Why You Always Go Left (and What Your Favourite Side Gives Away)

Every level in Dodgeye starts the same way. The bunny sits in the middle of the row, the Watcher looks at you, and you make a first hop that feels like a free choice.

It isn't, quite. Ask a few hundred people to make that hop and they don't split evenly. Ask one person to make it forty times across a week and they split even less. Somewhere in your file there is a line that says LEFT 64% or RIGHT 58%, and you didn't decide that. Something decided it for you.

Where a favourite side comes from

Psychologists have chased side preferences for a long time, and the honest summary is that there isn't one cause. There are several, and they stack.

• Hands and thumbs. Most people are right-handed, and on a phone the tapping thumb has an easy side and an awkward side. Hold your phone the way you normally do and notice which tile sits under your thumb. That's a bias before any psychology gets involved.
• Reading direction. People who read left to right also scan left to right, and tend to treat the left as “first”. When a choice feels neutral, first wins more often than it should.
• The middle-option pull. Offered three things in a row, people pick the centre one more than a third of the time. Shop shelves are built around it. On a three-tile row the middle can be your favoured direction and feel like no preference at all.
• The first thing that worked. This is the one the game creates itself. You hopped left in First Hop and survived. Left is now “the safe side”, and every survival after that makes it safer. Three levels in you have a lean you'd swear you don't have.

None of these is a flaw. They're the shortcuts that let you make a hop in under a second. The trouble is only that a shortcut is, by definition, a pattern.

What the Watcher does with it

The live prediction is built from your recent patterns: after these last few tiles, where do you usually go? But sometimes there is no pattern to lean on. Early in a level, or right after you've done something new, the Watcher has nothing that matches. When that happens it falls back to the simplest fact it holds about you, which is where you go most often overall.

So your favourite side isn't only a statistic on a card. It's the Watcher's default answer. Every time you break a pattern successfully, you push it back onto that default, and if the default is right two times in three, you've traded one kind of predictable for another.

How the file measures it

Open the Watcher's File (the STATS button on the home screen) and the line called Favoured direction shows the column you land in most, and how often. It's measured over the hops the Watcher currently remembers, which is the last sixty in each mode, so it moves with you rather than being a life sentence. The file is worth a post of its own, and it has one.

A few honest notes on the number. On a two-tile row there is no middle, so those hops count toward left or right. And “favoured” doesn't mean “always”: 45% left is still a lean if the other two columns split what remains. What matters is the gap between your top column and the others, because that gap is exactly what the fallback guess feeds on.

what a perfectly even three-way split shows on the card

~33%

hops per mode the favoured direction is measured over

60

hop of every level starts from the middle, and it's the one most people make on habit

1st

How to lose the lean

You don't fix a side bias by being aware of it. You fix it with a rule that fires before the habit does.

• Start on the other side. For one whole world, make the first hop of every level to your least favoured column. It'll feel wrong. That's the feeling of a shortcut being refused.
• Count your landings out loud for one level. Left, left, middle, left. Hearing it is different from knowing it.
• Let the board choose. Coins sit on risky tiles, and mystery tiles start appearing in the City. Going where the reward is, rather than where your thumb goes, spreads your landings for free.
• Check the file after every session for a week and watch the percentage move. It's the most satisfying number in the game to watch fall.

If you want the whole programme, there's a seven-day version. If you only want to see the number, open the app, open your file, and read the line you've been avoiding.