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.

Raph is, at once, incredibly accomplished, thoughtful about design, and humble about it. I once caught him coming off an international flight, and he was excitedly showing off a game he'd coded on the plane. He genuinely loves working on the stuff and thinking about it.

His writing is often SO full of ideas that I can't absorb an entire piece in one sitting. It's like a 12 course tasting menu. The neat thing with his writing is that, despite what he says here about all 12 pieces being important together, you can often just pick an isolated bit and chew on it for a while, and still learn something.

(Presumably return to the other 11 courses later; they'll still be fresh.)

My question: is there a concise theory of game design that properly explains why cutscenes are fucking stupid?

There are a lot of AAA games out there that very clearly seem like the developers wish they were directing a movie instead. Sure, there’s loads of cutscenes to show off some cool visuals. But then they seem to think “ok well we need to actually let the player play now”, but it’s still basically a cutscene, but with extra steps: cyberpunk 2077 had this part where you press a button repeatedly to make your character crawl along the floor and the take their pills. It’s just a cutscene, but where you essentially advance frames by pressing the X button.

Then there’s quick time events, which are essentially “we have a cutscene we want you to watch, but you can die if you don’t press a random button at a random time”, and they call it a game.

If it’s not that, it’s breaks in play where they take control away from you to show you some cool thing, utterly taking you out of the experience for something that is purely visual. I usually shout “can I play now? Is it my turn?” at the screen when this happens.

But I digress… I essentially hate games nowadays because this or similar experience seems to dominate the very definition of AAA games at this point. None of them respect your time, and they seem to think “this is just like a movie” is a form of praise, when it’s exactly the opposite of why I play games.