Thought 13: What is the point of a superstition?

I am not a supersitious person.  I in fact have gone out of my way to show that I do not believe in superstitions.  As a kid I would spill salt, walk under ladders, walk in front of black cats, etc.  My lack of belief in ghosts/hauntings/etc. combined with a rather boastful nature lead me to prove that I wasn't afraid of bad luck and other associated superstitious maladies.

But if I'm playing D&D and a die keeps rolling bad I'll switch it out.  If a die rolls hot I'll keep rolling it.  Oh, did I find a particular habit that I indulged in before winning 5 games in a row?  Now I'll do it before every game.  I'll do it and feel like I'm maintainig some weird kind of balance of cosmic forces.

Yes, riffle shuffling 7 times will somehow alter chance to let me top deck that card I need at a crucial minute.  The dozens of times I've done that exact same thing and still lost won't keep from doing it again next time.

The more I've studied probability and variance the more often I have found myself thinking more about the uselessness of these habits.  When I was younger I really did think these kinds of things helped.  I had lucky dice.  Now I know it does nothing.  The cards are shuffled and the die rolls according to chance.  Not Lady Luck, or Fortune, or Fate, just plain ol' chance.  Yet I've done all kinds of weird things to try and influence something that I don't really believe exists anymore.

I do think the games are a little less exciting, but more enjoyable.  I can see games as a contest of skill with enough variance thrown in to keep each game fresh.  But as I think about designing a game I kind of want to tap into these habits.  I think some people really do enjoy the game more when they have their little fetishes.

I'm not sure how to implement something like this into a virtual space, but as a method for making a game more enjoyable I think it is a non-trivial idea.  Maybe allowing the user to customize something about the appearance of a character.  They can have a lucky color.  Maybe just allowing them to making non-deterministic branching choices gives them an illusion that they can influence luck and chance.

A few habits still stick around though.  If I roll enough misses in a row with a die I'm probably still going to switch.  I know the die isn't cursed, but maybe, just maybe it really is.