Simplification of Games: Dumbing Down vs Focused Design

The "dumbing down" of games tends to be a pretty polarizing topic for many gamers, and it's easy to understand why. In order to be interesting or fun games have to engage with the player on some level, and one of the most common and effective ways of doing that is a challenge - and a game being too simplistic or easy can fall flatter than the disk it ships on.

With all the ire and venom the gaming community throws at dumbed down titles I think that gamers have lost sight over what they're trying to fight for. A lot of people will cite specific game elements or tropes as crutches for dumbed down titles rather than trying to understand what makes a game engaging or not.

Rather than argue whether specific games are or aren't dumbed down, I'd like to take a look at what does (and doesn't) cause a game to feel dumbed down.

Difficulty and Simplicity

The most common argument in this debate I hear is that a game is too easy or too simple. Any time a long running franchise introduces any mechanics to streamline features or make it easier for players to progress someone invariably begins a cry that the game is being dumbed down, usually combined with a thinly veiled insinuation that "casual" gamers who aren't as good as the blessed veterans are to blame for their lack of skill.

This argument seems utterly ridiculous to me. There are a dozen examples of games that are easy but thoroughly engaging and games that are hard as nails but less engaging than the box they come in. While difficulty is arguably the most common way to engage the player it's certainly not the only way. The vast majority of your time in almost every MMO is spent doing almost trivially easy gameplay, and how many people do you know who actually played I Wanna Be The Guy for more than 10 minutes?

There are no less than 15 things that can kill you on this screen alone.

Similarly, simplicity seems to have little direct influence on how engaging a game is. If pure simplicity were enough to make a game boring then surely gaming would have died in it's infancy with games like Pong, Asteroids, and Donkey Kong.

Rather than blame the difficulty or simplicity for a bad game I think it's more useful to look at how the game tries to engage the player and where it succeeds or fails at it. To understand whether a game has been dumbed down or not you need to first look at what the core engagement of the game is.

Core Engagement

The core engagement of a game simply refers to the primary method the game uses to draw the player in. This can include things like exploration, mastery of mechanics, puzzle solving, atmosphere/world building, and competition. A well designed game has mechanics that support its core engagement; aspects like difficulty, complexity, pacing, etc. will naturally be dependent on what the core engagement of the game is and therefore will vary from game to game.

As an example, think of how open and expansive the world in Skyrim is. This makes perfect sense, since one of the main draws of the Elder Scrolls series is an open world for exploration. The mechanic supports the core engagement, so it feels natural within the game.

However, if you took the open world style and applied it to a game with a significantly different core engagement - say, Super Meat Boy - then it immediately feels out of place. Super Meat Boy would be horrible if you had to traverse a giant expansive world just to get between different levels. Conversely, Skyrim would be ruined if you were thrown back to the start of the area every time you were touched.

With how varied games are today it's nonsensical to think that there's some absolute cutoff for difficulty or simplicity that would make a game automatically boring. Whether you personally like them or not games like Gone Home, The Stanley Parable, Dear Esther, and the entire Visual Novel genre (not to mention cow clickers) are basically impossible to lose and have no execution challenges in them, yet many people find them interesting and engaging.

What? Doesn't everyone set up a macro to click their mouse 100 times per second and leave it running overnight?

Focused Design

To muddy the waters more, it's often a good thing for games to streamline or eliminate mechanics and features that don't contribute to the game's core design. More and more there are games being released that boil an idea or genre down to their basic core concepts, and they can be extremely fun and engaging.

Divekick was designed to take the fighting genre and strip away as much of the execution challenge as they could while retaining what many consider to be the most fun aspect of fighting games - how to out-think and outmaneuver your opponent.

At high levels of play fighting games are less about executing great combos and more about predicting what your opponent is going to do and countering it. By stripping away all the mechanics traditional fighting games have that don't service that one engagement the developers were able to bring that engagement to the focus and make it more accessible to more people.

One Finger Death Punch did a similar deconstruction with the beat-em-up genre. By focusing the gameplay down to two buttons then slowly ramping up the difficulty curve they do an amazing job of delivering the feeling of performing long and complex combos on dozens of enemies.

I... am... a... GOD! BOW BEFORE THE WUSHU MASTAH!

Neither of these games are likely to replace the standard in their respective genres simply because they only have a single core engagement. Most games work to engage their players in several different ways that compliment each other, and both One Finger Death Punch and Divekick feel like fairly simple games in comparison. However, they serve as perfect examples of focused game design rather than dumbed down - extremely simplistic games that still successfully deliver engagement to the player.

Dumb Design

So what does qualify as a game being dumbed down?

Well, one could make the argument that so long as the game's mechanics support some core engagement then it's not dumbed down. I know that's a bit a of a cop out, but I have a hard time arguing against it. Even with seemingly atrocious design like being able to beat an entire level of a shooter without firing a single shot you can make the argument that the core engagement of the game ends up being cinematic fantasy fulfillment rather than solid shooting, which the mechanics do end up supporting. So the question remains: if a game is still coherent enough to successfully deliver on a core engagement, why do players still feel like they've been dumbed down?

I think in the end it boils down to two factors: expectation vs reality and homogenization.

When you play a game that's supposed to be about solid fun shooting mechanics where shooting is optional you feel like they "dumbed down" the game to the point of pointlessness, and rightfully so - they did in fact strip away the core engagement you were wanting and expecting. This is why the dumbing down of games is so often a problem with long running franchises. Whether it's a desire to shift or evolve the franchise, appeal to a different demographic, or simply the developers not understanding how the players engaged with the previous games it's fairly common for new entries to deviate from the old formulas.

Additionally, we're seeing more and more games shift their core engagement to try and fall in line with the popular games of the moment. Games are an expensive and risky investment, and trying to adapt your game for mass appeal is a common strategy to help mitigate risk. Unfortunately this means that the bigger budget games tend to move closer and homogenize in their mechanics and core engagements, leading to less variety in AAA games than has existed in the past.

Bloody screen (so real)!

Of course, that's not to say it's impossible for a game to be fundamentally dumbed down. There are plenty of examples that just aren't coherent enough in mechanics and core engagement to adequately engage the player. Games like Final Fantasy: All The Bravest manage to strip away all the mechanics supporting the core engagements of the franchise without adding in alternative ways for the player to engage with the game. However, most players tend to consider games that fail to deliver on any core engagement simply bad rather than dumbed down.

Doom and Gloom?

People have been complaining about games being dumbed down for as long as I can remember, and I don't see any end in sight. While there certainly are examples of mechanics being over-simplified to the detriment of the core engagement and some AAA games becoming more and more alike, I think that by and large games have just been evolving and experimenting with different ways to engage the player.

Over time and through trial and error I think that both players and developers will learn more effective ways of engaging people with games on both simple and complex levels. I wouldn't worry too much about specific games not appealing to you, but I would encourage everyone to start thinking about why various games do or don't appeal to you rather than crying "dumbed down" every time a sequel deviates from the formula of it's predecessors.