Simplicity

A few days ago I was watching the daily when someone brought up Heroes of the Storm. In the course of the discussion, the topic of simplicity arose. I contended that Chess is not a simple game and got a significant amount of backlash. I didn't understand why people thought Chess was simple when to me it clearly isn't. It relates back to a saying that Blizzard loves to design around, "Easy to learn, difficult to master." Does easy to learn constitute simple? Obviously not for that saying to hold true. So how do we separate games like Chess from games like Checkers? I believe both games have a property I'm going to call intuitive. With only some small explanation you can play both games. However, there is a cap to how good you can get at Checkers. There is a dominate strategy and the game is solvable. Chess has no dominate strategy and is not solvable for a human being. Chess and Checkers are both intuitive, but Checkers breaks down and becomes simple while Chess does not. Indeed Chess has a pretty enormous place in upper academia and institutions of higher learning. No simple game could accomplish that feat.

So really the contention was over the definition of the word Simple in relationship to games. I don't think a game that is intuitive and easy to learn is simple. Nor is a game that is difficult to learn necessarily Complex. Its about the number and impact of the decision you make.