Links: Hasbro's Hiring, Spiel 2012 Warm-up & Twilight Struggle and Chance Narratives

It is curious that chance and all the chaos it implies became a bedrock component of what it is to be American. From a young age, schoolchildren are told that they can become the president or an astronaut, because only in America do people have the chance to become whatever they want. The market system carries the belief that only chance can guarantee true transactional efficiency and separate innovative wheat from mundane chaff. Interventions that impede working of the "invisible hand" increasingly crowd out the chance new discoveries will be made. Narratives using chance in American culture — the rags-to-riches story, or immigrant emigration story lines — are so prominent, they are often taken for granted. But the illusion of freedom these narratives convey helps conceal the way chance circumscribes experience. Even the phrase land of opportunity carries overtones of chance: Some will make it; others won’t. There is no destiny, only opportunities that one must take advantage of when chance allows.

But where fiction generally resists reader alteration, board games take it for granted and depend on it. A fictional narrative remains the same despite how it's interpreted by readers. The underlying expectation in gameplay, however, is that the player actively constructs a narrative and perhaps even modifies the game's rules. Meaning for players comes only through the active process of experiencing play. Operating Twilight Struggle's narrative platform provides a ludic truth — truth through play that gives experiential knowledge using popular, though misleading, historical explanations for the period. It purports to compress the Cold War experience while maintaining some semblance of fidelity to the mentalité of the period, but the chance experienced through gameplay is wed to narrative exposition that clearly embraces a U.S.-centric worldview. Chance narratives help players validate experiential knowledge they acquire during play, but their execution actually inverts the meaning of chance, so that the objective reality behind the Cold War presented in Twilight Struggle becomes illusion. The ideology behind chance is thus recharged through play, validating the American Cold War experience on the basis of an illusionary reality where chance effects are safely circumscribed.

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If we had a d20 that rolled perfectly, each face would come up 500 times. But of course randomness isn't perfect and we'd expect some deviation: Over the course of 10,000 rolls we'd expect, with 85% confidence, that each face would be within about 33 of 500 — so anywhere from 467 to 533 is within the bounds of randomness. (At 95% confidence the margin of error is 45.) Neither die falls within these bounds.

The Chessex d20 had a standard deviation of 16.13, and the GameScience d20 had a standard deviation of 12.25.