Unafraid of Elegant Complexity
Over at Flash of Steel, Troy Goodfellow posted some comments on another blog entry by Zack Hiwiller. Zacks’ assertion, if I read it correctly, was that modern sports games like NBA 2k8 were overly complex and simply unapproachable by anyone other than hard core fans. The ensuing analysis was that game design for these sports titles had been hijacked by the grognards who posted on the game’s forums and thus misled PR types into believing that this was what customers in general desired. Another contributing factor was that the designers, who were rivet counters and complexity lovers themselves “self selected” other designers of the same mindset to hire and promote….an echo chamber resulted.
I can’t comment on whether the anaylsis is correct. I don’t reallly play sports games that much and for me the wonder of Madden selling millions of the same basic game every year ranks up there with the Deer Hunter boxes flying off of the Walmart shelves. Don’t get me wrong, I am not an effete chess club sports snob. I enjoy a beer and an occasional Monday Night Football as much as the next guy.
Zach would like to see more games that serve a “middle” segment of the market. This is interesting because I always thought that consoles and therefore one of the biggest sellers on consoles (sports games) would naturally aim for the big bulge at the center of a “normal” distribution of gamers. In order to move the units that they do how can it be any other way? The conclusion that you come to from Zach’s observation is that gamers en masse are buying games that are too hard core (complex) for their tastes and are not enjoying them. But shouldn’t this market mismatch eventually stop? Consumer’s generally do get what they want. Eventually they stop buying or somebody else comes along with a better product.
It’s certainly true that complex strategy games have been abandoned for the most part over the last 10 years. Correlation or causation with the rise of the consoles? That’s a heated debate for another time. The companies/publishers that make them now like AEGOD, Matrix, Shrapnel and Battle Front are small and privately held. Their games are complex. They aim to serve a niche. On one end of the niche are the vocal grognards who know detailed penetration data on the sloped armor of a Panther tank. In the middle are guys who might have played Avalon Hill board games, spent time in a basement playing D & D, read some military history, know that cows don’t really MOO and generally enjoy some competition and taxing some neurons on occasion. That’s an important segement of my target demographic.
So given a perfect user interface does increasing complexity mean decreasing the potential customer base proportionally (or some other ratio)? I’m not trying to make a mass market game that’s going to sell 500k units so the answer doesn’t really matter to me…or at least I’ve got more leeway in determing where on the complexity line I want to fall. This whole long winded entry leads me to three sort of related statements that I wanted to make:
1. Don’t be afraid of complexity in your games. Without it you get rock, paper and scissors resolving everything. Add complexity to your games not by increasing variables, widgets or options but by making sure that some small subset of variables, widgets or options interacts in complex ways. i.e. Choose complexity of interaction over complexity of raw numbers. This is what I call elegant complexity. Just like physicists look for elegance (simplicity, symmetry, etc.) when building models to explain rare particles, so to should the game designer build a architecture in which simple concepts give way to complex interactions.
2. Create onion skinned complexity. Just as ogres are like onions, so too should good strategy games be. If you design a game well players should be able to enjoy the game by just mastering the first layer of the onion. As they learn the system they can peel off another layer of complexity and explore deeper. Civilization lets you do this. You can play the game and enjoy it without having to ever figure out whether you should build a farm, village, mine etc on any given tile. And I am not talking about setting the workers to auto improve…just playing casually and saying oh I think I’ll build a farm on that tile because I need some more food.
3. Many (if not most) people want instant gratification but are happy with the results when actually forced to put some effort into something. You appreciate what you earn by hard work not what is given to you easily or for free. I tangentially talked about this a little in my Defense of a Steep Learning Curve entry a while back. How many games have you thought at first were opaque but now on reflection seem like childs play. I’ve chosen to pitch games at a market segment that I hope appreciates this. It’s not an excuse for bad UI or a poor manual or lack of player aids (although I plead guilty to some of that). It’s a conscious design choice to say I’m going to lose a bunch of people because they sit down and can’t immediately intuit the game without some work and effort. Small guys like me can risk this. Of course you don’t want to create some monstrosity that requires you put some alien knowledge dispenser helmet on so players can figure the game out!
