Simplicity Itself

Once upon a time there was a fine game called Space Invaders, a game of extraordinary simplicity in both design and technology, and it soaked up quarters in the dingy corners of bars and convenience stores where men and boys of all walks fired missiles at aliens that fell like snowflakes caught in a crosswind. And it was good.

There may be some kind of backstory to Space Invaders locked in someone's head; something to explain floating destructible shields and the bizarre landing method employed by the alien armada, but what you need to know to play the game reaches into that primal place in our animal brain where we instinctively know to eat, sleep, reproduce and shoot missiles at aliens any chance you get. Simplicity in the first days of videogaming was not so much a choice as a necessity of limitation, with only a handful of bytes and the processing power of the modern remote control at developers' disposal. But, what resulted, the joy infused into these wooden cabinets with their phallic controls, built a generation.

My big problem with a lot of games today, particularly those of a far-eastern nature, is that I need a flow chart and a genealogy program to understand why I'm slicing swords at bad guys. I recognize that good story-telling can enhance a gameplay experience, but I'm sorry to break the news that there are surprisingly few good storytellers making video games, much as I'm sure that there are very few good game developers currently writing novels. And, sad though it may be to say, nothing ejects me from a game like a fighter pilot in a flat-spin, quite as swiftly as a crappy and convoluted story.

Perhaps it's why I have such an affinity for first person shooters, and increasingly less tolerance for role playing games. After all, even when shooters have poor storytelling, most of the time I can just ignore it and shoot bad guys. This is especially effective if I can also pretend that the bad guys are somehow at fault for the storytelling, like I did in Max Payne. It is a simple mechanic with decades of refinement that, at the end of the day, tickles that same limbic spot where caveman me likes to hit things with sticks and throw rocks at breakables.

As we advance through generational iterations of increasing complexity, it seems that I long ever more for simple games with fundamentally fun mechanics. The trappings that surround gaming these days feel a lot like eating a cake that is drowned under a dozen layers of differently flavored icing. I look back somewhat fondly on days lost playing games like Pac-Man or Asteroids in the dark corner of the local Seven-Eleven with a pocketful of quarters weighing heavy in dirty jeans and hands sticky from filling up my third Slushee of the afternoon. Why there was a yellow orb with a mouth trapped in a maze with Technicolor ghosts was irrelevant. I needed no story. No complex controls to, say, shoot back at the ghosts or activate super speed or get temporary invulnerability. Even if the makers of the game had had limitless resources of technology from which to work, I would not have wanted the simplicity of the mechanics to be compromised in the least.

That's not to say that all video games should be achingly simple, and I've enjoyed enough games in my youth that required careful study of keyboard shortcuts to recognize the value of deep gameplay, but nothing opens up the pitfalls for sloppy design like adding features. The more unnecessary layers that developers add to a concept, even a very fun one, the more disillusioned I become with the experience. Again, like any art, the skill of cutting away the fat from of any endeavor is, in many ways, the most important step. The best work comes from artists who finish, look at the result, and then ask themselves, "What can I remove?"

This is an experience of pain about which most people probably know very little. It's rough enough for me when I spend hours working up a thousand words or more on a topic, and revisit it only to discover that I've only produced one useful paragraph and everything else belongs in the trash, so I can't imagine discovering that weeks or months of work need to go. But, the inconvenience of the discovery doesn't preclude its accuracy. How many directors have languished over the wonderful material that gets discarded on the editing floor? And, how many times have you watched deleted scenes on a special edition DVD and thought to yourself, "Man, I see why they left that crap out!" Reduction, simplification is itself an art, and in videogames of late a lost art at that.

Maybe it's why I find myself most enjoying the games that have reduced a single idea to finely honed digital representations of fun; why games like Portal, Rock Band, Peggle and Lumines have captured me so strongly over the past few years while games of elaborate design and extraordinary complexity float by unloved.

I interviewed an MMO developer recently for another publication, and he said something that I hope becomes the mantra for every developer. Essentially he said that the most important time in a game's development cycle is when you've got nothing but the fundamental mechanics and the empty space on which you'll put your game, and that's when the most polish is necessary. If you have a racing game, a car and a big flat space, if the basic design of driving the car around is not fun by itself then it doesn't matter how many tracks, how many achievements, how much backstory you add; if you haven't nailed the fun of driving that car then your game is doomed. It's impossible to go back and fix it later when there's a big team in place doing the world building and designing the gamespace, because game development takes on momentum of increasing mass and velocity and the only practical opportunity you have to fix the basics is at the start when you have a tennis ball rolling down a hill instead of a boulder crashing down a mountain.

