On Game Design - Game Design Theory - page 49

In turn-based games, the most obvious and apparent problem with
having too many choices is something called analysis paralysis . This
condition manifests itself clearly in multiplayer board games, as other
players can wait a long time for the current player to take his or her turn.
In other games, it's a lot less clear when there are too many options.
The damage done by having too many options is usually that each op-
tion starts to lose uniqueness, and the game starts to blur into a some-
what arbitrary guessing match of tiny decisions that have little meaning.
Much of the weight of decision making is lost under these conditions,
even though it's less apparent.
This relates to our earlier discussion about the essence of design: el-
egance. Elegance is doing a lot with a little, and giving players dozens of
options for each thing they can do usually entails a lot of inherent com-
plexity. Having 20 guns, or cards, or moves that a player can do is prob-
ably a bad thing. For instance, in Street Fighter each character has dozens
and dozens of moves, all of which can be performed at any moment dur-
ing play. Extreme Street Fighter fans will tell you that every single one of
those moves matters—and at the highest levels of competitive play that's
probably true, as any small advantage can mean the difference between
winning and losing—but the reality is that many of the moves serve the
same purpose to varying degrees. The result is that many of them never
get used, because they do the same thing less well than some other move.
This speaks to the real problem with having too many options in a
game: in any given game, there are only a small number of meaning-
ful things you can do. In Street Fighter , for example, your real choices
might be attacking high, attacking low, blocking, throwing, jumping, and
shooting a projectile. But attacking high alone includes ten or so differ-
ent options for performing it. The reality is that at least a few of those
options will be simply not as good as some of the others in performing
the real choice of attacking high .
Good game designers understand what the real choices in their
games are, and usually limit the number of in-game choices to be similar
to the number of real choices in the gameplay. They know that when a
game has too many choices, many of them will be false choices.
Efficiency
Do not, under any circumstances, waste any of your players' time. Play-
ers' time should be absolutely paramount, and you need to be doing
everything in your power to deliver as many interesting, cool decisions
to them as you can per second of play. Keep in mind that they're prob-
ably quite busy, and have taken not only some time out of their days but