I'm pulling away from the curb because I brought my son off at school. We all know what that means.

It's time for their drive to work. Okay, so today's topic is variance. This was requested by someone on my blog.

And interestingly, after someone requested, I do a podcast on variance. Someone else said, hey, but he's already done a podcast on randomness.

And then I had to say, hey, wait a minute, variance and randomness are not the same thing.

So today I'm going to explain what variance is, why it's not randomness, or it is to variance it's a randomness but they're different

things and i will talk about how we in design um interact with variance how we raise or lower variance

so i guess let me start with the most important thing on a podcast about variance what is

variance so variance is talking about how often games play out the same. The higher the variance,

the less they play out the same. The lower the variance, the more they play out the same. So why is

that important? And real quickly, I guess, let's say you're playing a game of magic, okay? I have

the same deck and I play 10 games. High variance would mean, man, those games are really,

really different from one another. They played out completely different. Low variance is I was basically doing the same thing every game.

Now, why do we care about variance?

Well, the answer is, and I'm going to make some generalities here, but they're generally

true.

High variance tends to be more fun.

Why?

Different things happen.

You don't know what to expect.

Or at least when I say more fun, I mean from a casual standpoint.

That high variance means just I'm surprised more.

Things happen I don't expect more.

...