Nothing asserted here is simple. And after reading all that it's still hard to design and build a game that will cut through the noise of all the other games coming out on Steam.

It's not a matter of "simple vs. easy". If you have to write many words to list your ideas and you state each idea is deep and connected to all the other ideas, the thing you are talking about is not simple.

This feels like a classic example of the concept that simple ≠ easy

  Simple != easy
  Simple != obvious
  Simple != intuitive
  Simple != easy to understand

  Elegant == Simple
  Simple  != elegant

For reference Raph Koster wrote "the book" on game design, and was the lead designer for Ultima Online (among other things) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raph_Koster

The title is ironic. Game design is very simple indeed.

This is an amazing article. I work on game design and I think this could work as a map of the terrain.

the complexity of a given domain is not necessarily an indication of it's difficulty. I suspect that a guy of Koster's experience and reputation knows that and is making a spicy title for the clicks.

For the people taking the title literally without apparently reading the article:

> Put another way — every single paragraph in this essay could be a book.

This reads like the handbook for people making grind-based games. Sure enough, the author exclusively works in the mmorpg space.

If you are a game designer, please take this with a grain of salt.

Fun does not equal repeated challenges. And let me also reject the implicit notion that stories are entertainment but not, academically speaking, fun.

When I started writing fiction I found myself naturally gravitating towards inserting puzzles and mysteries and twists and unknowns. I think some people just love that. There's this dopamine aspect of solving the problem or knowing the unknown and the anticipation towards it can be very intriguing! Games do this in a more obvious way, but the 'rule of fun' is everywhere.

Look how exciting mystery is and how boring well known things are, but ironically there's a lot more to, say, the theory of gravity that if contextualized differently would be exciting and deeply interesting that 'unknowns' like the mystery of some cult or whatever can't even come close to, but in the end, there's something inside of us that wants to read about that cult. I make sure to self-aware of this and do deep dives into the boring 'known' world and push back on the sensationalism and such I'm so drawn to.