Shooting polygonal asteroids was fun. Moving a yellow circle through a maze while being chased by ghosts was fun. Dodging from behind floating shields to shoot missiles at aliens: fun. And now, hitting a pretend drum set to the artificial pattern of a known song is fun. The best designs are the simplest; the best games the ones that get the fundamentals right and then discriminate on what features get slapped on top.

Comments

I'm with you on that. Dear Old Dad and I used to shoot hours together on the Atari 2600, but once the PS2 came out, all he could do was shake his head and say "too many buttons."

These days I'm inclined to believe that the best innovations in videogaming are happening in flash-based web games. The guy over at Orisinal.com is a wizard at creating simple games that reel you in and cause you to lose hours doing things like helping little girls scare ladybugs. Ditto, lostvectors.com has some spectactular games (jedi trainer for one, bowmaster prelude for another) which don't sully the simple-to-learn-hard-to-master mechanics with any extraneous storytelling. (A great non-flash-based example is Katamari Damacy)

These days I spend most of my video game time with flash games or games like Every Extend Extra, Bomberman, WTF, or the demo for Patapon. Simple games with no justification other than the fact that they're games.

I miss the arcade, with plots like "Blow things up to achieve high scores!" or "Beat up thugs to achieve high scores and, if your money holds out, rescue the endangered person/object/animal" or "Space. It seems like it goes on forever. But then you come to the end and the monkey starts throwing barrels."

I want my monkeys back.

This is exactly why I couldn't bring myself to finish The Witcher. At its most basic it's a fun game, but somewhere near the middle of chapter 2 the story got so convoluted that my character was often having conversations that just didn't make sense to me. For example, there was one particular character who, in my mind, was most certainly guilty of some non-spoilerific crime, and I was sure that he'd end up being the bad guy. When I went to go talk to him, however, my character proclaimed his innocence and befriended him. It was at that point that I realised that I had no idea what was going on with the story anymore.

I talked to some other people who had played the game and they told me that I'd done some stuff out of order, and that if I'd done it in the right order, it would make sense. I don't buy that as a valid excuse. If things need to happen in a specific order to make sense, the game better damn well not allow me to do things out of order. Doing otherwise is an example of complexity (allowing too many uncontrolled storyline branches) that kills my enjoyment of the game.

In the case of The Witcher, it's actually a combination of both poor writing and too-complex mechanics that allowed a really cool game to completely fall flat for me.

Why pick on "far eastern" games as being baroque and complicated? To my mind they might be complicated narratively but the gameplay is much more streamlined than the combination spreadsheet and inventory bin-packing puzzle that a lot of Western games turn into. Nothing makes me put a game down faster than inventory management.

I guess to each his own.

I just have one question for the author of this article, who seems like a complete jerk. Sir, if you were to sit down with Space Invaders right now would you have fun playing as much as you did back then? Would it be more than a quick trip down memory lane before you went back to Poker Smash? Speaking fondly of the old days of Pac-Man and Space Invaders is like pining for the old style of basketball when they used a peach basket for a hoop and poked the ball out with a broom after every point. The core is still there, but there's a great deal of nuance even in the games you go on to mention compared to the first of their kind.

Maybe it's why I find myself most enjoying the games that have reduced a single idea to finely honed digital representations of fun; why games like Portal, Rock Band, Peggle and Lumines have captured me so strongly over the past few years while games of elaborate design and extraordinary complexity float by unloved.

I submit, Too Tall McGee, that were you to put someone who hasn't played a game since Pac-Man in front of any of these titles, they would be just as confused as I was when I first fired up Sins of a Solar Empire. Complexity has been on such a subtle upward trend since the industry began, the truly "simple" games that have any longevity are rare. Peggle would be one of them.

I don't think anyone would disagree that the core of any game needs to be fundamentally sound if the player is going to have any fun by the time you're thinking about achievements and cutscenes. That being said, we've seen too many competent FPS, RPG and RTS clones that do absolutely nothing wrong at the core of their gameplay completely lose out because the rest of the layers (the icing, in your cake example) taste like sh*t.

