The Dice Behind the Dark: How Horror Games Use Hidden Odds to Scare You

I first played Five Nights at Freddy’s on a cheap Android phone under the duvet, with the brightness turned all the way down so my mum would not spot the glow under the bedroom door. I lasted untill about 4 AM on night two. Bonnie got me! For weeks afterwards I was totally convinced that purple rabbit had a personality, that he waited for me to look away, that he knew when my power was running low. He did not know anything. He was rolling dice.

That is the dirty little secret behind alot of horror games. The monster feels clever, but a really big part of what scares you is plain old randomness, dressed up in a costume and shoved out of the dark at exactly the wrong moment.

Bonnie Is Rolling a d20

Five Nights at Freddy’s came out on PC in August 2014 and on Android later that same month, which is why so many of us met it on a phone first. Fans who dug into the game found the system behind the animatronics is really simple. Every few seconds (about once every five seconds in Bonnie’s case) each animatronic gets what fans call a movement opportunity. The game picks a random number from 1 to 20 and checks it against that animatronic’s AI level. If the level is equal to or higher than the roll, it moves. If not, you get a few more seconds to breathe.

On the early nights those AI levels are tiny, some of them sit at zero, so the animatronics hardly bother you. A few of them creep up as the clock hits 2, 3 and 4 AM, and the starting numbers climb as the week goes on. And the famous custom night where you crank all four up to 20? Every single roll comes up in their favour. No mercy, no luck, just maths!

What really gets me is how hard our brains fight all this. Knowing it is a dice roll does not make Foxy sprinting down the west hall any less horrible. We are wired to see intent in anything that moves, so a random number generator in a rabbit suit reads like a hunter. The game hardly has to do anything clever. You do the scary part yourself.

The Alien Has a Babysitter

Alien: Isolation goes the other way, and it holds the potential to be the smartest monster you will ever carry around in your pocket. Creative Assembly released it on PC and consoles in 2014, and Feral Interactive brought the full game to Android and iOS in December 2021, which still feels a bit weird when you remember how big that game is.

The xenomorph actually runs on two separate AIs. One is a director that always knows exactly where you are. The other is the alien itself, which has to hunt you down with its own eyes and ears. The director only drops hints, nudging the creature towards the right part of the station.

Then there is the bit I love most. The director keeps track of a value usually described as menace, a kind of stress meter that rises when the alien is close to you and when you can actually see it. Once that meter tops out, the director calls the alien off, into the vents or a neighbouring section, so you get a little breathing room before it all starts again. Your fear is being paced like a song. Verse, chorus, quiet bit, verse. The idea is not new either, Valve’s Left 4 Dead had its own AI Director back in 2008, watching how the players were coping and sending in zombies to match.

Why Bent Dice Scare Better

Pure randomness is actually a pretty bad horror designer. Truly random monsters would sometimes turn up three times in thirty seconds and then vanish for twenty minutes, and you may possibly spend half an hour bored out of your skull before dying in a way that feels totally unfair. So designers bend the dice, FNaF with its climbing AI levels and Alien: Isolation with a director that backs off right before you snap. Both of them are using chance, just chance with a hand on the steering wheel.

That is the trick holding the whole genre up, and honestly it is way more interesting than any jump scare. The game is reading you, and the dice are taking orders.

The One Place the Dice Cannot Read You

Funnily enough, randomness is not allowed to do any of that in the place most people picture first when they hear the word odds. In the UK, online slots have to run on random number generators checked by independent test labs, every spin is meant to be independent of the last one, and the return to player is fixed in the game’s maths and listed in its info screen. Since 31 October 2021 (Halloween, of all the dates) UK rules have also banned autoplay, spins quicker than 2.5 seconds, and sounds or animations that celebrate a “win” no bigger than your stake. So when you scroll the lobby at Monster Casino this time of year and find it crawling with Dracula, Frankenstein and haunted hotel slots, the dice under the costume are just as flat and uncaring as they are in July. There is no director deciding you need a breather, and no menace meter. If you fancy a spooky spin, set a budget before you start and stop once it is gone.

Turn the Lights Off Anyway

None of this ruins horror games for me. If anything they got scarier once I understood them, because now I know exactly how little it takes. A twenty-sided roll and a rabbit suit. A stress meter and an air vent. That is all it needs to make a grown adult hold their breath on the sofa.

So this October, grab some headphones, turn the brightness down and put FNaF or Alien: Isolation on your phone. You stand a chance to last the night. Bonnie might roll low. Then again, he might not!

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