Titanomachina: Engagement & Complexity, delivering value for cost

A fascinating tweet by game designer Eric Lang, to whit that most games are too complicated, clicked my thinking cogs and I wanted to address a pet theory of mine in game design that I've applied to Titanomachina. Here's the theory: 

Game players will tolerate any amount of complexity if it delivers sufficient engagement. Talking about the cost of complexity is worthless without examining the value of engagement.

What does this mean? Well, it means you can make the most ludicrous Rube Goldberg-machine in the history of games, full of edge cases, complications, and a vast amount of rules, and people will happily engage with it as a game and especially as a product if they feel that they're getting more value out of doing so than the effort (time, money, attention) costs them. 

Over a decade ago I made a crack at a career in finance. Likewise the value of my income from finance did not offset the feelings I had about it, and hence I changed careers. I certainly miss the money, but I don't miss the 'work.' I also took away a lesson on why people might give me money in exchange for financial services instead of anyone else providing them. Part of that lesson was that they perceived the value of doing so outweighed the plainly usurious cost. This notion of 'cost vs value' is very insightful for why people do things, even with commodities, whereby they buy things that cost more (more money, more time, more effort, etc). Because, and drum-roll please, they think it's worth the extra cost; the extra cost in complexity in a game is worth the value that game delivers. 

Warhammer is, I think, a fantastic example of this as while I no longer feel it's worth the effort, plenty of other people are busy throwing thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours at it. In part this is because Warhammer delivers far more than just a game, it delivers a set of hobbies all neatly tied up by their relation to one of the fictional worlds on offer. You don't have to like playing Warhammer to enjoy it if you like reading game books, reading comics, reading novels, buying models, assembling models, painting models, collecting bric-a-brac, playing video games, or chatting online about it. But people do indeed enjoy playing Warhammer, in vast numbers. 

Warhammer is not like a conventional board game where you buy a box, play with the contents according to the rules included, and then chuck it in your Kallax shelves so you have space on your table for another box. Certainly there's overlap, and there's plenty of people looking to make their games have a better table presence, but Warhammer delivers more. It delivers more models, more rules, more paints, more products, and so on in a game of toy soldiers that I find tedious in its most basic form. There's a huge number of people, customers even, that find the value it delivers worth so much. 

It's fascinating to me, that Warhammer isn't too complicated for commercial success, even if it is too complicated for me now, and it's too complicated for me because that complication does not deliver enough value, and not too complicated for so many other people because it does deliver that value for them. It shows, I think, just how far you can take these things. Is it accessible to everyone? No, but it isn't inaccessible to everyone either. 

Is complexity in games a good thing then? If it helps to deliver the engagement that makes players think it's worth playing, then yes, of course it is. Simplicity in games is still very handy though; if you're making a not-particularly-engaging game then you need to make sure that the cost of playing the game fits under the value of doing so. Designing and testing simpler games isn't necessarily easier, but fewer variables and hence lower cost means that less interested people will still be willing to give it a swing. If you can squeeze the cost until it's under that minimal value, then you're going to profit. 

And I think people desperately under-estimate the importance of low cost as a way to get a foot in the door, both to get busy, uninterested producers' eyes on the game, and to get busy, uninterested (sorry, 'casually interested') consumers buying it. Warhammer gets away with complexity because it is less a game than a product ecosystem, but it also gets away with it as a game because that complexity is engaging to sufficient numbers of people, and the value to them outweighs the cost. I don't know if most games are too complicated, because 'most' is extremely vague, but I can certainly agree with Mr. Lang that some games are too complex for the value they deliver. 

I'm giving Titanomachina away for free out of necessity because I can't afford the easy ways to 'sell' people on its value; I occasionally suspect that people might be more convinced if I charged money, but it's really more of a marketing issue (to whit, the budget for marketing ran out). I suspect what would be required would be more conventional art and robot designs, but thankfully I get to make the Titanomachina that appeals to me and not what gets bought, played once, and put away in favour of the next new shiny game. I hope that some people find Titanomachina to be an engaging hobby game in a board game sized serving.