I find myself thinking, a lot, about video games and simplicity. I am curious about how games make the undesirable desirable. Some games make us want to grind, whereas other games do not. I think there are many variables in games that entice us to do things we would normally run away from in real life. However, I think the best games reward us through simplicity by offering us growth.
Human beings love things that are complex. Just watch any small group of people attempt to create rules for a game and you will see just how overly complex they can make it. However, the best games, the timeless games, embrace simplicity.
Consider games such as Go, Chess, or even Checkers. These games have few rules, are steeped in strategy, often involve philosophical elements within their strategies, and are just simple to play. The best video games follow this design approach and succeed by being simple (even though the code behind the game is extremely complex).
When World of Warcraft first exploded onto computers in 2004 I spent hours wandering the lands of Azeroth. I remember several conversations with others about how much fun the game was. Everyone seemed to agree that World of Warcraft, aka Vanilla WoW, just focused on having fun. People saw the game as simple. At the time, it was very simple compared to other games in the genre.
Interestingly enough, Vanilla WoW was not that simple. Well. It was simple in 2004, but in retrospect it was a very complex game. If you played Vanilla WoW you probably have hundreds of great memories about the game. WoW in 2004 is way more complex than WoW in 2017. Do you remember all of the reagents you had to carry? Warlocks had to manage soul shards. Hunters had to carry ammunition along with food for their pets. Mages had to carry stones for teleporation and portals not to mention light feathers for Feather Fall. Priests had to carry candles. All of our bags were stuffed with...well...stuff that made inventory management a nightmare. Today, those reagents are gone. The game has been simplified (in more ways than just inventory management). So why do many veteran WoW players hate what WoW has become?
In Blizzard's quest to make WoW simple, they took away the intrinsic reward that came with playing the game: growth. When was the last time a group sheeped or sapped mobs in a dungeon before a pull? When was the last time you had to manage your cooldowns and plan your rotation? When was the last time you had to be concerned about mana generation during a long fight? When WoW was more complex, players had to become experts at playing the game. You had to manage resources and you had to be highly adaptive. Achieving certain milestones in the game meant something to players. Some of the best memories stemmed from pulling too many mobs and the team working together against overwhelming threats to manage the encounter. So much fun was had in those "Oh shit!" moments that came out of nowhere. Those experiences are gone. The player growth that the game once offered has been replaced with so much simple that there is no personal/player growth to be gained. The quest for simplicity removed the tactics and challenge that made the original game so memorable.
If there's one thing that all video gamers love, it's hard fun. Players enjoy a challenge, but not so much challenge that things become frustrating. Even when you fail, you want to feel like you learned something for your next attempt. Vanilla WoW rewarded us with extrinsic as well as intrinsic loot. In many respects, WoW is now so simple, that much of the hard is gone. WoW no longer gives us intrinsic rewards, it only focuses on extrinsic rewards (equipment, levels, and gold are aplenty). When things are challenging enough to allow for growth, but simple enough to execute, then gamers will slip into Flow. Finding that Flow is what boosted WoW's initial sales and made the game the king of all MMOs we came to love.
I'm glad I don't have to manage reagents, but give me reasons to sheep again.