Harrison: Non-gamers see controllers as live guns

[Bodhesatva]

Here's someone who agrees with his general assessment, Valve software (whom I believe a great deal of people in this thread repsect, including me).

Robin Walker of Valve: When we decided to try Team Fortress without these things, the team assumed, "Oh, god -- there's no way we can get on without these!" Then we playtested, and all agreed: The game is actually better. And there's certainly a threshold you can cross over where too much complexity prevents people from appreciating the depth. Look at chess, rock-paper-scissors...

1up : The Sims creator Will Wright loves Go [an ancient and strategically complex game with simple rules].

Robin Walker: Yeah, an insanely simple mechanic. You each take turns putting a single piece onto this table, but people spend centuries writing strategy analyses. It literally took us years to get to the point where we were able to do that as designers, to even realize it was right.

http://www.1up.com/do/feature?pager.offset=5&cId=3165930

 

Let me emphasize this: the people who think "games with more buttons and stuff to do" are smarter while "games with less stuff to do and less buttons" are dumber are obtuse. It's incorrect. Go, one of my favorite games, has precisely one mechanic, and it's more complicated than pretty much any other game I've ever played.

This is something that many of even the video game designers are just now waking up to, so it's nothing to be ashamed of that many of us didn't realize it before. Still, it's important to emphasize: more buttons does not equal more intelligent. In fact, I'd argue that for most designers, it's a crutch, in precisely the way Molyneux describes -- it's extremely challenging to make a game as deep and rich as Go, so rather than try to create a robust, focused experience, they just keep adding crap on and hope the game is "deep" simply because of how many actions there are in the game. If you give a character 40 guns to work with, it's automatically deep!

There's a reason Starcraft is still on the top of the competitive gaming scene, even though it's long been passed in the sheer number of units and tech trees involved.