Generative simplicity, complication, and complexity
Structuring working hypothesis. Its practical consequences still need testing across more games and more kinds of players.
Resonance does not oppose simple games to complex fiction.
In many systems, simple local rules or transformations can produce complex global behavior. Cellular automata, dynamical systems, and fractals offer clear models for this intuition: the richness of a result is not proportional to the number of rules that generate it.
A game does not need to contain all the complexity it can produce.
Three notions not to confuse
Simplicity
A structure is simple when it rests on a small number of principles, relationships, or transformations coherent enough to understand and manipulate.
Simplicity is not an absolute value. A very short rule can be difficult to practice if it transfers all interpretation or invention to the participant.
Complication
Complication is the mediation burden required to play: rules and exceptions to memorize, conversions, calculations, lookup, preparation, prior knowledge, coordination, unsupported improvisation, or procedural decisions that are not themselves part of the intended experience.
Some complication may be useful or necessary. The problem begins when it is treated as the natural price of fictional richness.
Complexity
Complexity is the richness produced by relationships and interactions: crossing causalities, delayed consequences, changing relationships, compatible or contradictory truths, irreducible perspectives, and patterns or stories that emerge without having been written in advance.
This complexity can be desirable. It is often exactly what living fiction is for.
Four possible combinations
A game can therefore be:
- simple and complex — few generators, much emergence;
- simple and poor — few rules, few handles, few consequences;
- complicated and complex — heavy burden that genuinely supports richness;
- complicated and poor — much manipulation for little fictional power.
Resonance is not looking for “the fewest rules.” It asks which complications are fruitful and which simple structures can carry or generate more complexity than they demand from the player.
Generative simplicity
A generatively simple device uses a few principles to let play produce situations that do not need to be pre-written into the system.
A good generative primitive does not necessarily tell a player everything they can do. It gives them an operation that can be applied to new fictional content.
In Regard, the question “what matters here?” does not model in advance everything that might become relevant. It lets relevance be localized when it matters.
Likewise, Situation/Vector does not try to write every possible scene. It looks for causal structures strong enough for scenes to emerge.
Methodological consequence
Whenever a design becomes lighter, the useful question is not only:
“How many rules did we remove?”
but:
“What generative power did we preserve or gain?”
And when a rule or procedure adds burden:
“What new complexity does it make accessible or able to emerge?”
This double question prevents minimalism from being confused with accessibility.
Hypotheses to test
- Can a shorter procedure increase real burden by demanding more implicit expertise?
- Can devices be compared by the relation between burden of practice and generative power without turning that power into a naive metric?
- Which forms of complication are useful because they externalize difficulty a player would otherwise carry mentally?
- When does a generative constraint stop opening fiction and start closing it?
- Can games produce most of their complexity in relationships created during play rather than in prior rules or lore?
The aim is to discover forms simple enough to give access to complexity that can exceed them.