Against the Cult of Simplicity

Telepath Tactics’ developer Craig Stern has written an opinion piece on his official website, designed to counter the arguments supporting a nigh-hegemonic design trend in the indie space (and not only there): the belief that all games should be focused around a simple, core mechanic. I don’t think this should come as a surprise given I write for GameBanshee, but his words strongly resonate with me:

Simplicity is not elegance

It is something of a truism in the indie game space that elegance is a desirable quality in game design. I seldom see people actually specify what they mean by (elegance,) though. If we are to talk of the desirability of elegance, then we must mean something more than just (simplicity) otherwise, we are merely making another thinly veiled attempt to privilege simple games and squeeze complex ones out of the universe of titles that receive recognition from the community.

When we talk of elegance, we should not speak of a game’s raw simplicity or complexity: we should be talking about how much complexity the game creates relative to the number of elements used to build it. Elegance should be about achieving a lopsided ratio of possibilities to rules, about generating a huge possibility space out of a comparatively small set of pieces. Achieving this lopsided possibilities-to-rules ratio means nestling into a sort of localized maximum of complexity and freedom relative to the time and approachability cost it incurs. It is, in a word, about efficiency, not about simply making the (right) kind of game.

Simplicity alone is not elegance. Suppose we create a game where two players fly around in rockets and fire bullets at each other and that is it. No use of secondary objectives or special terrain. A game like this is simple, but not elegant; its elements do not add up to a possibility space larger than its minimal parts suggest. Or, to name a more extreme (and even clearer) example: consider the hypothetical game (Button Clicker RPG) from my old RPG definition article, a game in which we simply click a button and a number increases onscreen. That is not an elegant game. It is devastatingly simple, but the possibility space is also vanishingly small; we both use little and accomplish little. That is not anything particularly praiseworthy.

If elegance is efficiency, then simplicity is something else entirely. Limiting a game to a single core mechanic is ripping the fat off its bones; it is turning a light bulb into a laser; it is driving the experience relentlessly forward in a singular, closely defined, tightly controlled loop. This can be beautiful in much the same way as a minimalist painting or a Philip Glass piece: which is to say, beautiful, but there are alternatives that deserve at least as much respect.