Sadly, nothing I can really show off today.

However, I can report that I’ve made quite a bit of progress on the programming front.  I’ve been throwing together a bunch of simple little math-type modules, and I’m hoping that soon I’ll have all the ones I need to start doing more with them.

Not that exciting to people looking in from the outside, I’ll grant that.  But it’s a long way for me, and it’s the first time making programs that are totally mine – at least in conception, if not wholly in code.  And as this diary charts both my technical and design thoughts, better to pave the way for that now.

Speaking of improving my skills – the last couple days I’ve been playing this quirky little iPad game called Merge Pool.  It’s ok, but nothing special;  a fun little score chase game where you fire colored balls ala Puzzle Bobble,  but they have the physics of a pool table (or, honestly, an air hockey table) and they absorb balls of the same color.

There’s only two things that really bug me about the game.  First, the game should be called Merge Billiards.  There’s no holes, you’re basically playing billiards.  So call it billiards.  The second is the App Store reviews for this game.  Ignoring the numerous complaints that the game is an ‘ad revenue generation scam’ there’s a significant number of people saying the game is “completely luck dependent”.

At some point, we need to do an episode about skill vs luck, because there’s a lot of different things to say about the topic.  But for now, I will say that my feeling has always been that there is definitely an aspect of skill to luck.  Not in a pure luck game, such as roulette or baccarrat, obviously.  However, it’s a simple fact that my score in Merge Pool increased as I got better at taking shots and planning.

In most games, what is called “luck” would be more accurately described as “risk mitigation”.  Pool is actually a fairly good example of this.  At first blush, it may seem like the game is purely about the mechanical skill of being able able to hit the balls with the cue ball, and then hoping that the cue winds up in a good position.  But the reality is that a skilled player is attempting to make sure that the cue ball returns to an advantageous position for him.

Likewise, in card games, being able to do even simple distribution calculations can prove helpful for similar reasons.  You might not know, for example, that the next card you flip will be the 6 of hearts.  But if you know diflucan that there’s more 6’s left in the deck than 5’s, you can adjust your strategy in hopes that one will come up.

I find that far too often, when people say a game is “luck-based” they simply mean “I don’t know how to evaluate my chances, or how to know what a risky play is.”  And a lot of times, that can be helped by designers making information a little more clear.

The rest of the time, such as with Merge Pool, it just feels a bit like sour grapes.