"Necessary Complexity" in Online Games

Massively is running a story about Google's short-lived virtual environment, Lively. The article examines why Lively shut down so quickly, and how its simplicity and its attempts at user-friendliness did more harm than good. Quoting: "The idea here is that any interactive system has a certain amount of complexity, usually involving the number and type of tasks which can be performed. Obviously, it is detrimental if the interaction interface is more complicated than it needs to be. That just makes things harder. What's a little less obvious is that reducing the complexity of the interaction interface too far makes things harder as well. Either it makes it hard to perform the tasks, or it reduces the number of tasks which can be performed. ... ideally the interaction interface needs to be of an order of complexity that is coupled to the order of complexity of the number and type of possible tasks. If it rises above that or falls below that, performing tasks becomes harder. Performing tasks with an oversimplified interaction-interface is like trying to make coffee with one hand tied behind your back. Overcomplicating it is like trying to instruct five people to build a shed, when none of you have any language in common."

Comments

Article is Not Well Thought-Out

[firmamentalfalcon]

The argument's flawed. Lively had a simple interface and it failed, so let's blame it on the simple interface!

Given _a_ program, there is a direct relationship between the simplicity of the interface and quality. In the set of all programs that allows for the same set of interactions, the program with the simplest interface wins.

The problem with Lively is that its set of interactions was not large enough. Its problem was not the interface that delivers these interactions. It's like saying the monitor isn't working when your program doesn't compile.

Spore suffers from the same problem...

[Lordfly]

...in that it's been reduced to such a simple game that there's nothing to do. It's a simulation game without any simulation.

Any game that touts a "simulation" of an entire galaxy that doesn't even let carnivores and herbivores interact on planet surfaces has gotten nearly everything wrong.

Maxis's previous game SimLife had more complex systems interacting than Spore does. And Sim Life came out in 1993.

The most interesting games, to me, are the ones that have multiple systems that interact with each other with simple, but easily combine-able mechanics. Simcity's a good example... traffic effects land value which effects what goes on the land which effects your tax revenue, and so on. Those kinds of games offer tons of replayibility, because you're constantly changing systems that affect other systems.

Anyways, just my two cents. Spore might be popular, but it was my biggest gaming disappointment in half a decade.