[hypertele-Xii]

> A game which randomly misinterprets your inputs will not.

You clearly know nothing about games. This specific kind of challenge (called 'output randomness') is widely employed in games and it absolutely makes you better at carefully considering what you're doing (because it might go wrong), making contingency plans (inevitably it will go wrong), efficient encoding of intent (maximize the outcome despite going wrong), and priorization (dedicate more effort to the important first).

The results of getting better at this kind of thing can be seen in telecommunications, where the unreliability of links has required very smart people figure out how to communicate over them anyway. And our networks are more robust because of it.

[oneoff786]

Please enlighten me on the games that intentionally implement misinterpreting player inputs. Accusing me of knowing nothing about games is a pretty reckless claim. Think about how fucking stupid that kind of thing is to claim of a random stranger. Games aren’t even a niche subject area,

“Output randomness”, as in, rolling a d20 to see how your attack goes is not remotely close conceptually to the idea of a game that intentionally misinterprets your controls.

If you choose to attack, your attack might not succeed. But that’s not a good analogy for a disability. Those are the rules everybody plays by. A disability like a stutter would be you decide you want to attack but then the game decides you’re going to use a useless item instead.

[hypertele-Xii]

Gladly.

Traditional roguelikes sometimes implement a spell or effect of 'confusion' that causes the symbols by which you read the game world to shuffle around randomly, thus obscuring the information of what is what. Then attempting to use an item you thought was an X turns out to be a Y instead. Many of them have items or spells with inherently uncertain outcomes, like wands of random effects.

The modern traditional roguelike Cogmind has a mechanism where a certain type of damage causes corruption to accumulate, causing your character to increasingly perform random actions instead of the actions you input, such as randomly triggering weapons to fire at random targets. Skilled players take this into account to avoid catastrophic accidents, for example by dropping all their weapons before talking to a friendly NPC.

The tactical/strategy game XCOM models the psychological stress of combat operations as a chance that a soldier will inadvertantly reject your order and do something else instead, in panic. Darkest Dungeon leans heavily on a similar mechanic, where accumulating stress or negative personality traits can cause your party members to act against your command, on their own volition, messing up your plans, necessitating the organization of actions around the least reliable elements.

Deck building card games in general present an inconsistent and unreliable set of options at any given moment, as your available actions are a randomly drawn set of cards. Despite your best efforts to include tools for dealing with situations, you can never rely on a particular tool being available when it's needed, leading to heavy planning around probabilities, redundancy, and flexible card combinations.

Since your understanding of the subject is "rolling a d20 to see how your attack goes", I would say my accusation is perfectly well placed. No need to get defensive about it. I've been researching games for decades. The problem is when you make factual statements like "a game which randomly misinterprets your inputs will not make you better at playing it" (paraphrased) as if you are an expert on the subject, when absolutely clearly to anyone who has studied games to any length can immediately see that your claim is false.

Let me know if you'd like more examples, these are the ones off the top of my head.

[oneoff786]

None of those are misinterpreted inputs. Those are clearly defined mechanics within the games that have a chance to have an unexpected outcome but in exclusively designed contexts.

I don’t see any of them making you better at the game either, but rather just being a context that you need to adapt to. Dropping all weapons before talking to someone because there’s a chance you might attack them if you don’t isn’t making you better at the game, it’s adding tedium to circumvent a risk that is only present due to your confusion state. If you had no such confusion, this behavior would just be a waste of time. You’re not better at the game generically for doing this.

Also fwiw that sounds like an incredibly stupid game mechanic in cogmind. None of your other examples felt remotely relevant to me.

[hypertele-Xii]

> None of those are misinterpreted inputs. Those are clearly defined mechanics within the games that have a chance to have an unexpected outcome but in exclusively designed contexts.

Video games are computer programs. As a programmer, you have to clearly define the rules to the computer, otherwise the computer will refuse to run your code. Programming unexpected outcomes is by necessity defining clearly probabilities and consequences of failure. How else would you even do it? Actually corrupting the program's memory? Yeah good luck with that.

All I hear is "I don't understand this so I think it's stupid so you must be stupid and these games must be stupid as well."