Everybody has their own tolerance levels for how complex they want a game engine to be. In fact, many of us have a different preference depending on the game. The current trend, and I assume the trajectory games are on in general, is that there's beauty in simplicity. Things are more fun when they require less concentration than things in real life. Don't make a player roll dice twice when just one dice roll will do. Don't make a player track encumbrance because that's too much paperwork. Design rules so a newcomer can start playing the game within 15 minutes of reading the rulebook. As an educator, I agree with this design choice. As a gamer, though, I'm not always on the side of simplicity, and here are three reasons why.
First though, I think many of us have different tolerance levels for complexity depending on the subject. You might rage quit a game that forces you to refer to three different tables and two different dice rolls to calculate whether or not you managed to pierce the heavy plate armour of the Green Knight, but happily spend hours playing an economy simulator that has you tracking the current price of red gemstones based on your negotiations with the dwarven labour union. Even more confusingly, you might rage quit the game about combat with the Green Knight, but then embrace a complex game about space battles just because for you it's more fun to endure the tedium of flying an imaginary spaceship than it is to endure the tedium of hitting a guy in a tin can with a sharp stick. It's confusing, but it's how we humans are. Gaming is a hobby, so nobody has any obligation to be consistent or logical in what they find entertaining. Sometimes I enjoy an "over-complex" game, other times I don't. This blog post is in defence of the, arguably over-complex, games I enjoy.
Somethings in life are complex. Disarming a timebomb, for example, is something that most of us will hopefully never have to do in real life but it's a nice dramatic trope. In a game about disarming timebombs, you'd probably want the action of disarming the bomb to have a specific feeling. It ought to feel stressful, even though players know that failing to disarm the imaginary bomb actually has no real consequence. It ought to feel like a highly specialised activity so that players feel they're the experts in the game world. It ought to feel delicate, like one wrong move could trigger disaster.
In a simple game, you could have players roll a dice and maybe add their Explosives skill. Roll 10 or better on a d20 (or a 4+ on a d6, or whatever) and you've disarmed the bomb. Great, game over.
But in a complex game, maybe there's some randomly-generated clues within the timebomb itself. As the player, you must interpret the clues to determine the quickest avenue to deactivation. The clue you follow determines the sequence of dice rolls required, and you only has a limited pool of Explosive skill points to use to increase or decrease earch roll. For some parts of the timebomb, the game even teaches you some basic electronics so you can calculate resistance along some of the circuits, and read an in-game voltmeter so you can find out which wire feeds the trigger signal between the clock and the explosive. If you mess up, you can start back at the beginning but then the timebomb's timer advances one step closer to detonation!
Both games are imaginary, but one is obviously more complex than the other. Tabletop games being what they are, it's entirely possible for you, as long as you have imagination, to walk away from the simple version feeling like you've actually disarmed a timebomb. However, your memories of that game experience isn't likely to be procedural. You're likely to remember the stress associated with the problem, and you might have a mental image of the imagined scenario, but you won't remember the work you actually did because you just rolled a dice once. The complex version of the scenario gives you memories of the work you did to achieve your goal. It's still mostly imaginary, because you weren't really disarming a bomb, but your brain was authentically engaged. You had to make choices, you had to balance the good and bad luck you experienced when rolling dice, you had to think about circuit design and voltage and how a bomb might be designed to explode when a clock hits a specific point on the clock (probably because that's when the signal stopping it from exploding is disconnected, unless it's being controlled by a microcontroller in which case maybe a pulse is sent after some amount of time), and so on. Lots of thoughts had to go through your head to win that game, and all that brain activity implants a healthy set of memories and emotions.
Jono Bacon on LUG Radio had a great story about a story [sic] of a woman who was making afternoon tea. Her partner was grumbling about how much of a bother it was to make tea every day, and how an automated tea pot would alleviate so much pain. To that, the woman said, "But I like the pain of making tea."
