Delightfully complex system design.
A good friend of mine has encouraged me to blog out some of my thoughts. Let's find out together if that was a mistake they will come to regret.
I figure a good starting topic would be something abstract that I have spent some time pondering during those quiet moments when I am vaguely aware of my surroundings.
The world we exist in is infinitely complex as far as our minds are concerned. Being fully aware of everything in a single moment can be overwhelming, intense, possibly life changing. What it is not, is simple. One could spend years describing the exact forces and minutia at play during one instant in time.
So we don't, not typically. Instead we summarize and simplify our experiences until it becomes a manageable, easily appreciable amount of chaos.
Truncation is the key to enjoyment it seems. Understanding what happened just enough so we know why we liked it is critical for our brain to decide that we earned a reward.
And is that not the prime reason to stay awake during they day? So that we might set up the intricate pieces of our lives to allow for a special moment to occur, that gives us a dose of a chemical our brain could produce all the time but doesn't, lest we become inert piles of quivering joy.
So why talk about the process of chasing satisfaction? Because isn't that the goal of gaming? (Incase you weren't aware, and I forgive you if you weren't, this is a game development blog at the moment.)
To recreate the joy we find elsewhere in our lives in a reliably repeatable manner; to reduce the complexity required to get our happy chemical release, this is why games are created.
So why then would we wish to make a complex game? If gaming is a method to reduce the uncertainty of life into a pleasure simulator, why muck it up with lots of fiddly bits that require attention and dedication to "make the thing work"?
Because everyone is a masochist to some degree. Like everybody. We as an organism tend to need a sense of accomplishment, of triumph over adversity, or of a sense of rarity or exclusivity, or to just get pushed around a bit, for many activities to feel fulfilling, worthwhile, or good. To feel like a thing was done we need an affirmation of reality, we need a signal that let's us know we actually lived though it, in other words, we need pain. Complexity and perceived difficulty are simulated pain.
Our brain also seems set to punish us for over-indulging in the happy juice, by causing the diminishing returns of it's effects. I assume this is to hopefully prevent us from jeopardizing our alive time in pursuit of more "fun". The exact same activity if too simple or too easy tends to reward less and less with each subsequent completion.
So now we begin to see that complexity can be used to inflate the potential number of uses a particular happy-go-round contains. This is because complexity tends to decrease the chances of the exact same outcome occurring, and therefore makes the solution feel relatively novel each time.
This process also works with our memory to develop skills that can influence said outcome and create performance based satisfaction. When we "git gud" it feels good.
So how do we make something feel complex and good instead of complex and bad or frustrating?
I believe the way to navigate that question is to have a conversation with reality.
Life is frustrating at times. Sometimes because things beyond our control create problems beyond our comprehension.
So lets create a system where, the simulated uncertainty and difficulties we see in life are demystified and instead come with concise bounds and rules that give the player all of the tools they require to succeed.
But to make the journey to that success feel worthy, we need to obfuscate the path, we need "pain". Manageable, safe, even preventable, pain.
Giving lots of options and lots of levers to pull is simultaneously engaging and stress inducing.
Having the player discover which combination of options create interesting or effective results rewards their engagement.
Creating an arena with enough variations in which that newly gained knowledge can be applied to numerous new circumstances, keeps that engagement rolling until the player is (hopefully) expertly juggling an entire system at once.
These are all vague platitudes and could benefit from specific examples and also a further discussion about how to fail at delivering such an engaging experience.
But that will have to wait until a future me finds another quiet moment to jot them down.
-Dersu