Spoon 3 has an odd relationship with randomness. Well, first of all it has perhaps too many progression systems, little things you're always levelling up to acquire more customisation options, or gear abilities, or currency you can put into other progression systems... I still think it's odd that Spoon 3 seems to take after modern free-to-play shooters, with their dizzying array of bars to fill; and a "Catalog" system that is almost exactly a Battle Pass, minus the part where you have to pay real money to unlock a better version of it.
Out of these systems, the Catalog is the same for everyone, the rewards you get from Salmon Run are random but also the same for everyone, what you get from levelling up your gear is random, and what you get out of the "Shell-Out Machine" - basically a gacha machine - is also random (it's not presented as a progression system, but we'll get to that). What's interesting is how the randomness is implemented. Of course, this is a computer game so it's not going to be real, true, actual random, but that's to be expected. The unexpected thing is that Spoon 3 initialises each of its random systems once, and then runs the pseudo-random generator forward from there, only when it's needed, without ever messing with it. Because the system is static, and the algorithm is completely deterministic, by simply consulting an easily-available external tool you can see the future.
Just put in some data about a handful of consecutive rolls for the randomiser you're interested in (a specific piece of gear, the Shell-Out machine, even whether Murch is able to find exactly what gear you order) and it can find the exact seed for that generator, and predict every possible future event from it. What I love about it is how much it feels like an ideal form of divination or fortune-telling: complete a short ritual, ask a question (like "how many pulls of the gacha machine until I get the super-rare season banner" or "what's the quickest way to get the exact abilities I want on this gear"), and you'll have your answer. Unlike in the real world, divination in Spoon 3 is 100% accurate provided you complete the ritual correctly.
Spoon 3 then provides a fun opportunity to play with the question posed in a lot of stories, about whether it's truly a good thing to have perfect knowledge of the future. A case study for this is the matter of the gold banners, the super-rare cosmetic items which you have a 1/1000 chance of getting out of a roll from the Shell-Out machine. Going by this extremely salty reddit thread, it turns out there's a big difference, psychlogically, between "1/1000 chance" and "exactly 871 more rolls". Does it matter that 871 is a bit unluckier than the average of 693? If you were committed to getting the gold banner, presumably you'd be happy with the 693 rolls to make it statistically likely - surely just 178 more isn't a big deal? Hell, here's a comment where somebody seemed disappointed that they've got 596 rolls to go - that's better than average! I think the problem is that knowing the future means you can't be unreasonably optimistic about it. As long as you don't know that the thing you want is guaranteed to be 1701 rolls away (this is my own number), you can believe that it could just be one more roll! Maybe it'll work this time! 1/1000 isn't that bad of a chance, really! Maybe if I just stand behind the machine, or tap B when the Pokeball shakes-
Randomness truly makes fools of us all. At least the gear ability stuff can be circumvented if it's too impractical to get what you want by pure force of random chance. The funny thing is that being able to predict the gacha machine effectively turns it into a second Catalog, while simultaneously revealing that it kind of sucks. Personally, I'm trying to get one specific title out of the machine - "Bifocal Wearer". While it's possible to divine when you'll get titles, unlike knowing you're going to get a special banner, you currently can't predict what title you're going to get, and there are apparently 556 titles that you can currently get given at random. So I would need 278 of them in order to probably get what I'm looking for... and 22% of all upcoming rolls are titles... so if I'm doing the math right, it'd take 1,263 rolls on average to get any particular title! That's even worse than the gold banners! You know what, if they ever reverse-engineer the generator on what order you get the titles in, I'm not going to look. Better to believe that the one I want could be just around the corner than to know, as is much more likely, that it isn't.
