A case for simplicity

"look at all that super mario bros. accomplishes with about four types of blocks ... that's elegant design." This is how Anna Anthropy (aka. auntie pixelante) responds to Saint Exupéry's quote.

Anthropy is a blogger, game developer and game theory expert who has a particular interest in the design of platform games, particularly with old-school classics such as Super Mario Bros. and Monuments of Mars. Her games, like her analyses, pride themselves on simplicity and elegance: When Pigs Fly is a pretty accurate embodiment of this philosophy.

"contemporary game design is a victim of clutter," says Anthropy. "because the games industry is hit-driven (big budget games need to sell huge amounts just to recoup their costs), games are designed to be everything to everyone. unfortunately, the result is a game full of features which all tug in different directions, and which stretch the idea of the game thin beyond recognition ... they stretch an hour's worth of ideas over eighty hours of filler."

Adam Saltsman believes in "hardcore reductionism". The first step in his projects is to boil a game down to as simple a concept as possible. "Once you have this atom, this indivisible thing, frequently there are simple or obvious ways to expand it honestly and faithfully without attaching whole new mechanics to the thing. If you've boiled it all the way down, it's usually pretty easy to see what sorts of other gameplay options will be a good fit."

Saltsman has a rather interesting — and controversial – Gamasutra blog post that touches on this concept.

Gamasutra blogger Gabriel Lievano advocates a similar point of view, and actually makes reference to a very high-profile series which he believes suffered from design bloat at one point.

An example of this type of design [minimisation] can be watched in Sid Meier's Civilization change from Civilization IV to Civilization Revolution. Civilization games used to evolve adding more and more functionality and content in each iteration ... in Civilization IV you had the same game but you could manage religion, finances, politics, external relationships, a huge variety of resources, culture, pollution, technology and a lot more ... the question: is all this functionality really relevant for the player's experience? And the answer was Civilization Revolution. The difference between Civ IV and Civ Revolution is enormous: it's like rewinding to the first civilization but keeping the most fun parts from its sequels and the cool graphics."

Another point made is that a good game should always be easily summarised. Often this is for the sake of design itself (Anthropy once again refers to the case of Super Mario Bros, where the basic idea is "jump with momentum"), but it's also a good indicator of marketing potential, as pointed out by Paul Taylor. The ability to craft a single-sentence description of your game experience is a good indicator of a tight design, and by extension a tight game.

Jonatan "cactus" Söderström, a rapid game prototyping advocate, is averse to the concept of a "perfect game design", but he does acknowledge the elegance of simplicity. "Neither a large amount of content nor variety are vital to a perfect game," he says, "and I think that experiencing something interesting in concentrated form can sometimes be better than having it diluted or prolonged."