A Musing on Complexity

Originally Published August 25th 2022

Complexity in games is in my opinion sort of a meaningless thing to say. Obviously one can ascertain what general thing you are getting at but unfortunately for us saying a game is complex leaves out a lot of the complexities.

I put forth a probably not new framework of understanding games called the Dual Complexities, they are as follows.

Repeated complexities are things in a game that you are expected to do multiple times and often times but not always you are expected to do so in the middle of play. This would be something like shooting a gun and seeing how much damage it deals in a game such as shadowrun 5e or attempting to grapple someone in 3e D&D.

This type of complexity often comes about in procedures of play, or in situations where there are many different factors to take into account.

Momentary complexities are individual moments that happen ocasionally and infrequently, oftentimes but not always they happen outside of the flow of play. Examples of this would be choosing feats upon leveling up in a pathfinder game or buying starting equipment from your starting gold in B/X D&D.

This time of complexity often comes about from a wide variety of choices to make all at once that will influence the future.

So what?

Eh not sure honestly, it's just the way I see games and, I could make a point about how when making something more inspired by trad games an ideal philosophy of writing is to have a fair amount of momentary complexity while trying to minimize repeated complexity but I don't actually care about that kind of stuff. It is just irksome to me to see a lot of things fall under the label of complexity that aren't exactly the same.