Ancillary benefits of simplicity

last updated 2024-06-26

I've discussed the relationship between simplicity and depth in my article on depth, so here I'm going to discuss other reasons why complex rules are undesirable. Simplicity has several ancillary benefits:

Depth in games

Reduced learning barrier. The more complicated your game's rules, the longer the player has to spend learning those rules before they can even begin to play for real. In a game that has a simple ruleset and gets its depth emergently, like Go, you can spend less time learning the prerequisites and more time enjoying the game. Also, the easier your game is to learn the more people will be motivated to do so.

Balance. More complex games are harder to balance. If there's more game elements or more rules, it'll be harder for the designers to anticipate how they might interact and prevent degenerate combos that could trivialize the rest of the game, lead to insufferable stalemate situations, et cetera.

If there are too many mechanics or game elements, you may end up with players sticking to just the ones they know and not learning the others. I've experienced this most notably when I used to play Starcraft. There were too many units for me, so I just used the same few every game. Despite ranking up considerably in online Starcraft 2, I don't think I ever built an Archon or an Observer. I didn't experience the full depth of the game because there was too much to learn and the game trained me to play without using it all.

I also experienced this when I briefly tried out League of Legends. Besides the gamestate information, I had to be familiar with four different abilities and too many numbers and stats everywhere to keep track of and when I went to the item shop, I gave up and left because by the time I could have read even half of those items my team would have lost the game. Not to mention how there's like a hundred different characters to play as and they all have different abilities. This created a problem where I wanted to know the lore behind the characters to pick one I liked (and since there were so many I knew there had to be one I would like), but after spending like an hour reading bad stories on their website, I realized any other game would be more fun than this.