Depth vs. Complexity

[Pifanjr]

In computer games, I think that's the benefit of open worlds. They massively expand the decision space without having to add complexity (new rules).

There are quite a few open world games that get criticised for being wide but shallow.

The problem seems to be that, while these games have a ton of possible strategies to pick from, once you've found a viable strategy for one encounter you can use that strategy for pretty much every other encounter in the game.

I think this is mainly a problem for games that are too easy. It happens especially when a game allows you to regain all of the resources you've spent on an encounter before the next encounter.

Bethesda games for example have addressed this issue by adding a Survival mode to their games, which primarily makes resources a lot more scarce and harder to recover in between fights.

Similarly, Pokémon games feel a lot deeper when you use Nuzlocke rules, even though all that depth was technically already in the game, it was just not necessary to complete it.

 

[Brian Boru]

complexity will depend on how much you tinker around with the different game mechanics

That's ideal imo, different systems are there for different tastes. Eg I've never used the food buffs in FC6, only once looked at the Banditos system, and only go fishing if a job specifically requires it.

Can anyone think of a very immersive game … that is nonetheless very simple in its rules and mechanics?

The one which immediately springs to mind is entrenched in my multi-Replay list, 80 Days. It is that unicorn of a well-written game, so good that …The Telegraph newspaper also named it as "one of the best novels of 2014"… My review.

ETA:
"developers estimate that on one complete circumnavigation of the globe players will see approximately 2% of the game's 750,000 words of textual content"

once you've found a viable strategy

Doing that can take quite a bit of journeying thru the depths of available strategies—because of course it must work against the hardest opponents. But yes, there are a lot of wide but shallow—but all genres have their multitude of average or lower products.

games that are too easy

Very few games have to be too easy. Even in Chess, you can spot your opponent a pawn or a rook. As long as there's some small level of choice in the game, you should be able to tailor it to your level of expertise.

So… once you've found the viable strategy for all seasons above, you then tailor the game to provide an extra or different challenge, and the show goes on

 

[ZedClampet]

Did you never have that experience with books as a kid?

No, never. But as it turns out, your definition of immersed is an extreme one, and I'm immersed in games and books quite often.

Based on what I'm reading, what you are describing is rare. According to the International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, their study identified 3 levels of immersion:

1) Engagement--Game is getting most of your attention.
2) Engrossment--"A Zen-like state where your hands just seem to know what to do, and your mind just seems to carry on with the story"
3)Total Immersion--"a sense of presence, being cut off from reality to such an extent that the game was all that mattered. Total immersion...was a rare and rather fleeting experience when gaming, whereas engagement and engrossment were more likely to occur."

They also describe Immersion (all 3 levels) as involving a lack of awareness of time, and a loss of awareness of the real world--not that you actually think you are in the game world, but that you stop paying attention to things in the real world. Only the few in the Total Immersion group actually lost touch with reality, and that was "rare and fleeting".

So what you are describing is not common, and I do, in fact, experience quite a bit of immersion, but in the 2nd level, not the third.

This all makes me feel much better. I've been disturbed all day believing I was living amongst the mad.

 

[Hveðrungr]

This all makes me feel much better. I've been disturbed all day believing I was living amongst the mad.

And I feel very happy and privileged to have such an esoteric experience!

Hmm here's another thought. I've read before that how people react to horror and comedy movies is strongly correlated: people who laugh like loons at comedy movies are also likely to be absolutely terrified at horror movies, and vice versa. The hypothesis was that such a person is naturally inclined to high levels of immersion. Meanwhile, people who do not get very scared at horror movies do enjoy comedy movies but more as an intellectual exercise. And indeed I have often cried with laughter at comedy movies (even ones I've seen before), and I find horror movies terrifying—I can't watch them. And on the flip side, a good friend of mine has no problem with horror films and never laughs at comedy films: he even told me once that he used to believe that the expression “crying with laughter” was purely rhetorical. What about you, where do you fall on those?

 

[Hveðrungr]

The one which immediately springs to mind is entrenched in my multi-Replay list, 80 Days. It is that unicorn of a well-written game, so good that …The Telegraph newspaper also named it as "one of the best novels of 2014"… My review.

I think 80 Days (which is indeed excellent) is the exception that proves the rule because as you say it is not really a computer game, it is a novel. And so the immersion one achieves is from the prose, like my Snow Spider anecdote, not from the game mechanics.

 

[Pifanjr]

Doing that can take quite a bit of journeying thru the depths of available strategies—because of course it must work against the hardest opponents. But yes, there are a lot of wide but shallow—but all genres have their multitude of average or lower products.

I don't agree with the implication that shallow games are "lower products". There are plenty of gamers who don't care for depth and wide but shallow games are typically designed that way on purpose.

