All games should strive to be elegant.
All games should strive to be elegant.
ALL GAMES SHOULD STRIVE TO BE ELEGANT.
OK, so then what’s elegant, and why should games strive to be it?
It’s a little complicated…
Gamers and experts alike use the word elegant quite a bit, but few agree on what the term actually means. Just like if you were to see a painting, or some furniture, or a car, it’d probabltybe easy to say that it’s elegant, but probably hard to explain why.
This is how I define elegance, and I’m sure this’ll change:
“Elegance is the use of low-level rules to create emergant properties in the gamespace that lead to interesting decisions.”
OK, there’s a lot of loaded terminology in there too. A “low-level rule” tends to just be a simple rule. One that’s not fiddly. It’s like the movement of pieces in Chess- generally pretty simple. Another example is the booster draft in Magic: The Gathering- take one card, pass the rest on. Simple stuff. Low-level rules tend to be the “foundation” of a game, whereas “high-level” tends to govern specific behavoirs.
Simple rules do not automatically turn into an elegant game. Tic-tac-toe is certainly simple, but the rules in it do not create interesting decisions, nor do they have emergant properties. (There are only a few correct moves in TTT, and then you just react to what the other person does.) Emergant properties are those things that aren’t necessarily expected- and not explicitly stated by a rule- that come out naturally by using the simple rules.
Chess is filled with emergant properties on the way pieces move. Bishop can take Rook on a diagonal, but Rook cannot take Bishop. Rook can take Bishop on a straight line, but not vice versa. Same with the Knight. Thus emergant properties: there’s no explicit rule that says “when on a straight line from each other, a Rook can take a Bishop, but not vice versa.” It just happens… and give each player two of each of those and some other pieces, voila, interesting decisions.
Same with Magic booster draft. You know, at the very basics, that you should be looking for cards to put into your deck that are good and work well together. But the emergant properties cover that, AND when you throw in the fact that those packs come back around to you and you can see what other people have taken as a result, it becomes a bit more interesting. A PROPERTY that EMERGES is that you often will want to grab cards that other people want, and you will want to take cards specifically to go up against the decks other people are playing. This would not be good if there were more rules governing the draft, what colors you were allowed to take, etc etc. Instead of forcing people to play a “metagame”, the format naturally encourages it, and adds a lot of depth to what could be a really boring game setup.
Another example is my Shark Game. You can play any card in your hand- there’s no rule telling you which card to play, or telling you to not play certain cards in your hand. But to do well, you look at what cards your opponents will play, because that will interact with your decision. (Yes, of course I’m going to call my own game elegant!)
Finally, there’s No Limit Texas Hold ‘Em. While there’s certainly some fiddliness in play and some annoying rules (the hand ranking is unintuitive and arguably inelegant), the game is not just a matter of pushing in your money when you have a good hand and folding when you have a bad hand. (Unless you play like Bartoneus… just kidding) The game is about making bets, disguising what you have, and figuring out what your opponent’s have, and what you think they think you have. None of that stuff is in the rulebook… it just emerges from the ruleset naturally.
How do you use this in your own designs? That’s a harder question, that I’ll leave for another time…
I’m not a game designer so my opinion on this subject means very little to nothing, however I do not think a prerequesite of elegance is having simple rules. I think you can have complex rules that lead to interesting decisions that create elegance as well… but I bet these games are harder to design and even harder to learn. Still, I do not really see difficulty as a mark of anti-elegance.
I’d argue that all truly elegant games have a core of simple rules, but may have additional complexities stacked on top.
Can you give any examples of games that you think have complex rules as a core, but are elegant?
Complex rules as a core, but are elegant-
RPG video games. I never really figured out how numbers were crunched in Final Fantasy Games, but crunched they were, and in a way that had obvious correlation, and led to excellent and intuitive game play.
Hrm, that’s sort of a different area there. Video games are a completely different matter, when the computer does all the complicated stuff for you. If you had to perform all those calculations yourself, I’m sure it would be anything but elegant.
The Fight/Special/Item/Run system of FF combats tends to be pretty elegant though.
Not specifically, at least, I do not think I can offer up a game like that where everyone would easily agree that it was elegant.
