Inside Asian Gaming

February 2012 | INSIDE ASIAN GAMING 29 Weike Is there a tendency in the industry for all game designers to want to copy the really successful games? Even if you tried to copy many components of someone else’s successful game, you will never do it as well. You might come close, but you certainly won’t do better. I think it’s important for a manufacturer to stand out—especially if they’ve got some innovative, unique, approach. The player’s overall perceptions of the game might be similar. The feature or the way it’s presented can be subtly different. I understand creating a game that people love must be satisfying. But is putting together the maths also intellectually exciting? I think so. A lot of it involves referring what has been successful and not successful in the past, and learning from that and moving forward. That includes fixing your own mistakes and improving. One of the most satisfying areas—and I think where the best products come from— is that when you have a successful game, the team can build on that success. So they start with exactly the same style of game and game model, and they add little things to it. And players enjoy this as well. They grow to love a certain game, and then they come across the next game in that series. They find something new and exciting, but at the same time there’s the core of what they grew to love in the first place. How do you ‘crunch’ the maths for a game? To a mathematician the maths is quite simple. It’s about simple combinations and counting. Fromgame- to-game, the formula, the structure, of that maths is pretty much the same. When we introduce a new feature or a new element, my team has to calculate the new maths. But it’s when we analyse those winning patterns within that maths— that it gets more complicated. We have certain formulae and structures in place that simulate game play, and do calculate the numbers for us. We can just plug in values and plug in new ideas and new features. But it’s the analysis that is key. It’s of benefit to have a mathematical background, and it’s important to have that team of mathematicians making a contribution to game development. Is the term ‘random number generation’ as applied to slot machines a little misleading? I ask because there have to be a certain number of winning events available and a certain return to player available over a given period. The set of outcomes in a given game, and in particular the most popular games, is actually finite. People may never win the biggest prize, but it’s still ‘visible’. Despite the randomness that seems to be there, we’re Weike’s AndrewMasen Problem solving.Slot game maths is relatively easy— it’s the analysis of winning patterns that counts