[MUD-Dev] Complexity and Accessibility (was: RE: Better Combat (long))

[Will Jennings]

Raph Koster wrote:

[some thoughts on how complexity in art grows, leading to alienation
and a shrinking market]

Thanks for taking the conversation in such an interesting direction!
Now I can disagree.

> We can observe a gradual move towards increased formalism and
> complexity in the development of almost any art form [...]. It
> typically is accompanied by a parallel loss of audience, as the
> general public tends not to want to be challenged in that way.

I'm skeptical of the teleology here.  Examples: Oral storytelling
has, in general, stricter form than the novel.  As rap music grew
its audience and entered the mainstream, it became more complex
sonically, but less complex verbally.  I'm not so sure the
middle-of-the-bell-curve of the degree of formalism of Western art
music has done more than oscillate over the last six hundred years,
and its audience has fluctuated independent of those oscillations.

Sometimes, perhaps, an art form needs to be around a little while
before it gets very complex.  There needs to be a critical mass of
folks making it before good language gets developed to talk about
it, and then the language helps in coming up with formal tricks.
But after the first person of a sufficiently scholarly bent starts
playing formal tricks, I don't see a general trend toward increasing
formality.[1]

It doesn't help that "formality" and "complexity" are, in the sense
we're using them, almost entirely subjective.  We're also switching
their meanings, using the same words to talk about richness of
vocabulary, structural complexity, the use of analysis of old work
to generate new work, and accessibility, all of which are pretty
orthogonal.

[major tangent]

> The cultural forces behind this are fascinating, because at the
> same time that the art recedes away from comprehensibility by the
> average person by demanding an overly high level of insider
> knowledge of the medium, we also see a rise in "priesthoods" of
> people who use their knowledge as a social signaling mechanism.

Yeah, that is cool.

What's even neater is that when the art becomes less comprehensible,
not because of demanding lots of insider knowledge, but because of
being more radical or abstract, the "priesthoods" arise regardless
and create the insider knowledge from thin air.  And then this
invented language can become a bigger barrier to outsiders than the
comprehensibility of the work itself -- it's a lot harder for me to
parse the text of an average modern art book than it is for me to be
moved by the works themselves.  (Sometimes I wonder how many MUD
players have been lost, not because the game is too complicated for
them, but because they're embarrassed to be unable to tell a rez
from a mez, or ltb from lfg.)

[/major tangent]

> Given that games (in the formal sense) are formal mathematical
> constructs, I think there's an interesting question to be had
> there.  [...] Is the overcomplication of games what will doom them
> to an increasingly smaller market?

  (Sorry if that's not the fairest edit -- I had trouble working out
  what "an interesting question to be had there" pointed to.)

MUDs and the vast majority of card, board, and computer games are
not games in a formal, mathematical sense (just like groups of
people aren't groups in the formal, mathematical sense).[2] To the
degree that they are amenable to mathematical analysis, David
Kennerly pointed out in a related thread that NP-hard (mathematical
complexity) doesn't equal hard-for-people-to-play
(overcomplication): it's easier to win at Minesweeper (which is
NP-complete) than to beat the toughest FPS bot (which probably isn't
solving too many NP-hard problems).

> Given that games are fundamentally formal constructs and not,
> generally, communicative media (unlike other art forms, which are
> generally communications *mediated* by formal constructs)...

I may not understand what you mean by communicative in this context.
Do you mean the art form communicates some fact or opinion?  Are you
saying that you view art as a message or moral, wrapped up in an
art-language?  I recognize that's not a terribly far-out idea, but I
don't see why looking at games through that lens is any stranger
than viewing music, sculpture, portraiture, architecture, flower
arranging, dance, or the culinary arts through that lens.

Maybe you mean instead that art-forms-in-general are, at core, a
form of social grooming or ritual -- that's another interpretation
of communicating, and another reasonable idea about art.  But
wouldn't games be exemplary. . . um. . .  examples of that?

In either case, I don't see why games are less communicative or more
fundamentally formal than the rest of Art.

> ...that may mean that videogaming may be headed down the path trod
> by chess and go--towards elites and no mass acceptance.

I couldn't name a third game with as much mass acceptance as Chess
and Go (unless, maybe, football?).  Even at our most populist (any
populists here?  hello?), I think we'd all be quite happy to work on
a game as popular and long-lived.

More germane: You're likely right that we'll see more shibboleths in
games, but I'm betting it'll be in reasonable proportion to the
degree the vocabulary permeates the culture as a whole.  Your
concern seems to be that hardcore Grand Theft Auto and Everquest
players will dominate the development of future games and create
things only those similarly initiated can understand -- why wouldn't
the ranks of future developers be drawn also from the masses of
Bejeweled players?

-Will Jennings

  [1] I do see a trend toward complexity when technology or money is
  a limiting factor.  That's my excuse for the most germane example:
  the increasing complexity of console and PC games, and (to a
  lesser extent) MUDs.

  [2] There are two breeds of formal, mathematical definitions of
  game that I'm familiar with: the von Neumann/Morgenstern version,
  involving some situation where a bunch of actors are trying to
  maximize what they get out of a payoff matrix, and the
  combinatorial game theory of Conway/Guy, where deterministic,
  finite, two-player, turn-based, discrete games of complete
  information are analysed (and maybe some very modest
  generalizations).

  Certainly these have applications to the study of
  games-in-the-MUD-Dev- sense, but to say that Nuclear War is
  fundamentally a Prisoner's Dilemma, or that Go is fundamentally
  Nim, isn't any more accurate than saying that the Sistine Chapel
  ceiling is fundamentally the Golden Ratio, or that Martha Graham's
  choreography reduces to the physics of tensile strength.
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