Gaming Manifesto, part 3

Two weeks ago, I talked about approachability and fairness in games and today we'll complete the list by talking about Depth vs. Complexity.

In a nutshell, depth represents the different possibilities and actions the player can use in a game. Complexity is how hard it is to do and understand said actions.

Chess is a high depth, low complexity game. The rules are simple, and there are only six different pieces to figure out. It takes minutes to learn how to play chess, but a lifetime to master.

The concept of elegant design creates vast amounts of depth for you to play around with, and sometimes, you need a bit of complexity to fuel that, but a super complex game becomes almost impossible to play for the majority of players. Ideally a game is always deep but not complex. Some people say they love complex games, but most of them are actually talking about depth. The two can easily be confused for each other. Having tons of options and different ways of solving problems don't mean the game is complex. If all those options are hidden amongst dozens of menus and unlocked by rarely explained actions, the game is frustratingly complex.

I like strategy games, but I'm not too fond of complexity and once upon a time, I was looking at Victoria, a grand strategy game set in the (you guessed it) Victorian Age. I love that era, but then I was told that a friend of mine who lives and breathes strategy games on a level of skill I can't ever hope to match, thought that Victoria was a bit too difficult to get a good grasp on. I quickly walked away. This reeked of high complexity.

Victoria is made by Paradox, and they are famous for their intricate grand strategy games. In my post two weeks ago, I mentioned another of their games, Crusader Kings II, and my trouble there. Today, in a few hours, Stellaris will be released also by Paradox. This is a grand strategy 4X game in space, and I was hesitant, but here they seem to have reduced the initial complexity and made Stellaris a lot more approachable than their previous titles. Time will tell if I made a mistake in buying this game, but I think I'll be OK.

Finally, complexity is by no means confined to strategy games, it exists in all genres and it always fights with depth. Something as simple as a games user interface, or UI can create needless complexity if it is badly designed.

The subject is wider than I can go into here, be on the lookout for this topic when you play, it's pretty interesting.

Until next time, have a great week!