The creator of Civilization, Sid Meier, has stressed that players are just a "bunch of head cases".

"Player psychology has nothing to do with rational thought", he said, while delivering the keynote address at the Game Developers Conference which happened on Friday. With the title "The Psychology of Game Design (Everything You Know Is Wrong)", the speech went on to talk about what tends to happen in a gamers’ mind when a game is being played, and how designers should anticipate and appropriately react to their expectations which the developer termed as "irrational".

A player’s perception of randomness was cited by Mr. Meier as an example. Most of the players, it seems, do not tend to grasp that randomness is, indeed, random, in particular when a roll of a die gives a negative, which is a highly unlikely result twice in a row. This is why he debates for sweating the odds in the favor of the player after a setback has been experienced.

The relationship between a developer and a gamer has been termed as an "unholy alliance" by Mr. Meier.