In resource management games, I typically have a set of coefficients in my head for the current relative marginal values of different resources, and my primary heuristic is usually maximizing the weighted sum of my resources according to these coefficients.
In combat strategy games, I usually try to maximize (my rate of damage) x (maximum damage I can sustain before I lose) / (enemy rate of damage) x (damage I need to cause before I win).
These don’t seem especially profound to me. But I’ve noticed a surprising number of video games that make it distressingly hard to track these things; for instance, by making it so that the data you need to calculate them is split across three different UI screens, or by failing to disclose the key mathematical relationships between the public variables and the heuristics I’m trying to track. (“You can choose +5 armor or +10 accuracy. No, we’re not planning to tell you the mathematical relationship between armor or accuracy and observable game outcomes, why do you ask?”)
It’s always felt odd to me that there isn’t widespread griping about such games.
As a result of reading this post, I have started explicitly tracking two hypotheses that I wasn’t before: (1) that the value of tracking things-like-these is much less obvious than I think, and (2) that a lot of people lack the spare cognitive capacity to track the things I’m tracking.
Though I’m not sure yet whether they’re going to steal much probability from my previous leading hypothesis, “most players are not willing to do mental multiplication in order to play better.”
That seems like it could only potentially be a feature in competitive games; yet I see it all the time in single-player games with no obvious nods to competition (e.g. no leaderboards). In fact, I have the vague impression games that emphasize competition tend to be more legible—although it’s possible I only have this impression from player-created resources like wikis rather than actual differences in developer behavior. (I’ll have to think about this some.)
Also, many of these games show an awful lot of numbers that they don’t, strictly speaking, need to show at all. (I’ve also played some games that don’t show those numbers at all, and I generally conclude that those games aren’t for me.) Offering the player a choice between +5 armor and +10 accuracy implies that the numbers “5” and “10″ are somehow expected to be relevant to the player.
Also, in several cases the developers have been willing to explain more of the math on Internet forums when people ask them. Which makes it seem less like a conscious strategy to withhold those details and more that it just didn’t occur to them that players would want them.
There certainly could be some games where the developers are consciously pursuing an anti-legible-math policy, but it seems to me that the examples I have in mind do not fit this picture very well.