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Simpler Sometimes Better In Videogames?
Thanks to NTSC-UK for their editorial discussing why more simple gameplay does not necessarily make a videogame worthless. The piece argues: "So why are there so many howls of derision when a game like Dead or Alive tries to make the concept of fighting entertaining with a button bashing, quick and easy style? [...] Just because an artificial intelligence can come back at you and outplay you on your own terms, is the game inherently more enjoyable?" The piece concludes by praising simple titles such as Super Monkey Ball and Wario Ware Inc., and suggesting: "The important thing, though, is that a game's worth cannot and should not be judged purely on its perceived 'depth' or complexity... there can be no argument that one game is better than another solely because it will take months to learn all there is to learn of it."
Oh, I forgot: She Kicks High...
Everything should be as simple as possible, but no more. How simple you can make a game really depends on the type of game. And whether you enjoy the complexity of the game really should be a reflection of the genres you enjoy. Do you like to spend your time immersed in the fantasy realm of an RPG, or do you just like to kick back every now and then for a short FPS session?
And some things are obvious. Should you have separate buttons for opening a door, opening a chest, and pressing a lever, or should you have one "do stuff" button? In this case, the answer is "No" of course.
Etiquette is etiquette. He kills his mother but he can't wear grey trousers.
On the other hand, simplification doesn't always lead to a more fun game, either. Ion Storm took Deux Ex, a game greatly praised by gamers, got rid of all the complex parts and made Invisible War. What happened, though, is they got rid of most of the parts that made the first game so good. IW is nowhere near as good as the first game, and the lack of complexity has a lot to do with it.
"When we started working on Invisible War, we targeted the console from day one. This time it wasn't an afterthought. Every decision we made along the way considered that we would be running on a console. And I think you'll notice the difference." -- Matt Baer, Ion Storm
I almost exclusively buy games second-hand, which means i sometimes don't get a manual. One test of game design is whether a game is playable sans manual - lets mention Master of Orion 3 here...
I think games that are 'intuitive' and easy to pick and just play are getting thin on the ground on the pc, as it's easier just use lots of keys or some fancy mouse-driven system. I'm not saying that the consoles are neccesarily better due to their comparitive lack of control options, but that lack makes an intelligent system more of a necessity.
The trend (on the pc) to make the same games (FPS/RTS) and then just try to differentiate on minor details doesn't help much.
At first, video games were simple and limited not just because of a lack of design abilities, but because of technical limits. We all know that, but we don't necessarily look at the other side of the story...
As the barriers to creating video games with more technical sophistication went away, games naturally moved in the direction of becoming sophisticated themselves, because that's generally agreed to be the best way to eke out every last drop of play value for your development time. And so features like item shops and special moves and multiple endings came into vogue, because they gave the game a little extra bit of fun/complexity and were relatively easy to add into a game once the rest of it was in place.
Games for the computer platform, of course, are most guilty of going overboard on complexity. And why not? It's a good platform to appeal to someone who wants a detailed simulation.
However, both console and computer games have fallen into the same traps. Now that all developers developing for the retail market have good access to detailed 3d graphics, the overwhelming temptation is to make the play 3d too, regardless of whether that's a good idea or not. Similarly, because it can be done, developers of all styles of games will throw massive quantities of some kind of feature at you, be it # of enemies, special effects like lighting or wierd gravity or whatnot, subquests of the FedEx variety, or special attacks or combo moves or SOMETHING.
This is all done as a way to differentiate the product and improve gameplay, but the massive flaw of this methodology is that one does not have to improve gameplay by making use of new technology or by adding directly and sequentially to previous designs. It works in the short term, on a product-to-product basis, but over time results in games that feel "heavy" and demanding of the player in a way that old games never were - they simply have so much STUFF in them that one can't find the fundamentals of the game anymore, and so players will, time and time again, go through them like they would a theme park - picking and choosing among the attractions of the game - and if they are lucky, they get that choice 100% of the way. If not, there is inevitably player suffering due to game length/other annoyances.
The point of all this is, one should design games so that they have complexity that is merely sufficient to the task, and not to go any deeper without good reason. Abstraction is a very useful tool, as non-video game designers have known forever(well, the ones that weren't wargamers, but cardboard-and-paper wargames that are heavy on detail and take most of your day to play come few and far between today for a good reason).
I think the best games are those that have an original CONCEPT, though they're not necessarily better because they're simple.
The most enjoyable games I've encountered so far are Pong, bzflag and Weichi/Igo/Baduk (A Chinese board game), and all three are games with relatively simple rules, but a very original concept. Tetris wasn't bad either, and follows the same pattern. The only game of these four to actually have anything that resembles an engine is bzflag, and it's a simple one at that.
A notable thing about Igo is that with its simple rules set and 19x19 board, it's actually more complex than modern games, and even more complex than chess. So sometimes less is more.
I don't buy the fact that simpler games means better. They may be fun and have a lot of "twitch factor", but after some time you get tired of them. I think rather that games should only *start* simply. A lot of games (especially on PC) throw you with full control of the interface and drive you through a tutorial so that you can learn how it all works. Sure, its cool to have a lot of options, but it takes a lot of fun of discovery away.
Compare with, for instance, Super Metroid. You can do some basic stuff (run around, shoot some monsters) with the D-pad and one button, but to finish the game, you need to learn the rest of the commands. However, you learn them slowly as needed... I noticed that this "simple-to-harder" gameplay seems to be a design choice in a lot of big N games.
The ENIAC Demo Competition
Personally, I like it when games are easy to pick up, but difficult to master.
My prime example is Soul Calibur II. Any newb can pick up this game and beat the computer with some button-mashing finesse. They might have trouble against an experienced player, but if two friends pick up a rental and proceed to smash each other with no thought as to what the buttons do, it can still end up being lots of fun.
However, each character has at least 100-150 moves, many have multiple stances, and more characters are unlocked as you play. This leaves room for a great deal of time spent mastering your character, developing combos, etc.
I think it is very important for a game to be both accessible to the casual gamer, as well as the hardcore, and this game does it well.
I think that's the idea. There has to be some challenge in a game, after all.