It's the reason Rock Band and Guitar Hero are no fun with just a regular controller. Fundamentally, it's just hitting buttons with timing and accuracy. In practice, it's the presentation, the instrument controllers and the music that capture millions of players. There's magic happening in these "simple" games that transcend their forebears. It's found well beyond pressing one button and jamming a phallic controller up, down, left or right.

Certis wrote:

I just have one question for the author of this article, who seems like a complete jerk. Sir, if you were to sit down with Space Invaders right now would you have fun playing as much as you did back then? Would it be more than a quick trip down memory lane before you went back to Poker Smash? Speaking fondly of the old days of Pac-Man and Space Invaders is like pining for the old style of basketball when they used a peach basket for a hoop and poked the ball out with a broom after every point. The core is still there, but there's a great deal of nuance even in the games you go on to mention compared to the first of their kind.

Maybe it's why I find myself most enjoying the games that have reduced a single idea to finely honed digital representations of fun; why games like Portal, Rock Band, Peggle and Lumines have captured me so strongly over the past few years while games of elaborate design and extraordinary complexity float by unloved.

I submit, Too Tall McGee, that were you to put someone who hasn't played a game since Pac-Man in front of any of these titles, they would be just as confused as I was when I first fired up Sins of a Solar Empire. Complexity has been on such a subtle upward trend since the industry began, the truly "simple" games that have any longevity are rare. Peggle would be one of them.

I don't think anyone would disagree that the core of any game needs to be fundamentally sound if the player is going to have any fun by the time you're thinking about achievements and cutscenes. That being said, we've seen too many competent FPS, RPG and RTS clones that do absolutely nothing wrong at the core of their gameplay completely lose out because the rest of the layers (the icing, in your cake example) taste like sh*t.

It's the reason Rock Band and Guitar Hero are no fun with just a regular controller. Fundamentally, it's just hitting buttons with timing and accuracy. In practice, it's the presentation, the instrument controllers and the music that capture millions of players. There's magic happening in these "simple" games that transcend their forebears. It's found well beyond pressing one button and jamming a phallic controller up, down, left or right.

Why is mommy yelling at daddy?

@Certis:

From listening to the podcast, isn't there a writer's section to the site where you guys preview each others articles? So, does that mean that you waited for this article to go live before torpedoing it? Nice. I can appreciate that level of dickishness. And so it's clear, I'm not being sarcastic. Seriously, bravo.

I just have one question for the author of this article, who seems like a complete jerk.

We've been over this enough times. You're the jerk. I'm the nutjob. Seriously, pick a role and stick with it.

Sir, if you were to sit down with Space Invaders right now would you have fun playing as much as you did back then? Would it be more than a quick trip down memory lane before you went back to Poker Smash?

You mean Poker Smash with the incredible simple design of move blocks around until they match? And, I can imagine a very compelling take on Space Invaders that involves the exact same concepts. Granted, I am perhaps a snob for some visual candy with my simple gameplay, but it's not hard to picture something exactly like Space Invaders with some light modern whiz-bangery that is exactly what I'd like to play.

The core is still there, but there's a great deal of nuance even in the games you go on to mention compared to the first of their kind.

We don't disagree, and I'm all for advancement. But, the key to this argument is not that games should be exactly like Space Invaders, but that games should strive for simplicity of design. My point, bringing up the classics, is that the technology limitations of the time that forced simplicity were actually a very good barrier for creating compelling games at the time. That the idea that just because you can add every feature under the sun doesn't mean that you should.

That being said, we've seen too many competent FPS, RPG and RTS clones that do absolutely nothing wrong at the core of their gameplay completely lose out because the rest of the layers (the icing, in your cake example) taste like sh*t.

I think I made that point already. I thank you for your agreement. The problem is exactly that the more layers you add that don't improve your model are steps toward creating a crappy game. I'd far rather see a game that rehashes a lot of stereotypes for a genre but refines them and makes sure that what it does add is excellent rather than feature overload.

There's magic happening in these "simple" games that transcend their forebears.

In some cases this is perhaps true. But Rock Band or GH are also excellent because they preserve their simplicity. They make the layers they add work for their game, and they don't get lost in complexity. I'm not arguing at all against presentation, but unnecessary trappings and awkwardness. Imagine if you had had Guitar Hero, but instead it was all, say, folk music, it's the same idea as creating an RPG and telling a bad story. It doesn't matter how beautiful the graphics, how awesome the battle system, how cool the add-on controller if you get the fundamentals of your game wrong. Making playing the Rock Band controller feel right is no different than creating that racing game where the mechanics of driving are just fun. It's still the basics, you're just arguing the semantics of where those basics start.

