Seeded Randomness

A many-player elimination format that uses a shrinking play area to force an ending the players would otherwise avoid.

A grid of cells whose states evolve by a local rule applied simultaneously everywhere.

Repeatedly narrowing the possible values of each variable using the constraints, until nothing more can be deduced.

The property that identical inputs produce identical outputs, and the foundation of caching and verification.

Selling randomized draws rather than items, and the structures that make the real price hard to see.

Computer opponents built to be interesting to play against rather than optimal.

A rewriting grammar that generates branching structures by repeated substitution.

A process whose next state depends only on the present state, and the basis of pre-neural text generation.

Persistent advancement that survives a failed run, converting loss into currency and a hard genre into a habit.

A conditional-probability puzzle in which switching wins twice as often as staying.

Creating content algorithmically rather than authoring it by hand.

An algorithm that produces a sequence of numbers that looks random but is fully determined by a starting seed, and the separate, stricter kind needed for security.

Converting geometry into pixels — the dominant real-time rendering approach.

Renders images by tracing individual light paths through a scene instead of projecting geometry onto a screen.

A genre defined by procedurally generated runs and permanent death, and the design pressures those create.

a hybrid genre where a deck built entirely within one run replaces the dungeon as the object of play.

Reloading a save to retry a chance-dependent outcome until it lands, converting a game's stated stakes into a series of do-overs.

A small program run on the graphics processor for every vertex or every pixel.

A dice-plus-modifier resolution borrowed from tabletop play to decide whether an attempted action succeeds.

A 78-card symbolic system used for narrative interpretation, and a well-structured combinatorial vocabulary.

The property that each test passes or fails on its own, regardless of which other tests run, in what order, or in parallel.

A card-game family in which players contest a series of small rounds, and a source of unusually clean rule systems.

The reinforcement schedule that pays out after an unpredictable number of responses, and produces the highest, steadiest response rate of any schedule studied.

A volumetric pixel — a value on a regular three-dimensional grid.