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Comment by MaikuMori | Hacker News Reader

This. The continuous push to make everything easy (as in gameplay and also learning) is annoying. Not all games have to be simple. I believe games have huge potential for teaching problem solving and systematic thinking, but by dumbing them down were partially eliminating this.

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.

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No, this has nothing to do with simplifying games. Complex games can be intuitive and build up complexity as the player learns.

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.

It was slightly off topic rant indeed.

cf Paradox's Crusader Kings etc., where you can start off with a tiny county with an army your larger neighbour can effortlessly stackwipe to avoid the issues of managing subordinates if you want, but if you don't read the manual to find out what all the options mean, you'll struggle to get beyond the tutorial never mind understand why people find it addictive (or buy any DLC...)

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

The second paragraph here seems like it can be summarized as, "reading about things the game doesn't tell you about is good because you'll learn about other things that the game doesn't tell you about."

What if the UI was good enough that it exposed some of those gavelkind inheritance implications?

It does supply you with warnings for stuff that might go wrong. It's just that there's a lot of things that might go wrong, may of which need longwinded explanations, and you're probably never going to love micromanaging all that stuff (never mind enough to buy shiny add ons giving you more symbols and options!) if you don't like reading manuals. And the whole point of differentiation from the Civilization series is to start off with an enormous choice of unbalanced real life historical scenarios which may need immediate attention rather than a blank slate to gradually build up. I mean, the UX is terrible in many other respects: but the first this looks like it's designed for people that enjoy complexity glance probably reveals more about the games than anything actually intuitive could!

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.

I for one welcome games that don't require me to sacrifice hours and hours to be enjoyed. I have job and familly and while I like games, they have only limited time and effort box available. Any more then that and they get deleted, as a strategy.

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.

Thank you. There are tons of complex games out there. I really like them in principle. I may even play them for a while if the learning curve is reasonable. But the days I’ll put hours into games are pretty much past and were mostly never there in the first place.

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.

This article isn't about dumbing games down, it's about making UI adjustments to make it easy to start playing.

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.

what's easy? what's simple?

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.

There will always be games with some depth out there - somebody is always going to be hacking away at Dwarf Fortress, or Gary Grigsby-type games. But, if you're building games on an input device as limited as a mobile phone, your options are sorely limited.

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.

Well a lot of older series haven been simplified in recent iterations. I haven't played hearts of Iron though.

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.

There are a lot of ways that a game like Dwarf Fortress could have a better UI without compromising the depth of gameplay.

The problem is not only have the people made their money, but the population has moved on to the next shiny dumbed-down thing. So while I agree with you, I don't know how to change it when everyone involved seems to have an incentive to keep things as-is.

The system is feeding it self. The simpler it is the more people are reached and the less ordinary person is willing to learn and overcome problems. Slowly everything that is slightly complex becomes too much of a hassle or gets negativity.

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.

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