From listening to the podcast, isn't there a writer's section to the site where you guys preview each others articles? So, does that mean that you waited for this article to go live before torpedoing it?

1) Actually, this article didn't have time to go up in the guild.
2) We avoid most debate over the article, and focus on the writing and the presentation. That way, we can still help articles that we don't disagree with.
3) He's wrong.

Yeah good read.

It's one reason I liked WiiSports so much.

It didn't improve bowling by giving you a massive character creation editor, 300 choices of custom bowling balls, bowling ball editor, 40 different bowling alleys, tournament modes, 40 actual wba challengers, additional legends bowlers, level-up system for your bowler so you can raise your bowler from birth to junior leagues to semi-pro to professional leve to legend status, design your own bowling alley editor, ability to throw left or right handed, use left stick to move your bowler up to the line, right stick controls spin, left/right bumpers give additional spin, d-pad does camera control, foul buzzer, lane imperfections, 6 different lane surfaces, 10 fantasy surfaces like bowling on the moon, instant replay mode with ability to fast forward/rewind/pause and send videos to your friends, in-game faces with camera, yada yada yada.

No it gave you a new way to control the ball. It added motion control. And threw in a few mini-games.

It improved on core of the game (the core control of the gameplay) and didn't try and improve by heaping on features to the old core.

The best thing about our arguments is that we say roughly the same thing in different ways and call it a disagreement. I don't want to send buzzvang spiraling back to therapy though, so I'll just say that Beardy McSemanticsPants is wrong and he's totally going to agree with me when we play Hellgate London tonight.

I recently set aside Resident Evil 4 to instead play a bit of God of War and Burnout: Takedown. So oh yeah, I completely get where you're coming from, Elysium. Convoluted back-and-forth travel, searching, bad controls, and questionable dialog versus straight push ahead and Smash Everything In Sight. The difference is like night and day.

Then again, I'm completely addicted to Dwarf Fortress. So who am I to talk?

Certis wrote:

The best thing about our arguments is that we say roughly the same thing in different ways and call it a disagreement. I don't want to send buzzvang spiraling back to therapy though, so I'll just say that Beardy McSemanticsPants is wrong and he's totally going to agree with me when we play Hellgate London tonight.

That just means we need a more 'extreme' member of the group. I suggest Jack Thompson for dissenting opinions.

Certis wrote:

I just have one question for the author of this article, who seems like a complete jerk. Sir, if you were to sit down with Space Invaders right now would you have fun playing as much as you did back then?

The Playstation version was great. The GBA version was awesome. Pre-rendered epic high poly sprites and particle effects, same old, albeit enhanced, gameplay, set to awesome techno music.

I passed the GBA version so many times...

As we advance through generational iterations of increasing complexity, it seems that I long ever more for simple games with fundamentally fun mechanics. The trappings that surround gaming these days feel a lot like eating a cake that is drowned under a dozen layers of differently flavored icing.

This part makes extra-sense to me (even if that sentence didn't). Most games right now just copy the basic recipe, the fundamental mechanics, and start throwing icying at it; sometimes it hits and sticks, sometimes they miss the cake altogether.

Game development and therefore, actual games, seem to have several layers of eye-candy, online community, downloadable content, achievement, global stat comparison, etc, etc, etc, yadda, yadda, yadda.

Now this could not be a problem --as past posts have argumented: with faster and more powerful technology, we demand more bang for our buck. The real trouble starts when the layers actually harm and diminish the over-all gaming experience (ie, the mechanics).

Mixing topics a bit, with the ever-increasing production costs of 'brand' vidgames, most studios won't dare to stray too far from the sucessful MMO, FPS, RTS formula. So it makes sense that most studio-based development budget are set on projected sales and return of investment spreadsheets. This in turn will lead to a vanilla FPS, throw icying until it's time to launch, shovel hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of marketing to the key sites, and just let the money-machine 'cha-ching' for the next year. Rinse and Repeat.