Like preparing for afternoon tea, a complex game with lots of things to track and lots of moves to be made, and charts and graphs to consult can be labourious. But another way to look at that labour is as a ritual. Just because something takes time and effort to accomplish, and just because some of the things you do don't necessarily have a good reason for being done, it doesn't mean it's painful. On the contrary, it can be comforting.
When you play a complex game that you enjoy, you take joy in exercising muscle memory, in seeing familiar cards or player tokens or character sheets, in adding to your version of the game's lore, or whatever. I think many people might consider Pathfinder Adventure Card Game complex, but the rules are engrained in my memory now and I play it frequently (despite only having the original boxed set with no valid expansions) and find it better the more I play it. It's comforting to experience and re-experience, I discover more and more nuance the more I repeat its processes. I can imagine a simpler version of the game, with fewer stats to refer to, and fewer dice rolls, maybe an easier way to track new abilities, and so on, and that might even be a good game, but it wouldn't be the same game.
Complexity is a matter of perspective, which is not to say that a complex game isn't actually complex, but that sometimes I think people misunderstand why a complex game is complex. You might think a complex game is just poorly designed, that the game designer just didn't get the memo that we're in the 21st century now and that game rules ought to be minimal. To be fair, that's sometimes true, but usually a complex game I enjoy is complex because it's viewing the game from a specific perspective.
Suppose the win condition of a game is to get your player token from point A to point Z. In a simple game, you could, for instance, roll a d6. On a 1-3, you don't move. On a 4-6, you do. You probably achieve your goal after one or two tries.
In a complex game, the same rules apply but upon failure you move from point A to point B, and then to point C, and then D, and so on until you finally reach point Z. On a successful roll, maybe you get to skip some points, or you get to re-roll, or maybe you roll several dice but certain numbers "explode" so you can keep rolling. The fun of the simple game is in the moment of surprise when you roll favourably. The fun of the complex game, though, is in the incremental progress and what form it takes. For somebody who enjoys a complex game, maybe the most fascinating part of the game is the final form the path to success takes, the pattern of good rolls and bad rolls. Getting a good first roll in the simple game is exciting, but in the complex game what's really exciting is that yesterday it was good-good-bad-good-good-bad and today it was bad-bad-good-good.
In the Middle-earth Strategy Battle Game, each attack requires a dice roll to determine whether you've hit, a chart to determine the defence of your target against your weapon once you have hit, and then another dice roll to determine whether your hit has caused damage according to the chart. That's two rolls and one chart for a single attack. It's like returning to the days of THAC0, and there are obviously lots of other games out there that handle combat differently. Mansions of Madness both determine a successful hit with one roll. Fallout determines not just the hits you deal but also the hits you take in just one roll.
So it might feel like this is over-complex, until you look at it the other way round. If your goal is to remove an orc from the battlefield in your game, that's pretty easy. Require a dice roll, and upon success remove the orc. Done.
But if your goal is to simulate the process of removing an orc from the battlefield, then doing it with a single dice roll is missing the point. You may as well just skip the dice roll altogether and remove the player tokens whenever you want. Better yet, don't even bother putting the player tokens on the battlefield in the first place. Better yet, don't even bother playing the game and just find another hobby. (Knitting is legitimately supposed to be pretty engaging, and it has a lot of computation embedded within it, both historically and practically.) I'm being hyperbolic, but not by much. The game is the dice roll, the chart consultation, the dice roll. Then it's the realisation that you're not going to be able to take this orc out by yourself, at least not with that short sword. You need to get away so a player token with better weapons and more attacks can move in. Leave it up to a single dice roll, and all you know by the end is that the dice didn't do what you wanted them to do, which is fine but also not the same experience. In some games, complexity isn't a hurdle to overcome in order to play the game, it's the game.
I think there's value in designing simple games. There's value in designing quick start rules that enable players to play a simplified version of a game with just enough complexity to give them an idea of whether they would like to learn more. There's value in designing a game that starts out simple and then adds complexity through in-game items. And there's also value to just admitting that sometimes you just want a complex, crunchy game that takes an hour to get through one round. It's not for everyone, it's not for every occasion. But then again, what game is?