Jamie Fristrom adds a new word to our game design lexicon: variance.

Variance is the amount of randomness in the outcome of your game. Poker is extremely high-variance: even the best player in the world will lose regularly. Chess and Go are very low-variance: Kasparov will beat me in chess 99,999 times out of 100,000…maybe even more…The SSX series is high variance, whereas the Tony Hawk series is low variance. When I play Tony Hawk, with most of their challenges, if I can beat a challenge once, I can go back and repeat my performance almost every time. This is because of the Tony Hawk rail system is really tight: you can use rails in Tony Hawk to line up shots and create repeat performances. With SSX, on the other hand, slight differences in timing and pressure on the analog stick can cause you to miss the rail completely and end up doing a totally different run than you might have originally planned.

Be sure to read both parts of his article, they’re thought-provoking stuff. MMOs, for the most part, are pretty low variance, which is one of the reasons they feel ‘grindy’. Are high variance games in our future? That’s hard to say.

One would argue that players want to see more variety in their gameplay. But the flip side of it is that, in a persistent space, players are far less patient of complete randomness which causes them to lose great amounts of time and effort. The fact that we don’t have save points makes it worse.

Jamie’s variance theory is more interesting when compared with Raph’s Theory of Fun, which claims that (paraphrased) fun centers on pattern recognition. A low variance game would be one where these patterns are immediately visible and easy to replicate. A high variance game is one where such pattern recognition is a more of the ’seat of the pants’ instinctual thing going on.

As Jamie points out in part two of his article, it would seem that it’s harder to make a good high variance game — you run the serious risk of designing something that’s too hard or random for a large portion of your playerbase.

Most online games are relatively high variance because of the unpredictability of other people and how they build and play their characters. Killing monsters in WoW is low variance, whereas killing other players (especially when you’re not expecting it) would be high variance. This simple, often unexpected of core play styles might be a large part of what makes freeform ganking so frustrating to those who don’t like PvP.