Very few games have to be too easy. Even in Chess, you can spot your opponent a pawn or a rook. As long as there's some small level of choice in the game, you should be able to tailor it to your level of expertise.

So… once you've found the viable strategy for all seasons above, you then tailor the game to provide an extra or different challenge, and the show goes on

Of course, but I would propose you're playing a different/modified game if you're adding limitations (either by introducing new mechanics or by ignoring/forbidding existing ones).

 

[Brian Boru]

I don't agree

Yes, good point.

you're playing a different/modified game

Yes, that's the point.

 

[Frindis]

Truck simulators get quite complex when you drink at the same time🍻

 

[Zloth]

Eeesh, start up a topic, then get sidetracked by fun games and family dinners.

Number of rules & mechanics in a game sounds like a good definition for complexity to me. Pulling the math book out on it doesn't look like something that would help us think about the issues. (THIS time.)

Really? You think that someone (who wasn't schizophrenic) could start playing Mario Kart and come to believe, if only briefly, that they existed in that world, that the game world was real, and that it was jarring to return to the real world and find they did not in fact exist in the game world?

That's beyond what I would call immersive, too. I never find it jarring to stop playing. (Standing up afterward if I've been playing too long is another story.) However, what I can do is internalize all those rules and make and make... jeez, what words to use? "Imaginary world" is wrong, especially with board games. There's no world, it's still just the board with pieces on it. More like a reality overlay with all those rules. For chess, the overlay says that bishops move diagonally. If one doesn't, it's WRONG. Once I can get this overlay figured out, then I can start figuring out strategies/tactics and get really immersed. When I get to the point that I barely even think about the things the rules don't allow, I would consider myself completely immersed.

That leads to something I think @BeardyHat reminded me of - it takes time to internalize those rules. Sometimes, too much time. Games can help out by not requiring that you know every bit of complexity right away, but sometimes that's not really possible. In fact, some games are happy to toss you in the deep end and let you re-load your game until you figure out how to swim.

Oh frak, it's tomorrow here, I need to get to sleep! OK, one more quick thing: I think adding PvP automatically adds a lot of depth, often TONS of depth. Playing poker against a simple computer program is going to be pretty shallow and, once you get a feel for how commonplace the various hands are, it's likely to get really boring. Playing against real people, though, introduces bluffs, trying to read facial expressions, and all sorts of psychology. (Que Vizzini, finding all manner of depth in the simplest of games.)

 

[Brian Boru]

internalize all those rules and make and make... jeez, what words to use? "Imaginary world" is wrong, especially with board games … More like a reality overlay

Something like this?

 

[BeardyHat]

Playing against real people, though, introduces bluffs, trying to read facial expressions, and all sorts of psychology. (Que Vizzini, finding all manner of depth in the simplest of games.)

Reminds me of this card game I have called Saboteur. I bought it precisely because it was described to me as that type of game, where a lot of it is about bluffing, which I something I always enjoyed in multiplayer Magic the Gathering.

It is a very simple game, but if you're a Saboteur, you really need to play delicately to win. My wife absolutely hates it, because she completely sucks as bluffing.

 

[Hveðrungr]

Reminds me of this card game I have called Saboteur. I bought it precisely because it was described to me as that type of game, where a lot of it is about bluffing, which I something I always enjoyed in multiplayer Magic the Gathering.

It is a very simple game, but if you're a Saboteur, you really need to play delicately to win. My wife absolutely hates it, because she completely sucks as bluffing.

Saboteur.

All of these games are Mafia- / Werewolf-a-likes really.

 

[BeardyHat]

Saboteur.

All of these games are Mafia- / Werewolf-a-likes really.

First I've heard of the...genre?

I just like bullshitting people and getting away with it.

 

[Kaamos_Llama]

Feeling like Im cutting in here a bit, sorry. But Ive fed this thread into my subconscious and pulled the arm on the fruit machine and thought I might as well share what came out anyway.

A game has depth if it has a lot of strategies that are equally viable depending on the situation. But its really hard to design a simple game that has a lot of depth, especially a single player one.

By introducing complexity it actually becomes easier to make a game deep, because with complexity can come more options for strategies.

A game can be very complex, but if it boils down to a narrow range of strategies required to win in the end, I might say that game is not deep, it is just complex. Because once youve worked out how to win, you just have to repeat those steps again to do it and it becomes solved.

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The earlier conversation about visual memory and internal monologue piqued my interest because my wife has no internal monologue, and I probably have partial aphantasia( hypophantasia apparently) I have very poor visual memory and usually cant make more than a blurry flash of an image in my minds eye. Signs are decent so far that our kid isnt completely emptyheaded due to the above, but its in the genes at least.

