On Game Design - Game Design Theory - page 42

space (endogenously meaningful possibilities)? In football, for instance,
you can throw the ball out of bounds to stop the clock, a decision that
quarterbacks sometimes make in a tight spot . You can choose to throw
the ball forward and out of bounds, or directly to the side and out of
bounds, or backwards and out of bounds. Technically these are three
different possibilities, but they don't count as three distinct gameplay
possibilities, because they all have the same meaning inside the game.
Essentially, the entire out of bounds area is one discrete space in football,
so it doesn't matter where the ball goes.
The reason people think Go has such a massive level of emergent
complexity is not just because of the high number of possibilities. It's
because of the very high number of meaningful possibilities. As game
designers, we should be thinking about how to make as many mean-
ingful situations as possible in our game systems. How one does this
is dependent on the type of game, and creating these situations is re-
ally what's hard about game design. In future chapters, I'll give examples
of how certain types of games can increase their possibility spaces in a
meaningful way.
Hiding Behind Complexity
Some games overwhelm players with inherent complexity in order to
keep them from seeing the basic dullness of a game. When there's 100
items, 40 characters, or 250 unit types in a game, many people just start
thinking about inherent synergies and look past the core mechanisms.
It's plain to see that Magic: The Gathering would get boring fast without
the vast amounts of inherent complexity in the form of thousands of col-
lectible cards.
High levels of complexity are hard for players to see through, but it
also means that they are hard for designers to see through. To make a
game that really lasts, limit your inherent complexity levels so that you,
the designer, can see any weaknesses in the core mechanism.
Information and Solvability
Perfect information and complete information are terms taken from
game theory , which looks at logical decision making. Various elements
of game theory are of varying levels of use to us—game designers. I rec-
ommend taking at least a casual interest in game theory, and the terms
listed above are of particular importance to us.
We refer to a game as having perfect information when all players
know all the rules of the game and everything about the current game-
state. So chess has perfect information, because all players not only know