Sports games have gotten progressively worse with the advent of 3d graphics. Sure, they look better, but have lost that innocent fun feeling sports games used to have. Just like Space Invaders ate my quarters, my bothers and I played Dr. J vs. Larry Bird to death. The original Hardball, with just two generic teams to choose from, had a much more fun batter/pitcher interface than any of the current baseball games. Once football games started to look so realistic, suddenly we get saddled with unreasonable expectations for how realistic the gameplay needs to be. Tecmo Bowl and Madden 95 were just fun games.

Too many buttons and a too many designer's wet dreams are to use every single one of them, most of the time.

There is a recent review of the upcoming God of War game for the PSP. One of its main pro's is that the game's controls were more unified as a side effect of the PSP's lesser button total. They streamlined the controls to retain every ounce of functionality with less button mashing and Simon-like cinematics.

Its the beauty of Nintendo and Miyamoto in general. The things that man could make you do with an 8 way joypad and 2 buttons.

Sports games have gotten progressively worse with the advent of 3d graphics.

A great example!

Well, Geometry Wars is just Robotron, and it seems to be doing quite well.

I agree with the last two paragraphs, but that's because I think that's a fundamental truth to all game design (and programming in general). However, as a charter member of the Complexity Club, I disagree that the "icing" is your culprit. It's all in how well it's done, from the bottom to the top.

I submit there are just as many bad arcade games as there are badly done 3D games. It's just that no one ever remembers the ones that sucked. Go here for an overall list of arcade games to start with. Just pick a letter of the alphabet and then click on the Year column header and take a stroll down a real Memory Lane in date order. For every Pac-man or Asteroids or NightDriver in the arcades there's a DigDug, SpyHunter, something that they want you to think plays like Street Fighter and a stupid PolePosition clone that no one ever wanted to play hiding back behind the Q*bert box. Being simple didn't save them.

Being complex doesn't either. Ask anyone to start naming off classic 4x games, you get a very similar list (once you explain what 4x is). One that often comes up is Masters of Orion 2. If you turn that around and ask for a list of the worst ones, Masters of Orion 3 is pretty much at the top of everyone's list. The difference, and order of magnitude of complexity on a system that was already groaning under it's own weight.

All the pieces have to be there. If one or the other aren't up to snuff, the whole thing falls apart and usually lands in the bargain bin.

I think my opinion on this article can be summed up in the old cliché, different strokes for different folks. I don't mean to belittle your argument, Elysium, but I think some people crave complexity as much as others crave simplicity in their games. I suspect that flight simmers and war gamers (I've dabbled in both genres) would riot if their games tried to "get back to basics." True, the games with the widest appeal will always be those that revolve around the simplest, most elegant designs. And I completely agree that the best games are those that get the core concepts right before adding on other features. But to imply that, generally speaking, less is more neglects the subjectivity of what constitutes fun. And I know you guys have talked about that fact on the podcasts/on the site, meaning we're probably on the same page, but I wanted to make sure that perspective was included in this discussion.

I think I've used three clichés in the course of this post, so I'll stop while I'm ahead. Oops, there's another one!

I'm not sure I include simulations (which I argue both War Simulations fit into as well) fall under the scope of this discussion. I don't think about them in the same way that I do most games.

Hmm, I guess that if simulations/war games aren't fair game (ha ha!) in this discussion, then it'll be hard for me to point out complex yet fun games that serve as counterexamples to your argument. I suspect that the RPG genre would have the most such candidates, but it would be easy for you to reply that the best RPGs are those that get the mechanics right and then add a great story, graphics engine, etc. on top. And when I think about the RPGs that I've played recently and really enjoyed, other than The Witcher (I was able to overlook its flaws, but I can't blame those who couldn't), I can't say that I would disagree.

Oh, and I do want to admit that the amount of time that I'm playing Audiosurf suggests that there is a lot of truth in your article. Just in case you needed some more ammunition in your favor.

Hmm, I guess that if simulations/war games aren't fair game (ha ha!) in this discussion, then it'll be hard for me to point out complex yet fun games that serve as counterexamples to your argument.

I didn't mean it like that, so much to agree with you that the complexity of mimicking reality is part of the necessity of those environments. There are plenty of games where, for example, introducing real-world elements steals from the game because it doesn't make sense to imitate a simulation. So, I guess what I'm saying is that there is a class of games for which complexity is part of the basic scenario.

On the other hand, I still argue that you can add complexity to these games that don't make sense.

I suspect that the RPG genre would have the most such candidates, but it would be easy for you to reply that the best RPGs are those that get the mechanics right and then add a great story, graphics engine, etc. on top.

