## Transcript **0:01** · There’s a quote by Mark Rosewater, lead designer on magic the gathering for more than twenty years, that for a very long time I didn’t understand, and it goes a little something like this: “don’t confuse interesting with fun.” Now, when I first heard this about a decade ago, I thought it was nonsense. What was he talking about? How can interesting things not be fun? **0:20** · But over time, with every game I played and the more I learned about how great games get designed, the more I’ve realized that he might’ve been right all along, just not in the way I expected. **0:30** · I first began to consider this when I got stuck into Mewgenics, a tactics roguelike coincidently inspired by magic the gathering all about sending cats to do turn-based battles against other cats and sometimes horrible monsters, now mewgenics is very good but one big gripe always stood out to me, and it’s most obvious when it come to the mage class. The mage is packed with a whole bunch of really awesome abilities like elemental powers that can affect the battlefield, teleportation, mana manipulation and loads of other little combo pieces which all have cool interesting effects no other class can do. **0:59** · I was initially very excited about this, but as I played it became increasingly apparent that not only was it really hard to actually assemble the mages weird abilities into a functional synergy that felt like it actually did anything, but once I did put together some sort of elemental combo or a way to make randomly teleporting around useful through lots and lots of grinding on the cat breeding mechanic, I ended up with something that wasn’t very fun to use. **1:20** · My janky mage combos took loads of setup to pull off, could be completely shut down by particular enemies and to top it all off were about equally effective as the other more conventionally designed classes on my team who just sort of clicked on things to do damage. Mewgenics is full of this stuff, really cool **1:41** · abilities and archetypes that nevertheless don’t translate into fun gameplay, everything from the druid’s flower-summoning toolkit to the tinkerer’s robot summons to the necromancer’s self-downing builds are immediately compelling but are often so gimmicky and narrowly designed that they’re hard to make work, and when you do make them work, you’re no longer really playing the fun strategy game the other cats are busy with. They’re interesting… but they’re not fun. **2:07** · Once I’d made this connection in mewgenics, the differences between interesting and fun design became harder and harder to ignore. For example, it came to mind when I played Mario Kart World, sure, the idea of an open world kart racing game is a super cool concept and there’s loads of interesting new course designs that you can pull off but in practice the open world stuff is just straight motorways that are way less memorable than the actual courses they end up getting in way of. **2:32** · It came to mind again when I played slay the spire 2 (a game I’ll get back to later) and was shocked to see that it was comparatively… small… compared to a lot of the other deckbuilders that’d come out in the space between slay the spire 1 and the early access of 2. Look at something like across the obelisk for example, a clear slay the spire successor that gives you four characters to work with at once, about a 50% larger card pool, a bunch more variety in status **2:55** · effects and enemies to fight - all things that you’d think would lead to much greater strategic potential much more fun deckbuilding and just a greater number of interesting things to do, but I got bored of that after a few runs whereas slay the spire 2 gripped me the moment I started playing and has yet to let go. And even just on a marketing level, something like FBC firebreak that **3:15** · promised a coop shooter but with the spooky weird vibes of control, or Crimson Desert which pitched itself as dark souls meets breath of the wild seemed like slam dunk concepts but both of them, despite executing on their core concepts well enough, never seemed to come together into something that captured my imagination or could support an entire game’s worth of ideas. **3:34** · So, what’s going on here? Why is it that some of the mechanics and systems in games that seem like they’re going to be interesting ultimately turn out… uh… kind of the opposite, and how can we tell which ones it’s going to happen to?. Well you’ll be glad to hear that Mark Rosewater’s advice wasn’t as I initially thought, that games have to be boring and predictable in order to be fun. **3:53** · What this distinction really means is that often the fun of games doesn’t come from big flashy individual ideas, which if allowed to overshadow a game can lead to shallow and disempowering experiences but instead from how lots of smaller ideas interact and work together to create a much richer experience than they ever could alone. The origin of this idea and the attached quote comes from way back in 2001’s Odyssey set where the magic