What is this about?

Dicegraph is a completely independant and self-funded project from Nikolas Wise, designed and built in Portland Oregon.

Dicegraph values agency, transparency, and clear communication. These are the design values for the product that should carry through to every aspect of the venture. We think that by making complicated situations parseable and as true as possible, we respect the player and allow them to make choices.

In keeping wiht these values, Dicegraph never tracks any personally identifying information other than your e-mail, and never collect or sell data of any kind for any purpose. All your data can be exported at any time, and when you delete your account we forget you for good.

The Mission

The driving mission of the product is to enable players and designers to understand the mathematical models that underly their game systems. The thought is to enable a greater sense of agency over the game that allows the user the understand what's happening and make choices that further their own goals within the game.

While much of the subtly of being _good_ at one of these games comes from the _fingerspitzengefühl_ or "_finger-tip-feeling_" of being familiar with the system, there are several aspects that work against a player in the generation of this sense.

The first is that the complexity of these game systems means that it takes many, many, many examples to build up enough experience to be able to call upon the predictive powers of generalized experience. This experience tends to get outsourced to the broader player community, creating a sort of common knowledge that becomes a stand in for actual experience and experimentation. This means that even tho _everybody knows_ that `X` is better than `Y`, there's very little quantifiable evidence that can determine if that's true, or by what margin.

The second stems from the first – a broader player base gives a richer set of experiences to develop more accurate _fingerspitzengefühl_, but the goals and ideals of that player base are far from uniform. Many players wish to operate at national and global tournament level, while other optimize for a "best in class" while ignoring more realistic determinants, and other still exclusively play a small set of opponents in a specific corner of the game.

The broader trend is the application of the global "meta" as a determinant for local decisions: or the opposite - local outcomes determining global design decisions. The street goes both ways.

Dicegraph's mission is to provide access to quantifiable statistical models that allow for better decision making in and around probability-based game systems.