The point made by tutorials

Danny Day, one of the names behind South African studio QCF (SpaceHack) , feels that Saint Exupéry's statement is an important influence on his game design views. He doesn't adopt quite the same stance as Anthropy, however.

The elegance and seeming simplicity of a polished design is obvious when seen at the meta level, but games themselves aren't actually about elegance or simplicity. A simple game wouldn't be very engaging because players wouldn't have to create and revise mental models or manage expectations, it would feel empty and senseless to play."

Day believes, instead, that playing a game is the process of finding one's own elegance and simplicity in a complex system. He highlights the example of tutorials: following Saint Exupéry's advice dogmatically would result in their removal from a game entirely, and in a lot of situations this simply cannot be done. But polishing and minimising that tutorial as much as possible without robbing a player of vital information is something golden. "As designers we should care about taking things away that obscure or confuse the player and make their interaction with the game seamless and empowering. An easily absorbed tutorial system is hours and hours of work." Player burden needs to be removed as much as possible: with a complex system, this becomes more difficult — but not impossible — for a prudent designer.

Anthropy also mentions tutorials, but with respect to classic arcade games: in an environment like that, the designer often doesn't have the luxury of a tutorial at all (or has only a few seconds to explain core concepts to players), and in instances like these a simple premise is an absolute must.

One example of game complexity stifling the player's experience is offered by Tyler Glaiel, a developer who learned first-hand the dangers associated with unnecessary complexity through the problems he had with one of his Flash games, Blockslide 2.

Following the success of the original Blockslide, Glaiel explains his design philosophy on this particular project. "I was in the mindset that 'bigger was better', so I invented all sorts of crazy block types to add into the game with no sort of restraint. Most people didn't finish the long tutorial. Most people thought the tutorial was the whole game, considering it very well should have been ... people were overwhelmed not necessarily by the amount of stuff, but by the unintuitive ways [in which] things interacted."

Glaiel took this problem into consideration with his next project, Closure, exercising more restraint on what he added to the game. The venture was far more successful.