COMPLEX DOES NOT MEAN INACCESSIBLE

When you were a little kid, some of the first games you played, barring physical activities like tag, were probably tic tac toe, checkers, and perhaps chess, in that order. Tic tac toe is so simple that it can be solved fairly easily by a human. Checkers, while still quite simple for most people, has orders of magnitude more complexity due to the bigger play space and additional rules, with way more possible moves in a given turn. Chess is orders of magnitude more complicated than that, and may never be completely solved.

The reason you probably got into tic tac toe first is just because it's simpler. So simple, in fact, that even your puny 3ish year old brain could understand it. Following this line of reasoning, it’s easy to infer that a simpler game will be easier to get into, and you could make an argument that the past decade or two of multiplayer games have proven this. So many series / genres have gotten simpler and “easier” overtime, often to great success. I think it’s impossible to entirely deny the truth of this pattern, but I dispute that it is the whole truth.

DEPTH VS COMPLEXITY

If given the choice right now, I imagine you would most definitely prefer to play chess over tic tac toe. The ladder is a pretty boring game because it’s very shallow and easy to solve, while chess has an endless myriad of strategies to conceive of and execute on, so much so that you could play chess your whole life and still not come close to solving it. That quality, the amount of ways to play and improve, is depth. But all the pieces and rules that enable chess to have so much more depth than tic tac toe also come at a price: more rules to learn. It’s more complicated. This means the game is less approachable and may bar some players, like three year old you for example, from getting into them.

Complexity is unwanted, but necessary for a deep game. After all, all those rules and mechanics you have to learn in chess are what creates the depth in the first place. But part of what makes games like chess so great is their elegance, which is to say that they create a huge amount of depth from a small amount of complexity. While more complex than tic tac toe, chess is still a relatively simple game with only 6 pieces, but has stood the test of time for over 1500 years as a great competitive game. This represents the best of both worlds, easy to get into but also very engaging to master.

THE NATURE OF COMPLEXITY

In this way, all the simplifications that many modern games have undergone seems valid. If there’s some extra moves, mechanics, or tech that don’t create that much depth, they aren’t worth their weight in complexity and should be simplified or removed. This line of reasoning has a lot of truth to it, but what I really want to get across is that it can be horribly flawed.

Not all complexity is the same. I’ve never seen any term or formal distinction of this, so I’m going to be an arrogant prick and coin it right now as frontloaded complexity vs hidden complexity. Frontloaded complexities are things the player absolutely must understand or know how to do in order to experience any of a game’s depth, while hidden complexities are advanced things that are entirely ignorable. Culling away hidden complexity does literally nothing to help make a game more approachable. And yet, so many games cull them away in an effort to appeal to new players.

I hate to pick on a specific series, but the contrast between Super Smash Bros Melee and its sequel, Brawl (and to a lesser extent subsequent titles) stands out as a perfect example. Melee featured a ton of advanced mechanics, most famously wavedashing, that gave the game a deceptively high skill ceiling. Brawl, in comparison, felt gutted to many high level players. Countless advanced techniques were removed with no replacement, combos and pressure were much more limited, and the game was much slower in all regards. Director Masahiro Sakurai explained in an interview that he felt Melee was a bit too difficult for newcomers. This might seem bizarre given it was the best selling game on the Gamecube, but I think it’s an understandable sentiment given that he had originally created Smash specifically to be a more accessible fighting game. While it might be easy to roll your eyes at the idea of a game that’s “accessible, simple, and playable by anyone,” I honestly think that’s a pretty noble thing to strive for, as long as it doesn’t get in the way of making a deep, compelling game. But that’s not what happened with Brawl. All the aforementioned changes do nothing for new players. After all, you usually aren't seeing wavelanding or technical combos when you’re just playing at a friend's house. The only players impacted by these changes are the high level players, who are left with a more shallow game to play.

THE LINE

While advanced mechanics, like wavedashing in Melee for instance, are optional, one could argue they are required in order to experience the “true game,” and thus represent another obstacle in the way of playing the game. Essentially, this argument disputes where the line between front loaded and hidden complexity actually lies. My cut off point of “any knowledge required to experience depth” (aka not button mashing) might seem a bit generous… is playing a game at such a basic level really how the game is meant to be played?

My answer is that it absolutely is, and I think it’s gatekeeping to insinuate otherwise. Look at this post of a Guilty Gear ACR tournament. All the kids have absolutely no idea what they are doing. They don’t know how to combo, do special moves, or block (unironically), and the best strategy is to pick Potemkin and spam one move over and over. Are they experiencing the game at the deepest level? Obviously not. But you would be a lunatic to march in and dismiss these players for ‘not playing real Guilty Gear.’ They are having fun with the knowledge they have working to expand that knowledge, the same as any other player.

Deeming a game as “hard to get into” based on an arbitrary measure of the game’s total complexity is incredibly disconnected from the actual new player experience. Depth doesn’t come at the cost of accessibility. In fact, they are mostly orthogonal. Making an approachable game isn’t about simplification, but rather providing good options for every skill level. There should be extremely simple, but good options (sometimes called ‘first order optimal strategies’ if you’re a nerd), slightly better and harder options, and extremely technical but powerful options. This gives every player good options for them, and attainable developments to work towards as they play more.

I think the push towards more accessible games has been great over all, but it always pains me to see the simplifications focused in the wrong place. Old games have so many advanced mechanics that I love or that I wish were still around that will probably become extinct in modern games. I wrote this article because there’s so many old, now removed mechanics I wish I could have experienced without digging up a 10-20 year old game.

These things weren’t sacrificed, they were murdered.

NonGMOTrash
june 24th, 2024
(last modified: july 6th, 2024)