So there’s this cool psychological effect whereby if you ask people “What are your odds of drawing a full house?” you get higher numbers on average than when you ask “What are the odds of drawing a full house?”. People are almost universally aware that the cards drawn off a deck does not change depending on who is doing the drawing, but when asked – on average – will assign themselves higher odds. How do we use that?
I don’t really shy away from any particular type of content in my game design, I like to stick to whatever the game feels like it needs. In 404 and Wizard’s Academy that didn’t produce anything particularly out of place. Thematically they’re both funnier than they are dark. There are hints of bad things in them, of course, but ultimately I’ve had more comments that the dead monkey token is “cute” than people complaining about the objectives like turn a human into pie and feed it to another human (colloquially: The Sweeney Todd objective).
