I'm part of my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work.

Okay. Well, today is another in my series, 10 things every game needs. Today is surprise.

Yes, number six. So, so far we've talked about goal or goals, about rules, about interaction, about a catch-up feature, about

inertia. Well, today we are getting to surprise. Okay, so let me start by explaining

there are actually two different kinds of surprise, and so let me clarify those as we

talk about surprise. So surprise number one is what we call hidden information,

which means one or more players in the game is aware of something

that the other players are not.

The other type of surprise is something in which no player knows,

information that nobody has.

So for example, hidden information, a good example of that might be a card game in which you have cards in your hand that are relevant, but the other players don't know what cards you have in your hand.

Magic does that, poker does that.

There's a lot of games in which it's, you know, I know something that other people don't know.

Now, an example of sort of general surprise is where there's some factor that affects the game that keeps happening.

Everybody knows about it, but nobody knows when those factors are going to happen.

So a good example of that would be, for example, in poker, when cards are turned face up, everybody gets to see what the cards are.

When they happen, it's information for everybody, but it's not something that you are well aware of ahead of time, meaning, oh, I didn't know that was going to happen.

Now everybody at one time knows it's going to happen.

So anyway, we're going to talk about both kinds of surprise today and the value of them.

So let me start by, so I did a podcast, three podcasts actually, talking about communications theory,

and there's three principles of communication theory, things that humans just need that communication

is built around.

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