I just wanted to play with the blocks! Now I feel like I’m not doing what I’m supposed to be doing if I don’t make some use of everything.Don’t.
I’m serious, don’t.
Rare is the game to which the solution is “put more stuff in it.”
Your game may need better design, you may need to spend more time on your designs, but you definitely don’t need more stuff in your game (particularly if you need better design or more time spent on your designs…).
Scope is precious in games design. Indeed, most games — if not all, I’ll go ahead and say it — should have reined in their scope before they went to press or shipped gold.
For most designers, this is antithetical thinking. Whether hubris, inexperience, or unmitigated love of the genre, they want to make one enormous game that is all things to everyone, with a feature set that keeps players coming back year after year, level after level, to plumb another facet of their grail-game, to master another aspect of their unending mine of entertainment.
It’s no coincidence that the solitary resource that a game can demand of its audience — time — is a precious commodity for designers, too. All of your ideas simply won’t fit into your design by your launch or print time. Those ideas may or may not even have any place in the greater game you’re designing, so taking time away from the features that do fit is doing them a disservice. (Brenda Brathwaite has an article about the time constraints of design, while we’re talking about it.)
A simpler feature is easier to understand and easier to use. The fewer restrictions you place on a function, the broader its application it is and the more creatively players will find a way to use it.
The Bejeweled minigame in Lineage II both breaks immersion and distracts players from each other.In video games, overdesign sometimes results in feature bloat. The extraneous feature feels tacked on, or it’s hard to find a thematic fit for the feature in the game in question. The Bejeweled-type minigame in Lineage II, for example — what’s it doing there? It’s a time waster, sure, and a great casual game… but time I’m spending playing the minigame is time I’m not spending forming and exploring relationships with other people, which is the entire point of MMOs. TetraMaster, likewise, feels out of place in the Final Fantasy games, because it’s something outside the world. It’s a fine side game, and putting Final Fantasy flourishes on it adds a bit of recognition and fun, but the idea of killing monsters and having them drop cards of themselves is boggling.
In tabletop games, overdesign sometimes manifests as “supplement-itis.” It’s a bit more of a problem at the tabletop, too, because every user doesn’t just patch his client to ensure version compatibility with the other players. If I’m playing D&D and I don’t have the book that defines swift actions, I might not be playing with rules that work the same way yours do. If we’re playing Vampire: The Requiem and I have the rules for a bloodline that you’ve never seen before, we’re going to have a game experience that loses something in the disparity. The benefit of tabletop games is that they have a living, creatively thinking arbiter running things, but what if she doesn’t have all the supplements herself? And of course, these are gross examples, and wholly subjective. As well, they’re games published by publishing companies whose business is selling books, not making sure your game is consistent.
Ultimately, when you’re making a game for play on a computer or around a tabletop, you need to ask yourself, “Does my game need this?” If your answer is no or, worse, you find yourself trying to convince yourself that, yes, your game does need this, it’s best to leave it on the cutting room floor.
As a coda to the merit of leaving things out, remember the beauty of broad strokes. If you leave something out or undetailed, the thing that occupies that space in your players’ imagination is always going to be richer and more evocative than what you ultimately show them. Remember the man behind the curtain in Oz? As well, something that’s not predetermined can be used in a creative new way, meaning you’ll have the joy of seeing emergent gameplay happen and seeing the way playing your game lets the players synthesize their experiences into something of their own communal creation.
Very fine advice, I’ve been trying to piece together ideas and thoughts for my pipe-dream game someday. Currently, I just play with nWoD conversions. I think that’s a decent starting point. I have to sit down when making outlines and write, cross-out, write, cross-out. It’s a harsh process, but it makes things a lot simpler and far more manageable, even in creating an alternate history setting instead of throwing in every single idea I could have for the conversion.
Too simple is also not good, so “always make it simpler” can be a dangerous design heuristic. I think that, to some extent, the overall amount of stuff/complexity in a game should be somewhat related to how much time you are expecting your players to spend playing it. Hence, MMOs are more complex than your average Playstation game. If Final Fantasy had been no more complex than Street Fighter, then far fewer people would want to spend a hundred hours playing it. Sure, there’s the storyline to go on, but if you’re playing a game you also expect to be unveiling more possibilities within the game as time goes on. New powers, new mechanics, new synergies.As with all things, the trick is in finding the balance. And I think I know what you’re saying: that too often designers try to make a game better (or more appealing to a certain crowd) by adding more to it, when their time would better be served streamlining what’s already there. I just feel that the message could be easily misinterpreted as, “Whenever you want to add something, don’t. Always make the game simpler.”The side-games that you mention are a bit of a different creature/problem, in my opinion. The problem with them isn’t that there is this thing in the game that is something extra — rather, it’s that there is this thing in the game that is extra and has nothing to do with the rest of the game, and adds nothing to the rest of the game.Also, I personally love supplement-itis in tabletop games. In every D&D game I’ve been in, and most World of Darkness games, from the outset the game master has said, “Okay, we’re going to be playing using these supplements.” So maybe it’s just my personal experience, but I’ve never seen lots of supplements for a game as a bad thing — I see it more as a “take what your group wants”/buffet thing. It just sucks when different supplements contradict one another, or aren’t balanced. And making lots of supplements does inevitably lead to at least one of those things.
@Alex: Yes, there’s something cathartic about sifting through and editing your own work. It’s pretty satisfying to be able to say, “Okay, self, this is cool, but maybe a bit much.”@Mike: I agree that it’s a balance. Chess and go, for example, aren’t hugely complex, and have been being played for thousands of years longer than Final Fantasy. You don’t necessarily need “more stuff” for a better game or for a game with more longevity, you just need a design that accommodates new permutations and emergent play.I agree also on the buffet-style play that occurs with supplements, but that’s a question of your game group’s chemistry. Many gamers take everything published for a game as canonical, so it’s less of a buffet and more like a Beverly Hillbillies jalopy packed to a height of ten feet with stuff that’s in print, so it “must” be used.Cheers, guys!
Yes! A thousand times yes. I know I come from a gaming background where more was better, but boy has that changed in the last few years. As I now work on creating my version of a vampire game, this mantra has been at the forefront of my design thinking. I don’t want bloated, I don’t want even a bit much; I want the right amount, and I want that amount to be small and lean. I don’t want extraneous stats/gimmicks/nifites that detract from the main couple of stats that define the central theme. So once again, yes to this whole post.
Much of a game’s best plot and mechanics are because of the factions and their relationships within the game itself. If a faction is missing from a sequel without a proper explanation, and is a key part of the experience, Then the experience as a whole feels as if something is missing- and as a player I consider the concept to have failed.Would The Forgotten Realms (3.5E basis) be worth anything without it’s gods and their feuds? Organizations like the Red Wizards? Scheming cabals of mindflayers?Would doctor who have been worth watching without time lords, daaleks, and the other assorted nasties and their factions? Even one of those having been missing in a series reboot would cause an uproar in Britain.Star Trek without Klingons, Borg, or the Federation? (This would cause overweight virgins everywhere to go into cardiac arrest!)I myself even don’t like it when organizations are changed beyond recognition. The difference between the Empire of Tamriel in Morrowind and Oblivion (curruption, graft, and greed to benevolent overlords) shocked me and actually prevents me from buying any post-morrowind Elder Scrolls games.Sure, there are some parts of all games that could be relegated to background material, NPC factions, or even kept outside of that particular game (but never pointed out not to exist against prior lore), but when removing things, remember what’s part of the core experience.