The god of random numbers is real, and right now he’s in your house, sniffing all your dice. If you don’t pray to him, you will never see a natural 20 again and all your decks will be stacked against you for the rest of the time.
Or… RNG as its name suggests. Random. Crush B, or A, or whatever button you like while the Poké Ball is ticking side to side will not affect the results in any way. It’s a reassurance, a meaningless ritual that keeps you busy while the game decides the outcome.
Oooorrr… it’s somewhere in the middle. Maybe you don’t believe in some kind of god overseeing random outcomes, but you do those rituals anyway. just in case.
That’s where I found myself. I’m not a particularly spiritual person, but I do have a few pointless superstitions. I never tell anyone what I wish on coins thrown in fountains or birthday candles that have gone out, unless that wish has come true. I also started wishing whenever the clock hit 11:11 as a teenager, which evolved into making sure the time went to 11:12, lest the wish wouldn’t count. I don’t care about black cats and ladders, or shoes on the table, but I pick up every penny I see on the floor, damn it. Once, when I was a teenager, someone told me it was bad luck to go through three manhole covers in a row (why?) and now I feel weird every time I do it, so I try not to do so.
And so, yes, I also have silly little gaming etiquette. Poké Balls are something I especially love, but Poké Balls have since evolved to not really require the button crushing technique anymore, as they are much faster and cheaper. When I’m diamond hunting in Minecraft, I throw all the tried and tested methods out the window in favor intuition. In Stardew Valley, I dutifully plowed the bare ground, convinced that any of them might secretly stash a treasure trove of the very material I was looking for, and I guarantee I will. wear the crown so that any God who can track Random Numbers will find themselves lucky.
We are not alone in these silly little rituals. A psychological experiment conducted by BF Skinner — the inventor of the Skinner Box, or operator’s conditioning chamber — experimented with superstition in pigeons, which provide bird food at regular intervals. This has the effect of causing seemingly superstitious behavior in hungry creatures, who will take whatever action they were doing when food first appears in the hope that it will work again.
“One bird was conditioned to spin counter-clockwise around the cage, making two or three laps between reinforcements. Another bird repeatedly rammed its head into one of the upper corners of the cage. The third bird played. develop a ‘toss’ reaction, as if placing the head under an invisible bar and continuously lifting it.
The two birds have developed a pendulum motion of the head and torso, in which the head is stretched forward and rotated from right to left with a sharp motion, then back slightly more slowly.”
Of course, that makes meaningless. Food is delivered whether the pigeons perform their little rituals or not. But we can’t really judge them—even though we’ve done that little Poké Ball button-squeezing ritual hundreds of times and it inactiveWe still do it, right? Somehow, we believe that maybe we didn’t do it right at the time, and it can’t be true randomness.
Whatever you think of rituals, we all have them in one way or another. Maybe we don’t even realize it, or think about them too deeply. I like to drink a cup of tea every morning, and if I forget, I get really upset for reasons I can’t fathom, even though I’ve been doing this daily for at least 10 to 15 years. year. Some people can’t bring themselves to wear socks that don’t fit, or wear underwear with the wrong date on it (does weekday underwear still exist?). My partner falls asleep every night watching videos of old computers (the channel is literally called don’t come to me), and at this point it’s impossible to sleep without them.
Whether the rituals change or not, they’re still a part of being human (and obviously pigeons too) — they’re a pattern that calms our nervous, chaotic monkey brains. They make us feel safe and grounded, like we have some sort of control over…well, anything. Maybe they didn’t change the actual numbers, and maybe the God of random numbers was looking down at us and laughing at our futile actions, but I found myself at least glad. tried to make the difference all the same.
Do you have gaming etiquette and superstitions? Do you have any proof that they work, or do you just enjoy doing them? Let us know in the comments section!
