Simple Yet Complex
With a good portion of video games, what you see is what you get. While there's a gradual learning curve to keep the game interesting, the underlying game mechanics become familiar incredibly early in the game. As you make your way through the story a few new things may be thrown your way, but as soon as things began to ramp up you have all you need in your arsenal to reach the conclusion. An interesting handful of games, however, are sadistic in their approach. On the surface they seem simple, maybe even too simple. You comprehend the few bits of knowledge you need to play the game almost instantly. But as you continue, you begin to realize something: there's more here than meets the eye. These are games that hide their complexity, only to release the avalanche when you least expect it.
Puzzle games are huge culprits in this arena. Tetris, which all of you should know about by now, contains only one simple objective: don't fail. But with this objective come a slew of player-imposed goals, e.g. beating a high score, only scoring points with Tetrises, reaching the highest difficulty, etc. Tetris is a game you can literally play for hours if you become good enough, but getting there requires incredible reflexes and an extensive knowledge of where and when to place the game's seven different puzzle pieces, as well as what positions work in what situations. Tetris is probably the best example of this phenomenon, but let's take a look at some other franchises.
Mr. Driller is a series of games that continues where Dig Dug left off. Originally conceived as Dig Dug 3, Mr. Driller follows the exploits of Susumu Hori, the son of Dig Dug's hero, Taizou Hori. Susumu shares his father's love for digging, but does so instead with the eponymous drill. But, unlike Dig Dug, Mr. Driller has no enemies for you to destroy. The main focus of the game is to drill deeper and deeper through various countries, while maintaining your air supply and trying to to get squished by the unstable rock walls you can't help creating. Each level has a depth goal that you have to reach in order to complete the stage, which of course increases as the levels become more difficult.
For the most part, the Mr. Driller games are pretty simple. Drill down, gather air tanks, don't die. The real challenge comes with how you score points. As you begin to drill, you'll notice that there are different colored blocks. If four of the same-colored blocks manage to touch, they disappear and net you a score bonus. Along with the breakable blocks come more durable ones that decrease the amount of air you have left upon breaking them. These gain even more points upon being matched up, and usually surround valuable air tanks that extend your play time. Add to these factors multiple characters with different abilities, and you're going to be hooked or quite a long time, no matter which version of the game you play.
Mr. Driller begins with an extremely easy goal: make it to the bottom of the stage. But adding to this a puzzle system that nets more points and the added goal of matching colored blocks, you begin to see the complex core of the game that makes it truly memorable.
A very well known series that also exhibits this type of complexity against initial simplicity is Pokemon. Every game in the series is pretty easy from beginning to end. Besides the weakest of the weak, you can basically grab any team of Pokemon you want and stick with them through the whole game. But Nintendo, insidious as ever, included a few odd gameplay mechanics even in the earliest incarnations of the Pokemon franchise. Individual values and effort values, abbreviated as IV and EV respectively, are two sets of special stats that make each Pokemon unique on a very base level. Most fans of the series have no idea of their existence, as the values of both are hidden.
As fans became aware of these hidden values, various programs were utilized in an attempt to find out how they work and what effect they had on the Pokemon they were training. Over time, IVs and EVs became an important part of Pokemon tournaments. It's become so prevalent that one cannot hope to advance far into a tournament unless you've done a good job EV training your Pokemon. You can read more about IV and EV training at Bulbapedia by following these links:
http://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/IV | http://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/EV
While puzzle games hide their complexity with simple rules and others do so with extremely lax difficulty, there's a select few that keep the most elaborate parts of their gameplay hidden behind decidedly archaic graphics. Sometimes, these graphics make the game more confusing than it has to be.
(click on the images for the larger versions)
The biggest culprit of this is an indie game called Dwarf Fortress. A game with a complete ASCII graphics interface, much of the complexity comes from sitting down and learning what each letter, number, and symbol stands for in relation to the Dwarf Fortress world. After getting that in order, you are introduced to the actual gameplay, which is even more elaborate than the graphics. Fans of the game find much satisfaction in constructing a self-sufficient fortress after extensive research into the in-depth gameplay mechanics. In my humble opinion, Dwarf Fortress is probably the most complex game out there at the moment, and the programmers continually amaze me with the little details they've accounted for within the game's code.
One problem I had with Dwarf Fortress upon first playing it was the graphics. You eventually get used to them, but I was worried the only difficulty the game offered was trying to decipher what you were seeing and getting used to such a low-tech way of presenting a video game world. Luckily, various tilesets are available for download that make the game much easier on the eyes, and actually show that the game has much more depth to offer. The pictures above show the difference in graphics, from the original on the left to one with a tileset on the right. Feel free to check out Dwarf Fortress in all its frustrating awesomeness by following this link:
http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/
So there you have it, a few malicious game series that choose to reel you in with simple gameplay mechanics and graphics, only to latch onto you and never let go upon revealing the true depth beneath the surface. While each one does so in completely different ways, they'll surprise you when you finally dig in and try out the more complex gameplay mechanics.
