Luck

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Luck, in the context of games, refers to an event whose outcome is not known ahead of time to any of the game’s participants, or an event which arbitrarily selects an outcome.

Note that these clauses do not fully overlap:

• If a deck of cards arrives pre-shuffled by an outside party, the event is not arbitrarily selecting an outcome, but whoever the deck favors the most (assuming this was not done to rig the game’s results) would be considered lucky.
• If a player selects a random player to screw over and doesn’t announce this fact, it’s not unknown to all the game’s participants, yet whoever was selected by this player may feel like they just had “bad luck”.

While luck is typically seen to run in opposition to the concept of skill, the two concepts are seemingly orthogonal to eachother¹ as seen by the existence of games with high levels of both luck and skill, such as Poker, and games with low luck and low skill, such as Tic-Tac-Toe. Is it though? Luck necessarily takes agency away from a player. While it’s true that luck can exist along with skill, it’s typically in two different “lanes”, so to speak, for example with how poker’s bluffing has no real random elements while the cards themselves are random. Need to think about it.