how many fights you’ll be facing in this area before you get to your goal.

This uncertainty can make things interesting. It can create good or bad surprises. It can make it a bit more difficult to plan for every single contingency and so you just have to go into the area generally prepared— and sometimes that just won’t be enough. But you’ll die or flee and do better next time.

Suppose you had perfect information about these things before entering an area. Would that make things more interesting or less? You could plan things out better, but it’s not clear that would make for a better experience.

Consider randomizer mods for much beloved and well-worn games. Why do people like those? It makes something very familiar just a bit more fresh. It gives a longtime fan a chance to experience the game in a new way. And that’s almost entirely due to the way it introduces uncertainty into the experience. You don’t know the places things will be anymore. And random encounters build just a bit of that spirit into the game in the first place. Again, uncertainty can be interesting and introducing randomness is one way to achieve that.

Good surprises, bad surprises

So uncertainty is one thing they give us. And this uncertainty can accomplish different things depending on the overall tone, atmosphere, setting, and difficulty of the game. The ever-present possibility of a encounter can feel like a looming threat if the world has a dark setting or the difficulty is significant or both. But the possibility of an encounter could feel exciting and almost reward-like in themselves if the world is generally bright, unforbidding, or the fights are fairly breezy. Pokémon takes this approach. Or the mood can even vary from area to area in a game. Some of the games in the Final Fantasy series are not so tough, but often contain optional dungeons and wilderness areas where life is nasty, brutish, and short (for the underleveled or underprepared.)

A brief note: someone might say something like this now. “But isn’t output randomness supposed to be a strategy ruining feature of poor game design? And isn’t a random encounter system just a form of output randomness.? Take one step, nothing happens. Take another step, and now you have to fight a monstrosity that wipes your party. Same action, but very different outcome. All strategy is ruined.” Well, I would say a different sort of strategy is required to do well in chance heavy games, even if that randomness lies on the output side. And, in the end, for they type of single player experiences we’ve been talking about— it probably just comes down to taste. Some people like the randomness mixed in and some do not. To each their own. I’m just attempting to point out that random encounter systems can provide distinct type of ludic experience that may fit well with the artistic aims of a game overall.

Are non-random encounters strictly better?

Random encounters are assumed to just be an outdated design which was only used by designers of yore due to the limitations of the antiquated hardware they were dealing with. As a result, people talk about visible non-random encounters as if that is now the only sensible design option left for this genre.

So let’s contrast random encounters with the usual alternative. In a non-random system with visible enemy placement, enemies appear in particular places on screen. If you make contact with the enemy or their encounter box, a battle will begin.  The battle screen may be more or less the same as the area screen you were navigating around before (or not—there still might be a transition to a pretty different battle screen.)

The non-random system does things the random system does not (and vice versa.) It provides information and allows us to make choices. What information does the non-random system give us? We know where the enemies are, we know their type and, depending on how the representation works, the number of enemies or encounters in an area. The number known is usually the number of encounters on a screen because a single enemy character will stand for an encounter that turns out to include a number of enemies. And what can we do with all this information? We can make some choices. We can plan a path. We might be able to buy or equip some relevant items in advance that will help deal with the type of enemy. But the main choice is this: fight or don’t. Walk into the battle or walk around. That’s the freedom the visibility and the clear placement gives us. That choice is a simple one. But people seem to love when it’s on the table.

Controlling Chance

This may not sway anyone dead set against random encounter systems, but something close to this kind of (fight or avoid) choice is often built into games with random encounters. Designers have introduce quite a few different ways to let players control or influence chance.

First, there’s the classic ‘flee’ command. Once thrown in a battle you can usually try to run away on your first turn. That’s not exactly the same choice as fight or avoid—since you’ve already been sent into the encounter. Admittedly, in the PS1 days, burying this choice after the encounter had begun could be frustrating. Loading times on those transitions were significant. And, depending on the design of the mechanic, it might not always work. Sometimes fleeing/running is an action with no chance of failure, but sometimes not. But this classic command is still a way of introducing some player control over the encounters.

Second, there are many ways that games allow the player to adjust the encounter rate, dialing it up or down as they wish.

This can be accomplished through simple configurational options in the settings menu—like difficulty modes or an an encounter rate dial or slider. Bravely Default, its successors, and many of Square Enix’s remasters of their classic titles are taking this approach—several just let you turn the random encounters entirely off whenever you like. The configurational approach is a solid workaround for players who do not enjoy the battles or have grown tired of them and can make a game more accessible. Similar things could and are being put in place for many real-time games , easier modes and settings that allow people to bypass much of the combat to get on with the story if that’s what they are there for.

A number of classic and modern turn-based games give players control over encounter rate and encounter type—diegetically. Final Fantasy VI had equipable relics that modified the encounter rate. Other games build in armor or rings or herbs or spells that dial the rate up a bit or down a bit or down to zero. Another aspect of encounters that designers let players influence is the encounter type. Items, like sprays in Pokemon, might attract specific types of enemies or deter others.

A classic approach made new is present in Octopath Traveler II. Nighttime is scary. Videogames have always known this. That’s when the monsters come out. Or more monsters anyway. So in games with a day/night cycles, the night time often turns a somewhat friendly, even charming, landscape into a dark place overrun with vampires, skeletons, bats, demons, goblins, and other generic creatures of the night. See Simon’s Quest, see Ocarina of Time, see Minecraft, and probably a thousand others. Octopath Traveler II shares this mechanic. The encounter rate is low during the day and high at night. The encounters during the day are easier and the night fights are tougher; but the day fights yield less experience and rewards than the night fights. In a generous move, the game gives the player instant control over the day/night cycle itself—just press a button to swap from day to night or vice versa. No magical instrument required. And the game gives the player even more control over encounters by including the classic items, skills, and gear to further modify the rate and type of encounters.

And, at this point in the essay, it has to be time to bring up Hironobu Sakaguchi. He created Final Fantasy— a series which had random encounters and turn-based battles until FFXI. Thirty years since FFI and Sakaguchi is still working in the genre. And still using random encounters in the most recent games he has designed at his company Mistwalker. And he’s still experimenting with these systems and finding new things to do with them. Fantasian, a beautiful rpg with backgrounds that are irl tiny dioramas, came out for the Apple Arcade in 2021. Beyond the intensely charming dioramas, the game introduced a novel way to give the player some control over encounters. The game has a risk/reward mechanic that allows the player to bank encounters and save them for later—but you can only bank so many, bank too many and you have to fight them all at once. Basically, the idea is you have a magic monster jail box . You can send every monster you encounter to the monster jail. But once the jail is full, they are going to get you. It’s an intriguing idea and it works well. The point of mentioning these very recent games is just this: there’s probably a deep pool of currently unimagined ideas that could make them feel new. Turns out, random encounters can still be cool after all these years.

And everyone should love them just as much as they always hated them (unless they always loved them in the first place.) .

This note looked at one type of randomness in game design—one that is relatively limited in scope. There’s so much to be said about the role of chance in other types of mechanics and systems: accuracy, critical hits, loot, events, dialogue, and skill checks. And then the procedurally generated maps, dungeons, and worlds which will always inevitably lead us to the idea of the infinite game— which is either a dream or a nightmare.