All Work and No Play

The Balance Between Complexity and Playability


Game design is a delicate procedure if you want to do it properly. There are various pitfalls to overcome; how much player balance is required, how much chaos needs to be introduced to achieve this, how pure you want the strategic elements to be and so on. Mostly you're trying to utilise abstract and quantifiable elements to create something that can be called a "game". How well you do this makes the difference between pastime and game; you can quite easily throw a trail of spaces between two points, a die and some tokens and you'll have a roll-and-move race; but this is more a pastime than a game.

One of the greatest problems involves theme as much as anything else; you want to represent something in a game which adds depth and interest, and is relevant to the theme. If it's a game about, say, managing a football team this might be the transfer market, or the football matches themselves; if it's a game about politics this might be the vote, or indeed canvassing for votes.

However, with every new element you add to a game design, you're opening a whole new can of worms. Unfortunately, it's usually a can of worms you cannot do without - if you don't fish out a few ideas, you might as well go back to roll-and-move.

And there's the rub; because as soon as you add something to the game to make it interesting you are by default making it more complex than it was before. More to the point, if you want the design to work properly, you're probably going to have to change or tweak something else in the game structure to accommodate the extra complexity. If you thought that would be an end to it, you then have to ensure that once this element has been introduced, it doesn't diminish the game's playability.

The experience of playing reflects a games playability - an indeterminate feature of any game which can be described as the difference between work and play. This abstract concept is something you can only really feel while playing the game, and is likely to be different from player to player. For instance, somebody who is excited by 1830 may not necessarily be excited by Age of Steam, and vice-versa. As you add more complex elements to your game design, your audience will shift; that's one reason why our hobby is niche - most "ordinary" people don't graduate from Draughts or Monopoly. The calibration within our hobby is much narrower; there are those with a taste for "light and fluffy" and those with a taste for "heavy and mechanical". I tend towards the latter, but am one of the few who appreciates both.

The problem of how complex to make your game is, therefore, completely dependent upon your audience; but whatever the level of complexity, the game has to be playable. This is true no matter the target audience; you don't want them to be bogged-down with calculations you would have to get an accountant in for; nor do you want the game to seem more like something you should be paying the players to do.

So how do you maintain a balance between the two? There is a simple answer; use your own tastes to guide you. If you're designing games then you've probably played enough to know what you like. You will know where your limits are as far as complexity is concerned, and you also know what will bore you to death (or at least bore you enough to cull the game). If you feel the need to introduce something else to the game, make sure it's not already covered elsewhere (in the abstract or otherwise); if it is, leave it; if it isn't, ask yourself how necessary it is (and trust me, "want" often equates to "necessary").