In the first wave of capital-I Indie, the developer as star auteur emerged, and with it there was a strong undercurrent of game design traditionalism; that AAA had lost its way, and in bloated capitalist money-grabbing had alienated the true gamers. Many of these developers promised to deliver games that made you feel like a kid again, as good as you remembered and better. They understood Game Design as applied science and they were cutting out the corporate middleman, and also could analyze and discard the awkward, naive, and janky parts to extract that core crystal of Good Game Design. Philosophically you still see this sort of undercurrent: Early games were good by accident and coincidence, but now that we understand game design, we can craft simple, elegant experiences, iterated on lovingly and blended into a pure perfect gamer's juice we all sup upon like delectable ambrosia.
In the late 00s and early 10s, simplicity and elegance in code, art, and design felt like a sharp contrast to AAA at the time. Thinking very concretely and specifically about the nuts and bolts of game design was and is an important step in understanding how games work and what they do, but then as now there is a tendency to think that this is all games are--there is the Game, and there is the window dressing. There is platonic code and elegance in the heart of the universe, and there is bullshit. The frame data is the Real game, the math that drives creation, and the animation is pretty but deceptive flesh that will ultimately betray, in a kind of gamer's Manichaen heresy.
But Heresy is not native to the world. It is but a contrivance. All things can be conjoined. And recently I've watched as simple, elegant, mechanics-focused puzzle game have given way for games that are stranger and weirder, that don't feel the same need to make sure the mechanics are as simple and elegant and polished as possible, that being so might not be the only way to be a good game, or only way to do Good Game Design, or the only way to demonstrate you know what you're doing. If there was a tendency to think of old games as diamonds in the rough that just needed to be polished and understood to be perfected, now there is much more of a movement to go back to older games and look at everything that seemed broken and unnecessary and treating those parts as valid artistic goals and intentional design choices. Is that jank, cruft, or friction actually an unnecessary hindrance, or is it a part of the experience?
Embracing the complexity and the cruft also means appreciating the Whole Game as if every part was equally important, not just the design and code. At GDC I gave a talk about how I wanted much weirder games because I wanted games made from the heart, about ugly and unwanted feelings; this is the other half of the conversation, about ugly and wanted mechanics and art that should be studied and celebrated and used creatively.
Being abrasive or 'wrong' can be a goal. Cruely Squad embraces how much it can look and feel like a huge, cacophonous mess, and is filled with systems that build on that same bizarre mess. It's not a stripped down Deus Ex; it's an "immersive sim" that rather than take on the burden of trying to simulate a whole world, it simulates only the most abrasive and insane parts of murder capitalism, with fishing and a stock market that make the hell worse and more complicated. Why do you reload by flicking the mouse instead of anything reasonable? Because you can do anything in a video game, and abrasion is just another color of paint on your canvas.
I also really enjoy Sylvie's games for similar reasons; she's often taking absurd premises or mechanics that feel 'incorrect' very seriously and designing games around a totally different set of assumptions than a puzzle platformer following what is commonly assumed to be 'correct' design. A platformer should have jumps that behave in this particular way and there should be coyote time to smooth out their experience invisibly so the game behaves in a way that the player would expect to be physically if cartoonishly accurate. Instead, many of Sylvie's games have jumps that feel like a naive programmer's first attempt at making a jump with none of that knowledge of how a jump is 'supposed' to work in a platformer, and then building a whole game whose mechanics explore the possibilities of what it would be like to play with this 'wrong' type of jumping. In doing so, she's exploring very interesting spaces that designers typically are taught to not find worth exploring, while asking the player to play with and take seriously a way of playing they've been taught to feel is wrong.
And there are some games only exist inside of complexity, and cannot be simplified without losing something essential, like fighting games or card games or psx jrpgs. Without the complex interactions of systems, there often isn't actually a pure and naked core of game design that is inherently fun and better. Many of these game genres tend to buckle when you simplify them too much, because the systems are too deterministic and brittle and when there isn't enough room you don't get the experience of mastery and exploration that are so important. These games NEED bullshit, and the bullshit is the best part. You can reduce these games if you want, and often the result is not a perfect gamer's crystal that Solves the genre. Sometimes even from the perspective of entirely mechanics-focused design, there's just nothing that can be gained and much to lose from trying to get too simple.
As an artist, I do believe there's as much craft and skill involved in making a game that feels strange, janky, abrasive, or 'wrong' and that like any feeling and every artistic tool, it is valid and human. Every part of the game is the Real Game, even the failed and wrong parts. And are they truly failed or wrong? Can even a failed and wrong tool be useful? Maybe history didn't end in late aughts and maybe game design isn't solved.
