Good Games are Elegant

To understand elegance, you must understand complexity and depth.

Complexity

Complexity measures how long it takes you to fully understand all the rules of the game.

An example of a low-complexity game would be a coin flip. I toss a coin in the air, and if you can predict which side up it will land you win, otherwise I win.

Even if you have never played that game before, that last sentence should give you enough information to run the game and teach it to others.

An example of high complexity would be Dungeons and Dragons. (This is doesn’t even come close to being the most complex game, but it is arguably the most popular complex game.) There are hundreds of pages of rules and hundreds of pages of statistics. The game even has a Dungeon Master, who’s tasked with remembering most of the rules and looking up the rest. It takes so long to learn how to become a Dungeon Master that players who possess this skill are often given free entry into paid gaming events.

Depth

Depth measures how long it takes you to learn “perfect play”. Perfect play means you know a strategy that no other strategy can beat more than half the time.

In Rock Paper Scissors, perfect play is choosing randomly. (This can be achieved with a computer, a dice, or secretly looking at the second hand of a clock.)

In Noughts and Crosses, a player who knows perfect play will always win or tie, but will never lose.

In Chess, mathematicians know that perfect play exists, but no one has any idea what it is, or what would happen if it played against itself.

Once perfect play is known, the game is “solved”.

Note: The problem with this definition of depth is that there is no way of comparing unsolved games with each other. Because of this, some people define depth to mean “how likely a skilled player is to defeat a less skilled player”. Although many people prefer this definition, such people also have to accept that any game becomes deeper when it’s played “best out of three”. I prefer to compare the depth of unsolved games by estimating how long it will be before someone constructs a computer powerful enough to solve each game.

High-Complexity + High-Depth = Heavy

Heavy games are popular among “hardcore gamers”. Normally they are themed. This means that instead of the game being about numbers, shapes or game markers, it could be about a great battle, business managers, ruling a kingdom or taking over the world.

Low-Complexity + Low-Depth = Light

Light games are ideal for playing with people who don’t normally play games. When introducing people to games, you should start with a light game and gradually teach them heavier games as they gain confidence. They are also ideal for players who are feeling tired, or don’t want to be too distracted from their conversation.

High-Complexity + Low-Depth = Broken

It’s only “broken” when this happens by mistake. This happens when the designer was unaware of a very simple yet powerful strategy that can only be defeated by itself.

Sometimes a game has high complexity and low depth because the designer was more interested in making the game into a simulation than a test of skill. The designer may have even worked out the best strategy ahead of time and is trying to teach the players a valuable life lesson.

The Game of Life falls into this category. There are rules for skipping college, but there is never a situation in the game where this is a good idea.

Low-Complexity + High-Depth = Elegant

Elegant games aren’t so much created as discovered. The only method that really guarantees an elegant game at the end, is to create lots and lots of different simple games, and then try to figure out which one is the deepest.

All game designers try to improve the elegance of their game, but this can only be done by deleting anything inelegant, or adding stuff randomly and testing each one.

The most elegant games in the world generally don’t have a theme. Examples include Go, Othello, Checkers, Chinese Checkers, Connect 4. All but chess and checkers have no theme at all. Chess and checkers are about opposing armies, but they’re not realistic enough to satisfy a hardcore war game fan.

That said, if a super-elegant game had a theme that truly fit and felt realistic, it would make its designer millions of dollars, easily.

What do you think?

Is there a better definition of elegance, depth and complexity? Is there anything my article has missed on the topic?