However, I will mention this. I think some tabletop RPG games are elegant, and virtually none of them have simple rules in my opinion.
Excellent article! My initial reaction to DrScotto’s first comment is that if a game does not have simple rules at its core, it cannot be elegant. But then the topic of table-top RPG’s comes up, where I cannot think of a way to dumb the rules down simplistically without ruining some of the fun/experience. Certainly the rules can/are ignored quite often, in the effort of making it more fun, but having them there is a comfort that I enjoy.
I postulate that the game Go has relatively complicated rules at its heart, and yet comes across as a very elegant game in the end. Something about the additive process of placing pieces rather then Chess’ subtractive process of pieces being captured. A game of Go ends when the board is at its fullest and there are no more moves to be made for either player’s benefit, and I like this. I know DrScotto likes Go too.
Many tabletop RPGs have a very elegant core: for example, the d20’s system’s basic mechanic is “Roll a d20, add some numbers, and compare to a number.” But the d20 system as a whole is definitely not elegant… which should be evident the first time you try to grapple or trip somebody! (If there were a Grapple or Trip skill, and it operated like the rest of the rules, that would be a different matter.)
Go is the very definition of elegant… but I don’t know that I would describe it as having “relatively complicated rules.” In fact, I’d describe Go as having extremely simple rules, or at least very simple play. BGG even says in its description: “By all appearances, it’s just two players taking turns laying stones on a 19×19 (or smaller) grid of intersections. But once its basic rules are understood, Go shows itself to be (from a novice’s point of view) one of the most elegant brain-burning abstract games in history”
See what I mean about people using it, but not being able to agree on what it means?
I would say an integral part of a game being elegant is that the pieces, typically simple and fundamental, fit together in a way that works and build upon one another. The fitting together is the key, the elegance comes from the integration of several things to form a cohesive whole which is better then the sum of all the individual parts.
I agree with The Game’s comments regarding the d20 system’s ‘elegance’. Don’t get me wrong, I love D&D and I think its a great game. But really, there are way too many ‘fiddly’, or ‘exception’, rules that are essential to the playing of the game. This is especially apparent with spells – even extremely common ones – as often a spell will bend the rules to the advantage of the caster.
Take Magic Missile, for instance. It’s a spell that almost every wizard has. And yet it breaks a bunch of key rules: no saving throw, no ranged touch roll to hit, does damage to incorporal creatures, etc. The fact that every wizard takes it, and therefore that every DM knows what it does and what rules it breaks, does not make it elegant!
And that’s just one example. Trying to comprehend the flying rules (what with the different maneuverability classes, speeds, and allowable turning radii) is likely to make you crazy!
Nevertheless, just because D&D (or d20 in general) is not elegant does not mean that it isn’t fun. Moreover, I think it’s worth pointing out that D&D has become significantly more elegant in 3.5 than in previous editions. The move from 2.0 to 3.0 made significant changes to the game and really established the core of the ‘d20 system’ as we know it today (described in a nutshell by The Game above). The move from 3.0 to 3.5, on the other hand, eliminated many of the less than elegant rules from the game.
A good example of this latter move was updating the swim skill. In 3.0, the swim skill had a -1 penalty to the roll for every 5 pounds of equipment your character was carrying – the only such rule in the entire game! This rule was annoying because players would often only calculate the weight of their characters’ possessions at the beginning of the game or if they knew they might be affected by the encumberence rules (which few characters were). Instead, in 3.5 you merely double the skill check penalty for armor and shields when swimming. This newer rule has much the same effect as the older one (i.e. impossible to swim in Plate Mail) but without the added headache of having to total up all of your character’s possessions down to the nearest 5 pounds.
Great examples, Sultan. At least once when playing 3.0 after being shipwrecked by a water elemental we discovered that under the rules it’s impossible to be a lifeguard! You’re totally right about the flying rules too; I consider myself pretty strong in d20 knowledge, and I have trouble with them, and they grind gameplay to a halt when you try to do anything cool.
I’m willing to give more leeway to the spells, since those are known to be exceptions to the rules. There are a number of alternative magic systems out there that try to fix it, but the version we’ve got is pretty entrenched.