My argument would probably be that the best games probably do the things that have been long established in the genre right, and then discriminate about what to put on top. For example, I might argue that the amount of features included in a game on top of the fundamentally established rules are a good inverse indication of quality. At least for me, that holds true. I get quickly bored with games with complicated battle systems, skill trees or even stories. RPGs demand some degree of complexity by nature, but I've played enough to know that it's the sort of thing you can lose control of quickly.

I wish RPG developers would have the same philosophy. There seems to be some idea in the geek/gaming world that a complex storyline is a good storyline: an article on Gamespot compares Final Fantasy Tactics' storyline to Shakespeare, which shows a complete misunderstanding of what makes a good story.

I prefer complex people who simplify things to simple people who complicate things. I could say the same about games.

I look at unnecessary complexity in current or past games as the stuff I had to do that made no sense to the storyline or objective of a game. So of course I'm going to use this forum to go Zenting about my pet peeve - Futile Fetch Quests.

I finally picked up Assassin's Creed plugged it in and within 20 minutes of acrobatic fun I end up on a rooftop staring at a shimmering flag of boredom, 1 of 20. I then found other flags, 1 out of 100, or should I say 1 out of who cares but the lifeless.

In gaming past we have been offered the choice to collect flags, packages, monkey idols, coins, horse shoes, skulls, and more. I could understand it if I was playing Sonic the Hedgehog but game developers keep throwing these horrible bobbles around hard to reach back alleys and hard to reach places.

If I fire up GTA4 and find a twirling Fuzzy Bunny 1/100 in the first hour I'm going to walk downtown and buy a ski mask.

Elysium wrote:

Again, like any art, the skill of cutting away the fat from of any endeavor is, in many ways, the most important step. The best work comes from artists who finish, look at the result, and then ask themselves, "What can I remove?"

This reminds me of one of my favourite quotes. Mark Twain is credited as saying that "an essay is not complete when there is nothing left to add to it, but when there is nothing left to take away."

Zen Mutty wrote:

IIn gaming past we have been offered the choice to collect flags, packages, monkey idols, coins, horse shoes, skulls, and more. I could understand it if I was playing Sonic the Hedgehog but game developers keep throwing these horrible bobbles around hard to reach back alleys and hard to reach places.

If I fire up GTA4 and find a twirling Fuzzy Bunny 1/100 in the first hour I'm going to walk downtown and buy a ski mask.

I would contend that it's not the mere fact of having collectible things that is undesirable. Look at Crackdown; 800-odd orbs to collect, and more than a few in places that make back alleys seem as accessible as the middle of the street, and yet I though they were great fun to collect.

The key, at least for me, is that the Fuzzy Bunnies have some impact, some meaning. The flags in Assassin's Creed? If they had a purpose, it was never made clear. I never looked for them -- though I did pick them up if I was running by -- and didn't even think about trying to. They were beyond useless; they were a potential distraction with no benefit.

I'm happy to search for Bunnies, as long as get to eat them and then jump over buildings. Or something.

re: complexity -
I think a lot of developers, when working with established genres, assume that the core gameplay will be fine and work on bells and whistles. If thousands of other people have made cakes with this recipe, I don't need to think about the recipe, just about the decorations that I'm going to put on afterwards, right? The biggest problem rears it's ugly head when the game is done and everyone who tastes the cake says, "Yeah, it's ok." Then the developers realize that the folks that made the best cakes used the recipe as a guide, but added their own unique flavours to make it something interesting to eat.

...I'm hungry.

buzzvang wrote:

Why is mommy yelling at daddy?

Too funny.

Indeed, Elysium has been stabbed in the back rather than "edited". "Et tu, Certe".

Overall, though, I agree. I'm about ready to bail on Lost Odyssey for this very reason. As mentioned in another thread (just recognizing that I know I am repeating myself) I am realizing that there are really good books I want to read. Because they're written by good writers. And I'm not reading them right now because I'm busy reading text within a game when I could be playing a game that was more fun. I sometimes need a reminder of why I play certain games and not others. In this case it's boredom.

buzzvang wrote:

Why is mommy yelling at daddy?

Gurgle. Coke. Nostrils. Ow.

On subject, I typically don't mind complexity, as long as I have enough time to digest it, so to speak. Unfortunately, there is less and less time for play, let alone learning how to do it.