Old World is LIVE TODAY on Steam and GOG! The Heroes of the Aegean DLC is free to own for the first two weeks (and also free for all previous EGS owners). Be sure to leave a user review to let others know your thoughts!.

Designer Notes #89: Patrice Desilets (@patricedez), Designer of Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, Assassin's Creed, and Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey - Part 1!.

Designer Notes #88: Caroline Marchal (@CaroMarchal), Designer on Heavy Rain, Beyond Two Souls, and As Dusk Falls - Part 2!.

Designer Notes #87: Caroline Marchal (@CaroMarchal), Designer on Heavy Rain, Beyond Two Souls, and As Dusk Falls - Part 1!.

RT @PurpBullMoose: Wrath of Gods - New DLC - Aksum via @YouTube . NEW - OLD WORLD - DLC. WRATH OF GODS!. By far the….

RT @mohawkgames: Old World MP battle of the content creators tomorrow Sunday 23rd March at 5pm GMT. Watch live via .

RT @mohawkgames: Old World DLC Wrath of Gods is now available on Epic, Steam, GOG and Stove, with a 10% launch discount! . Wrath of Gods i….

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RT @TGDRT: #podcast The Civilization Series returns with lead designer Soren Johnson, discussing teasers for Civilization VII, their excite….

Ironically, the 2024 election is the rare example where this is NOT a problem. 50/50 odds describe the current uncertainty perfectly as in "neither outcome is more likely." Just remember the country is not flipping a coin tomorrow. It's reading the last sentence of the chapter.

So, it's not surprising that, as we start to describe uncertainty more and more in terms of discrete probabilities, there has been a corresponding growth in the rise of real-money betting across more and more aspects of our life. There is an incentive to make that number "true.".

However, there IS one specific field in which describing uncertainty in terms of a simple number makes sense and has utility - the world of sports and political betting. The Yankee's 94% odds may have been just a guess, but they were necessary if one needed to set a betting line.

As a game designer, I know first-hand how bad people are at understanding probabilities (that streaks are to be expected, for example), so there must be a better way to describe uncertainty than just using percentage odds (or "X out of Y" results or other variations).

Clearly, this issue is worse for a presidential election. Nate Silver somehow got both praise and criticism for giving Trump a 29% chance in 2016, but describing uncertainty in those terms is inherently misleading. After some unknown day that year, Trump was always going to win.

This problem is true even for sports. The odds of flopping a pair are 29% because we can do the math; the process is known. We think the Yankees had a 94% of winning before the disastrous 5th inning of Game 5, but the actual probability is unknowable. 94% is just a guess.

However, we don't have the right language to describe this type of uncertainty, and it's unfortunate that we borrow the language from randomness, of exact percentage odds, to describe an uncertain event where one outcome is predetermined but unknown.

A presidential election, especially one so close, has an entirely different type of uncertainty. If we could Groundhog Day the election tomorrow, either Harris would win 100 times or Trump would win 100 times. There is not enough chaos in the system to produce different results.

However, even those last two examples are quite different. A baseball game has an inherent level of chaos, so that if you could Groundhog Day one game 100 times, a team with a 60% chance of winning would probably (but not certainly) win 60 games and lose 40.

Randomness (in the context of games) means an unknown outcome from a known process (29% odds of flopping a pair in Texas Hold'em). Uncertainty, in contrast, come from an unknown process, which could be whether the Yankees beat the Dodgers or whether Harris beats Trump.

There will be much obsession over the presidential odds at places like @FiveThirtyEight and the @NateSilver538 Bulletin, but these exact numbers are always going to be an awkward fit as they use the language of randomness to describe uncertainty, which is a very different thing.

Designer Notes #86: Anton Strenger (@antonstrenger), Designer on Civilization 5, Civilization 6, and Beyond Earth!.