Absolute Randomness Would Ruin the AAA Game You Think You Want

Picture this.

You are in a realistic AAA game, carrying the key item the main quest needs. You have walked a mountain road for three days. You have calculated weather, stamina, and equipment wear. You even begin to enjoy the slow, certain accumulation. Each step brings you closer to the goal. Then a random avalanche falls. It buries the item. There is no warning, no solution, and no prompt telling you that you can shovel the snow. You stand in the snow with nothing but an empty backpack.

Would you still find that chance romantic?

This question runs into Hideo Kojima. He has warned us not to be arranged by algorithms, not to live in a world smoothed flat by recommendation systems. The context of that line points first to real life, not to game mechanics. He worries about a phone assistant making choices for you, an algorithm steering a life toward the optimal solution, and the erosion of the ability to wander into a café by accident or meet someone by chance. Sliding that line directly into “AAA games should simulate absolute random disaster” is an overextension.

The chance in games is never unscripted.

1. The Avalanche Is Scripted

Random events, put another way, are events the developer has designed in advance but does not trigger at a fixed node. The difference is only whether they appear on a fixed schedule or under certain conditions.

Game design has often talked about emergent design: design a large set of simple rules, and let them combine into results that cannot be fully predicted. Note the wording: not fully predictable, not fully unpredictable. Minecraft and The Legend of Zelda are products of this approach. A more extreme example is Noita. Players combine hundreds of spells into a single staff and fire it before they know what will happen. Rockstar’s GTA and Red Dead Redemption series are another extreme. They pile a mass of missions, rules, systems, and random events into a dynamic world.

No matter how rich the rules become, they cannot break the underlying framework. You cannot turn GTA into Minecraft. The problem with this design direction is plain. The workload is enormous, the cost is high, and the demands on the team are severe. Too few random events, and you get a canned game. Too many, and you get Red Dead, GTA, or The Witcher 3. This is a matter of piling on work.

In Death Stranding 2, the avalanches and earthquakes that look accidental are, according to player-community observation, almost entirely scripted, with limited impact. They are not disasters triggered at random across an open world. The accidents in Kojima’s own games are never dice rolls from the system.

2. What Gets Buried Is Not the Item. It’s the Point.

Back to the avalanche. This design is not impossible. A design that only throws up a problem and refuses to supply a solution is a bad game by construction.

If an avalanche can bury a key item, the game must provide an answer: a snowplow, a snow-melting item, or some recovery mechanism. Otherwise the flow dead-ends, and the player sends you a one-two-three combo of bad review, quit, and refund. If the game is built to AAA scale with realistic visuals and interactive presentation, that answer could cost millions of dollars to develop. To build a large number of similar answers, the cost climbs into the tens of billions. This is the practical reason an AAA game built on absolute randomness cannot exist under current technical conditions. The idea is not ugly. The engineering cannot hold it up.

The more fatal problem is on the experience layer.

What players enjoy is the flow of encounter a problem, solve the problem. An accident is only a behavioral description of surprise. Landing and dying immediately in a battle royale is an accident. Five bruisers jumping out of a bush in League of Legends is an accident. Once or twice, players can accept it. If the experience is like that all the time, no one enjoys sustained accidental suffering. Even competitive games insert bots to give players positive feedback.

A purely random disaster that cannot be prevented cuts the loop of observe, learn, overcome, and grow. Failure is acceptable because it can usually be attributed to a misinput or a bad strategy and converted into experience for the next attempt. An accident that cannot be learned or answered offers only helplessness. When success and failure are decided by a dice roll, effort loses value. The game slides from challenge into arbitrariness.

You stand in the snow for three days and learn that whether you see the next ridge depends on a random number you cannot observe, influence, or learn. Difficulty means knowing why you failed and believing you can do better next time. The avalanche gives you no such belief.

3. Players Do Not Want a Sterile World

“They say they hate being calculated, but their bodies crave certainty.” The observation is sharp, but it may not be hypocrisy.

Pity systems and guaranteed returns in games play the role of a risk floor. They lower perceived risk and raise willingness to participate. In a world already full of challenge, a predictable feedback loop is the psychological anchor that tells players their time will not vanish into nothing. What players often dislike is not certainty itself. They dislike the design showing too nakedly. At the same time, they need a layer of experiential certainty as a safety net.

So rather than saying players crave certainty, say they seek controlled accidents. They welcome variables they can answer within their ability and draw a sense of achievement from. They resist arbitrariness that cancels their effort.

Good randomness is an accident the player retells afterward. Bad randomness is an incident the player only wants to refund.

Kojima has not fallen into the romantic fantasy of absolute chance. His idea of friction design works inside a carefully controlled frame to create discomfort and dissonance, to make an experience memorable, not to build an impassable obstacle. Death Stranding 2 reached a 79% completion rate within one month of release, well above most open-world games. That suggests a heavily designed experience with friction can be accepted commercially and by players. But that acceptance rests on a premise: it is a meaningful whole arranged by a top-tier author, not an unordered world ruled by random disaster.

4. The Accidents People Remember in His Games Are Designed

If a AAA game were built on absolute randomness and stripped of daily tasks and pity systems, most players would not keep playing. Players are not hypocritical. Such a design removes the possibility of building meaning in the game.

Kojima’s warning is closer to a creator telling us to watch out for real life being ironed flat by algorithms. It is not a blueprint for systemic chaos in a game. The accidents people remember in his games are the most heavily designed, least accidental parts.

Players do not want a sterile world where every step is arranged. They want a world where an accident still leaves them a choice, where disaster still lets them read the rules, and where failure still lets them believe the next effort will matter. That is where chance belongs in a game. It is a story the player is willing to tell afterward.

After the avalanche, the player needs a shovel. He wants to know that if he digs, he can hit something. He is not afraid to die. He is afraid the dig will mean nothing.