Seeds in games

[Callum McKenzie <callum physics otago ac nz>]

Many of the games in gnome-games have a UI element to let you set the
"seed" that the random number generator uses. I intend removing this
feature in the interests of UI simplicity during this coming release
cycle. 

The way I see it there are only a handful of uses for seeds in games:

1) Replaying a specific game. Usually all you want is to restart a game.
In most other cases you want to go back to a game after you have logged
out and logged back in again. This later case should be handled by
session management / saving state.

2) Challenging a friend (say via email) to get a better score. This is a
valid reason, but I suspect it is a very limited audience. Using high
scores are just as good as a means of resolving who is better, although
that looses some of the fun of a direct challenge .

3) Reproducing bugs. While it is conceivable that it could be useful to
report the seed for a game that ends in a particular bug (so it can be
reproduced), no one ever does.

4) So you can play all the possible games. There are four billion games
(assuming a 32-bit seed), you can't do it.

Against the seeds is the problem of UI clutter: we need two "new game"
options and the seed has to be displayed somewhere (usually as a large
number in the title bar). The concept is also unintuitive, the term
"seed" itself implies knowledge of how the random number generator
works. There is also the inconsistent use of the feature, some games
have it, some games don't (this can of course be fixed the other way
too).

Can anyone think of any other reason for keeping the seed ? Any
comments ?

 - Callum