Jay Bloodworth: Complexity in Games

[Editor’s note: I asked Jay about reprinting this article prior to the winner of the 2009 Spiel des Jahres being announced. As we all know by now, Dominion took home the prize.]

A popular comment since the 2009 Spiel des Jahres nominees were announced in late May has been that Dominion is “too complex” to win. That may well be so, but a degree in computer science and ten years of teaching math have taught me that complexity is a tricky thing. If one mind can easily follow a procedure or solve a problem while another can’t, the question I always want to answer is how the computations carried out by the two minds differ.

Disappointingly, neither my classroom experiences nor the reading I’ve done on cognitive science have offered much in the way of definitive answers when it comes to adolescent minds doing algebra. Nonetheless, while I probably only have just enough knowledge to be dangerous, I’d like to offer a few thoughts about what it means for a game to be “complex”. I’m going to mostly restrict my examples to Finca, Pandemic, and Dominion; I have not played Fauna, and while Fits certainly gives some people fits, I don’t think the cognitive challenges it presents are akin to the ones I want to talk about.

Working Memory

A reasonably well known meme from neuroscience is that the human mind can hold about seven “chunks” of information at once, plus or minus about three, depending on the individual. Games that push up against this limit are likely to be perceived as complex. I think this is where Dominion takes the biggest hit. Every turn you need one chunk each for the number of actions, buys, and dollars you have at your disposal. Certain action cards give you other things to keep track of, and skillful play probably demands several additional chunks: what you intend to buy this turn, where you are in your long term strategy, maybe a note or two about what your opponents are up to.

Some may protest that it’s easy to organize your thoughts so it doesn’t feel like so much to remember. Easy for you, maybe, but saying it’s easy for everyone is begging the question of how minds differ. Maybe the ten chunk memory is just a four chunk memory with a good compression ratio.

With that in mind, consider humble Finca, a game I haven’t heard anyone describe as too complex for the SdJ. But for a mind with a bad “chunker”, it might be. In a four-player game, you have three meeples to move on the windmill. Assuming all are on different blades, you have to keep track of several things for each: how far it can move, how many fruit of which type it can obtain, and whether or not it can claim a donkey. I don’t claim that people generally treat each of these as a single chunk or if they do that they must store all twelve at once, but do wonder if this sort of accounting explains the “information overload” some intelligent people experience when they play our games.

Intuitiveness

Intuition probably seems like a strange concept for a supposed scientific discussion of cognition in gaming, but the fact is that the mind likes patterns and is a familiarity junkie. It’s good at noting deviations from expectations, too – that’s one of the ways we learn – but the experience of those deviations is at least mildly uncomfortable. So players familiar with other card games may find discarding your hand every turn in Dominion, or replacing the discards on top of the deck in Pandemic unpleasant and hard to remember until repetition ingrains the new pattern.

The Impact of Theme

Responding to an earlier draft of this piece, Wei-Hwa Huang suggested that effective integration of theme and mechanics can mitigate the perceived complexity of a game. His example is the infection cards in Pandemic; he says that when he points out how this models the tendency of a real infection to intensify in a city where it already has a foothold, the rule is no longer a problem. At first I didn’t entirely agree with this example – while the infection deck mechanism in Pandemic is clever, it has never struck me as particularly mnemonic – but as I have reflected further on my experience learning the game, there was a moment where realizing the thematic rational behind the rule relieved a quantum of stress; it no longer felt like “another damn rule” to remember.

In a May 2009 interview on Eric Burgess’s Boardgame Babylon podcast, designer Dan Verssen said that he develops his games to the point where they are “obvious.” His goal is that a player’s reaction to the rules should be, “Yes, of course. How else would you do that?” Now, I can think of many games that don’t produce this reaction, including many I consider great, so I don’t agree with Dan that “obviousness” should be a mandatory goal in game design. That said, I do think it is a real quality, and that games that possess it are more approachable because their actual or perceived complexity is lowered by the well integrated theme.

Moral Considerations

Compared to my earlier points, this is mere speculation. However, we certainly have a social/moral component to our minds that is brought to bear against some problems but not others. Responding to the impulses of this module, some people choose not to play “take that” games or games with themes of death and destruction. But among those who choose to play such games, I wonder if the social brain doesn’t still subconsciously intrude on and complicate efforts to play dispassionately. Does the life-or-death, real world theme of Pandemic impact the way people play? How much does playing an Attack card in Dominion feel like an attack, even when everyone acknowledges it’s the rational play?

So, what do you think? How do the brains you know best approach games, and which aspects of these games influence the brains’ perception of their complexity?

Bibliography

A number of books have influenced my thinking about thinking, but these are two I referred to while writing this piece:

• Lehrer, Jonah. How We Decide. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009.

• Pinker, Steven. The Stuff of Thought. New York: Viking, 2007.

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