 

[Brian Boru]

My wife … completely sucks as bluffing

Yes, that's what the top-grade bluffers make you believe.

I just like bullshitting people and getting away with it

👀 Got my eye on you… 👀

 

[Hveðrungr]

A game can be very complex, but if it boils down to a narrow range of strategies required to win in the end, I might say that game is not deep, it is just complex. Because once youve worked out how to win, you just have to repeat those steps again to do it and it becomes solved.

Here's a spicy take for you all inspired by the Llama's comment: I think the way many of us play games nowadays, jumping from one to another and always looking for the newest game, makes it easier for complexity to substitute as a proxy for depth because we don't spend enough time to reach a point where we optimise the fun out of the game by finding the universal best strategy.

 

[Brian Boru]

easier for complexity to substitute as a proxy for depth

Yes, that's my very unscientific observation in recent years.

we don't spend enough time to reach a point where we optimise the fun out of the game by finding the universal best strategy

Mastery is a source of fun to a gaming segment, just like the various other gamer motivations. But even those who have other motivations—don't they all play as best they can? If there's a segment who prefer to play worse than they can, they keep quiet

But of course you're right about the mass market, it's consumption much more than patience or mastery.

Difficulty Level

As well as immersion, another relevant element of this discussion is difficulty. At lower difficulties, many complexities can be ignored and depth hasn't entered the picture yet.

 

[Zloth]

A game has depth if it has a lot of strategies that are equally viable depending on the situation.

Oh, I don't think they need to be equally viable. Sanely viable, I would say, but as long as the strategy has a reasonable chance of working, I think it would count. Like maybe you want to play Solasta with a party that's all wizards. (Insane things, like "I defeated Doom Eternal + DLC with just the initial pistol and no upgrades" are something else, IMHO.)

@Brian Boru - yep, I think in most games lowering difficulty allows you to ignore lots of systems. Crafting? Why bother on easy? But on hard, you better know how to craft, and you better have a plan for how your crafted things will complement each other.

 

[Brian Boru]

Crafting? Why bother on easy?

To learn how the mechanics work, and what other game systems it affects. I almost always start a new game on easy for that purpose, to learn what makes it tick and if it's likely of interest. That way you get a fuller overall picture because hopefully you weren't killed in scene 1 or didn't run out of money to buy more seeds after 10 minutes.

That can be short-circuited by reviews, videos, tutorial or if it's a sequel to a game you already know well.

 

[Kaamos_Llama]

Oh, I don't think they need to be equally viable. Sanely viable, I would say, but as long as the strategy has a reasonable chance of working, I think it would count. Like maybe you want to play Solasta with a party that's all wizards. (Insane things, like "I defeated Doom Eternal + DLC with just the initial pistol and no upgrades" are something else, IMHO.)

Thats fair. I've mostly been thinking in terms of strategy games here.

Picking up on Doom and other genres though I do think a platformer for example, can be relatively deep in comparison to other platformers. Something like Gris has pretty shallow game mechanics because the art style and atmosphere are supposed to be resonating emotionally with the player. Whereas something like Celeste (which I havent played) as I understand it is demanding partly because the tough complex platforming is supposed to be a metaphor for the emotional struggles of the protagonist.

You can probably say the same for different FPS or other games. Please point out or ignore if Im missing something that was discussed earlier, I dont have time to re read the whole thread right now, sorry.

Here's a spicy take for you all inspired by the Llama's comment: I think the way many of us play games nowadays, jumping from one to another and always looking for the newest game, makes it easier for complexity to substitute as a proxy for depth because we don't spend enough time to reach a point where we optimise the fun out of the game by finding the universal best strategy.

Possibly true, maybe also because of the volume of games being released, but also because making a game truly mechanically deep is really hard.

I dont think its a negative about the industry. Slay the Spire is incredibly deep, CK3 has a lot of depth of experiences, Against the Storm keeps introducing mechanics to deal with for about the first 50 or 60 hours, just the ones Ive played in the last year or 2 I would call deep in that way and Im sure theres a lot of others around.

But games dont need to have to have deep game mechanics to be good. Novelty, art style, story, music etc can all be valid reasons to enjoy a game on their own. FTL comes to mind, it has fantastic music, and I honestly wouldnt have played it as much as I did without that, of course it helps the game was also great. Depth of gameplay is one thing, but depth of experience is another. Brother Tale of Two Sons which I always go on about is a very simple game that is better because it has a novel way of telling a story that provokes an emotional response. If you like that kind of thing of course. Theres a lot of other examples out there.

Games include all other media in various degrees, thats kind of the beauty of them for me.