Take It Away

Our bias against simplification

One of the challenges in game design, as well as life, is improving something. If you have a problem, what do you do to fix it? Is there a common thread in how people approach problem solving?

A team at the University of Virginia, led by Dr. Gabrielle Adams, looked at this question back in 2021.

They ran experiments asking people to solve eight different types of problems, ranging from making patterns more symmetric to rearranging travel itineraries. They specifically were interested in whether people added things to solve the problem, or remove them.

For example, in the pattern problem they could add or take away tiles in order to change the pattern. Here’s a video that shows some of the problems they used, including one with Lego.

Overwhelmingly people added rather than took away to solve the problems. In the pattern problem, 80% of people added tiles, and only 20% removed tiles. This occurred even though solving the problem through subtraction was way simpler.

Of course, we prize simpler solutions. We always teach that “less is more”, or the Einstein quote that everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler. Writers learn to use fewer words where possible, eliminating extraneous tiny filler words, and presenters are told to use fewer slides, and have as little text as possible on each.

And yet our natural tendency is to always keep adding more and more, and overstuffing whatever we’re working on. Perhaps that’s why we always need to stress to people to KEEP IT SIMPLE STUPID. Without the constant reminders pulling us back towards simplicity we will always add more and more and more.

And, of course, we in the gaming field are hardly immune to this effect. I do a lot of teaching and mentoring for game designers, and by far the most consistent flaw that I see in new designers’ work is that they stuff too much into the game. There are zillions of different rules and subsystems. Once I looked at a civilization game that had over 20 different resources you could collect – and you actually had to purchase things with very specific combinations of these, not just use them as a general currency. It was a mess, as you can imagine.

I think part of it is that new designers think that their first game may be their only game, so they put every single idea they have into it.

Sculpting vs Painting

I myself am hardly immune to this. On Ludology, Ryan Sturm talked about two methods of designing – sculpting and painting. In Painting you start with nothing, and gradually build up the design. If you sculpt, you start with lots of stuff, and chip away at it until you’re happy with what’s left.

Personally I am definitely a sculptor. My first published game, The Ares Project, had way too many ideas in it. I’m very proud of it, but it certainly could have been pared down. Even today, I spend way more time removing game elements than adding them. I start big during brainstorming, and chip away.

One area to be particularly careful about is when you run across an edge case that isn’t covered by your rules. The absolutely simplest thing to do is to add a new rule. And sadly that’s where many designers go to first.

Designer Eric Lang tweeted “You can solve just about any specific design issue with a game by adding a smart targeted rule. 99% of the time I believe that’s the wrong development choice.”

https://twitter.com/eric_lang/status/1388131953786884100

I could not agree with that more – and it’s a lesson I’ve had to learn the hard way. Every rule you add makes your game harder to learn and harder to play, even if they seem tiny and inconsequential.

If you have a design problem in your game, your first effort should be to remove or combine rules to make it go away, and not just to add a rule to patch over it. Removing rules is how you achieve elegance.

Same thing in life, in my opinion. Where possible look for opportunities to reduce and simplify. I don’t always follow that rule – I very often don’t – but I understand and admire the principle.

If you’re facing a problem – game-related or otherwise – take a step back and think about what you can take away to solve it rather than what you can add. You may be surprised at where you end up.