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 running maths. And sometimes if a game doesn’t feel right it’s not because the idea is wrong but because the numbers are.
What players actually experience is not the design itself but the result of it. They feel how often they are rewarded, how close they are to success, how quickly they are progressing, how fair or unfair something feels. All those things are shaped by numbers. Change the numbers and the feeling changes with them.
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