HTHRFLWRS #14 - The Basilisk

Have you ever discovered a Basilisk? No, not the “thought experiment” about how if you ever think of the world’s meanest computer, it’ll travel back in time to kill you.¹ I mean more along the lines of the “Basilisk Image” from David Langford’s short stories: a concept or image which, from mere exposure, seems to deeply affect the human mind in unexpected ways.

I think I’ve found something similar. (It won’t kill you, but I did post a gif of it further down the screen.)

It’s pretty obvious at this point that humans are really, REALLY bad at probability. Any game designer will tell you that our basic intuitions of probability are flawed; that we narrativize “unlikely” outcomes as shocking even as repetition makes them a near-inevitability; that nobody has any idea what “80%” or “20%” or “99%” really feels like. Many games fudge the numbers towards what players expect, rather than what the numbers actually mean, because otherwise players will think that the real numbers are wrong.

So, the other day, I started thinking about coin flips. This isn’t my first time chewing on the subject; I got a couple months deep on a Balatro-like about flipping coins last year, before dropping the project for being too complex. This time, I decided to try out the most dead-simple version of the game imaginable: here’s a coin with an unfair probability tilted towards tails. You get to see exactly what that unfair probability is. You’ve got to get ten heads in a row to win. Good luck.

I posted this gif, thinking it’d get some minor attention as a little two-hour distraction from my regular work. Instead, people were REALLY into it. To a disconcerting level. It got over a hundred notes on Tumblr in an hour or so, which is significantly more than you’d expect for the world’s most basic-looking game!²

So I polished it up some more, added a couple basic progression mechanics. Sure, now it’s an incremental game. I know how to make those.

I took a couple more hours to add the entire rest of the mechanics I’d had planned and posted the download link in a few places. I expected some enjoyment, some criticisms, maybe some people who didn’t “get” it.

First: Everyone enjoyed it.
Second: Everyone had ideas for how to make it bigger.
Third: Some people played it for over an hour, and wanted to play even more.

This is absurd to me. I’ve put much more work into much better games that people enjoyed far less! It’s just a coin!! It’s not even a fair one!!!

I think I expected that people would experience some form of the gambling-excitement response when given access to raw probability outcomes like this, but, strangely, this effect is not dissuaded at all by straight-up showing people what the chances are. If anything, it makes people more interested in trying to cheat the odds, however uncheatable they may be. It’s holding a mirror up to your face, and that mirror is the concept of 20%.

I’m fascinated by this project. It’s not evil, but it’s unsettling to look too closely at. I’m currently gearing up for a Steam release — and, if you wish to wishlist the game, you’re currently able to do so now:

Unfair Flips on Steam

A non-idle clicker game about flipping a coin that hates you. Starting with just a 20% chance of getting heads, can you get ten heads in a row?

The full game features art by Gwyndolyn Marchant and a special SFX by Surasshu (you’ll know it when you hear it, if only because it’s significantly higher production value than the rest of the foley).

And I put together a trailer, if you’re curious to see the “finished” game in motion:

Unfair Flips will be coming out September 25th, the same day as the WOMEN WANT ME expansion to FISH FEAR ME. I have Mysterious Reasons for this which shall become clear in time.

Anyways! I’m trying to get back into newslettering after falling off for a bit — it’s a fundamentally much healthier way for me to engage with the internet. I got suckered into being On Bluesky for a hot minute, and I’m still figuring out how to extricate myself from that whole situation. It’s nice getting to talk to people I admire, and being able to engage with people talking about my work, but it’s also a horrendous tar pit that takes over the reward centers of my brain.

Problem is, when I remove all social media from my phone, I usually find some worse algorithm to suck my brain into. Mostly Youtube Shorts, and I’m not really able to take Youtube off my phone (nor would that actually solve the issue). So! A question for y’all: What’s your ideal phone time-waster? The thing that requires zero mental energy, can be engaged with for ten seconds to ten minutes, isn’t limited by amount of content (where RSS readers tend to fail this mark for me), and keeps you from going down much worse attention-selling drains?

Best,
Heather Flowers

Want to respond to the discussion questions? Email me at heatherflowersbusiness@gmail.com!