I’ve noticed lately that I’ve been craving meatier, more challenging games. Heavy strategy games. Brain burners. Much of the lighter fare just doesn’t cut it for me anymore.
I’m a victim of complexity creep.
Complexity creep is my term for the tendency of people to become acclimated to ever-more complex forms of entertainment. A newbie who finds Puerto Rico difficult to grasp during his first weeks in the hobby may be happily playing Through the Ages a few years or even months later. The more games we play, the easier it becomes to understand new games. This is especially true because so many games recycle mechanisms used in previous games. After a couple of years in the hobby, every games reminds you of another.
Complexity creep is hardly limited to the boardgame hobby. “ In Everything Bad is Good for You” author Steven Johnson describes how many forms of popular entertainment like TV shows and video games are becoming ever more complex. Just compare the plot density of modern prime time soaps like The Shield or Battlestar Gallactica with older shows like Dallas or Dynasty. The difference in the amount of information thrown at viewers per episode is striking. Many modern television shows assume that the audience is quite bright and can hold many plot strands in their heads for weeks, months, or even years.
Even the dialogue of modern TV shows is denser. Modern medical shows have no fear of putting complex and often incomprehensible medical jargon in the mouths of their fictional doctors, confident that audience members will be able to pick out the one sentence that is important to the plot ("If her fever doesn’t drop in the next three hours, she may suffer permanent brain damage.")
Of course, the biggest sellers in the boardgame hobby will always be the less complex and more accessible games. But that doesn’t mean that the average hardcore gamer isn’t slowly becoming acclimated to more challenging games. Certainly there is evidence that some game companies are profiting from uncommonly complex games.
The rumor is that Fantasy Flight’s biggest money maker is the Arkham Horror series of games. While Arkham is not complex when compared with many wargames, it is still complicated enough for players to post flow-chart player aids on the Geek. And when all the various expansions are added to the original game, the amount of rules that players must understand becomes truly formidable.
It was just announced that Mayfair is going to revive its series of 18XX train games. The 18XX series is the most complex series of train games that I am aware of, and it is interesting to me that Mayfair believes that this niche of the hobby is big enough to warrant cultivating.
It may even be that the increased popularity of Martin Wallace games of late is due to as much to a change in audience sophistication as it is to the quality of his more recent games. Would Brass have been as popular if it had been released ten or fifteen years ago?
Of course, many folks may say that they still prefer games that are simple and fast playing. That does not necessarily disprove my point. The games that they consider simple and fast-playing may be slightly more complex than games they would have placed in that category five years ago.
I’m not sure how I could ever prove my point. Perhaps measure the average number of rules pages for wargames in a given year that have a complexity rating of 4, and compare that average with the average from a decade ago. If the number of pages is going up, then the people who are rating the complexity of the wargames are suffering (or enjoying) complexity creep.
Anyway, I hope CC is a universal phenomenon. Otherwise I will be trying to force ever more complex games on other gamers who tastes will not match mine.
No matter. My daughters will force me to enjoy lighter fare for years to come.
Until I can entice them into the deep end of the game pool.
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