Is Elegance all it’s cracked up to be?
If you get a bunch of game designers together to talk about any sort of game system, it won’t be long before one of them asks the primordial question – “Yes, but is it elegant?”. Elegant is design short hand for effectiveness and simplicity, combined with a certain grace of application. Grace is a nice hand-wavey word that means that group of designers can argue until the cows come home about which is the most “graceful” of the options, but at the end of the day everyone agrees that elegance is desirable, and the most elegant solution should be the goal.
I wonder if that’s true, however. One of the things we’re good at is unravelling complexity, and there’s a satisfaction that comes with working things out that is deeply embedded in the human psyche. It seems to me the more I look at complexity (even wanton, needless complexity) the more it can offer a sense of learning and collective experience that in fact enhances the experience of play. Perhaps elegance isn’t always the optimum goal?
Sports offer a great example of games with complex and esoteric rule sets. The Australian Open is on at the moment, and offers a great reminder of the inherent zaniness of the rules of tennis. If you’ve got no points, that’s called love. Scores go love-15-30-40 and then game. Unless both people have 40 points, then that’s deuce. First to six games wins, unless they both get to five, then you keep playing. Which is the same mechanic as deuce, but with a different name (not very elegant, that). You play three sets, unless you play five. That’s not even getting into more esoteric elements, like challenging decisions, the role of the umpire, foot faults and so forth. Once you have all of those “basics” clearly understood, then you can start looking at the actual gameplay that takes place underneath them – positioning, choice of shots, and ability to make the shots one wants. This is for tennis, which is one of the simpler of the mass audience sports. Lets not even start on baseball stats or american football plays.
The interesting thing about all of the inelegance that hangs around the sporting world is that, although it does raise the barrier to entry for people new to the sport, it also gives people a shared language and experience. Once you’ve crossed the threshold of knowledge, you have meaningful minutiae of detail to discuss with other fans. In this case, complexity works for you, not against you.
Over in video games, we can see complexity working in the favor of everything from RPG’s, to the ever escalating systems present in FPS’s. In fact, genre’s of games regularly add complexity to previous games in the series or genre, on the assumption that a large element of their audience is familiar with what came before. This can work well (adding RPG progression to FPS multiplayer) or can eventually reduce your audience to a small number of experts, who continue to demand harder and more complex scenarios that alienate newcomers (like the various bullet-hell shooters).
Gameplay goes from this ...
To this crazed example of why they call them bullet hell games!
Let’s look at one of the triumphs of complexity, the Pokemon series. Not only are the game systems composed of a bunch of relatively esoteric relationships (check out the grid below to see how different types of Pokemon interact) the games grew more complex as they proceeded. Coming into Pokemon late in the series required a huge amount of learning, because it was assumed that you’d played and understood the predecessors. Nonetheless, once you’ve climbed that hill, there’s an immense satisfaction and sense of community – and it gives you something to discuss with other Poke-heads the following day.
If you think this is complex, try understanding optimal use of effort values. It makes the Spiderman Clone saga look simple.
So, while in any discussion about game design you’re always going to get someone who wants to find the absolute simplest solution to any problem, effectively devolving every game into a Go-like Platonic perfection, there’s lots of reasons to embrace complexity of systems and interactions. While complexity alone isn’t going to make your game interesting, feel free to explore the spaces where it can add to what you’re doing. This was certainly one of the strong points when we developed the character creator for Freedom Force. It was the initial goal (let people create their own superheroes, and make sure they can build just about anybody) that opened the flood-gates in terms of complexity. While we tried to keep the systems as simple as possible (with varied success) too clean a solution would have stopped people building heros that played and felt like the heros they were familiar with. In the end, we jury rigged and special cased around the existing systems to try and be as complete as possible – and ended up with a system that was one of the best parts of the game.
Fundamentally, I agree with that guy who said “games are a series of interesting decisions,” – complexity allows for additional axes of interesting decisions to be made, and therefore offers opportunities for people to learn, engage, and discuss the systems you’ve built. Elegant systems are a great virtue, but they’re only part of the picture.
