Alternative title: Building single screen casual games.
The ultimate example are mobile games. They optimized for profit by dumbing them down and adding addictive, simple gameplay loops. They also incredibly boring in longer term, but it doesn't matter because they've probably extracted enough money from you at that point.
This goes beyond gaming and applies to our industry in general. I strongly believe that having more complex, but powerful software is better for the society at large. Encouraging people to not give up when they encounter simple problems and promoting systematic thinking is important. But it's not as profitable and you lose users.
There is a middle ground somewhere.
I suppose the gaming topic made be rant, because it seems like a lot games being made now lack substance. But there are so many more games being made and so many more players compared to 10 years ago that I'm probably biased. I still think simplicity vs function is a tough problem with short term and long term pros and cons.
Take something like Civilisation. You don't need hours of tutorial to play the game. As the game progresses, it becomes more and more complex, but you start with 2 units, no enemies and no technology. After you build a city, technology is introduced. As you start exploring, enemies are introduced.
If civilisation threw new players into a typical midge scenario, players would need to read manuals and use tutorials and spend quite some time getting an overview of the current state.
Even complex games can start with the player playing a game.
And weirdly the mystery UX forcing you to pore through the manual and how to guides might actually be a good thing since even if you start out big enough to conquer and learn how to raise an army you're going to find it very frustrating when you lose it all and more happy because you didn't research the implications of gavelkind inheritance
What if the UI was good enough that it exposed some of those gavelkind inheritance implications?
Fair to say it's targeting a different market from mobile games where you see a screenshot of something that looks like Tetris crossed with Scrabble or Solitaire with poker hands and instantly understand the rules and what a good strategy might look like.
It is frustrating when something that was on the grognard end of things gets juniorized; I've seen a lot of complaints in that vein about the last Paradox Hearts of Iron iteration.
It's hard to please older gamers by crating something that feels new, but not too different or simplified and at the same point appeal to the new masses of gamers.
As others fairly pointed out my original comment was off topic. Creating good UIs is a worthy cause as long simplicity and mass appeal is not valued over substance.
As for mobile games, I will disagree. There is a huge inertia and lack of creativity. Everyone is trying to copy everyone else. Just look at the screenshots of a typical game in play store. Same style everywhere, they've even started to not show game content because it's just not there. Yet somehow I can run emulator and ejoy quality games with no input problems. Clearly it's not a limitation of the device.
If you play some Ludum Dare games, you'll see how important a good UI is to pick up a new game. You'll see lots of unexplained controls, unexplained mechanics, and indecipherable labels. And these little details will make or break games.
You don't have to like them. Not every customer wants to dedicate whole life to games.
I am thankful to mobile games creators that they did not rejected my demographics and interest group and started to make games that I can enjoy.
Truth be told I’m the same way with a lot of complex TV shoes. I do watch some like GoT but I’m pretty selective about it.
getting over it is extremely minimalistic, immediately accessible and exceedingly difficult
stellaris has a lot of layers, with the ux segmenting the game minigames for the user, but the core game loop is quite straightforward and the complexity mostly cosmetic.
triple town has both a simple interface and simple game rules, but complexity grows exponentially with the combination level, 2048 is more of the same.
there's no direct relation between interface complexity and game complexity; there's no even direct relation between rules complexity and game complexity.