design team created a combo of cards designed to disrupt the established metagame of gradually building up a lot of card advantage over time. They created this dog who lets you discard cards, and this giant… squirrel? **4:26** · Okay, who gets really strong when you have a bunch of cards in the graveyard, the gameplan being to discard your whole hand, buff up the krosian beast really fast and then start battering your opponent before they could react. It was a novel and very powerful strategy, but people hated playing with it, not because they didn’t understand the threshold mechanic but because it created really boring gameplay, either you did the combo in which case all you could do is attack or you didn’t in which case you mostly just lost. In other words, it was interesting, but it sure as hell wasn’t fun. **4:55** · Now, Mark Rosewater’s point here is that it doesn’t matter how conceptually interesting a card is to think about, if it isn’t fun to play then it’s poorly designed, but I think this idea also taps into a deeper and more fundamental game design truth. In making people throw away the thing they use to interact with the game, their cards, not only did the krosan beast combo rob players of the fun of using them, but their potential strategic options became vastly more shallow as well and it’s the interplay and interaction between magic’s incredibly rich suite of cards that makes the game so enjoyable. **5:28** · In other words, this superficially interesting strategy destroyed magic the gathering’s depth, and it’s that I’ve been talking about the entire time. **5:41** · Depth is something that people reference constantly, but what does it actually mean? **5:46** · Well simply put, depth when it comes to describing an artistic work, be it a game or a book or a portrait describes its level of nuance, how many ways there are to think about it and interpret its constituent parts or to what level you can manipulate and rearrange what’s already there into cool new shapes. The deepest games ever made aren’t the biggest or the flashiest or the hardest, they’re the ones that have the most layers of strategy and understanding to unpack, and the ones which seem to constantly evolve the more we play - the likes of devil may cry and factorio are titles you can play for hundreds of hours and constantly find new ways to play them **6:17** · and new layers of mastery to uncover in a way that you can’t with equally good but less deep games like, I dunno, Indiana Jones and the great circle where you’ve probably seen basically everything it has to offer by the time the credits roll. This is even more true for competitive games, where people are always discovering new aspects to competitive metagames that keep them fresh after decades or sometimes even centuries because of how deep the interactions between their rules go. **6:40** · This, after two and a bit pages is why interesting concepts often don’t result in games that are actually fun to play, oftentimes a cool idea grabs our attention and seems to stand out precisely because it operates at odds to what you expect, but unless this stuff meaningfully intersects with the rest of the game then it’s going to lack the emergent nuances and multifacetedness that comes from well designed deep systems. **6:57** · Depth isn’t something that developers can create simply by adding the right mechanic or following the right design blueprint, it’s something that arises organically as we players explore a game and that means that this foundational form of fun is, unlike other more straightforward reward mechanisms, incredibly fragile. **7:15** · If a designer upsets a game’s internal the ecosystem by adding something that causes the game to become more simplistic and one dimensional, like we saw with the krosian beast, then a game’s depth can completely evaporate, but equally, if us players are dumb and don’t interrogate and explore a game enough we may never discover depth that’s been waiting for us to play with the whole time and have a bad experience as a result. **7:38** · Through the lens of understanding depth a lot of related videogame mysteries get answered. **7:43** · I wondered for ages why I didn’t like sonic frontiers because I’d been crying out for an open world sonic game for ages, eventually I figured out that because the game’s movement tech and the open world stuff which mostly takes the form of minigames or combat, rarely actually intersect it means that you never really get the chance to use sonic’s moveset in a way that makes the most of it and thus the game feels shallow. I wondered why watch dogs never quite worked for me. The idea of hacking everything and anything seemed cool, but it’s because regardless of how many options you have, none of them really interact with eachother in interesting ways, they’re all just variants on stealth, hacking or combat. **8:15** · And I didn’t quite understand what kept drawing me back to the incredibly silly horsey game un I realized that beneath it’s ridiculous aesthetic and seeming chaos, there’s actually a lot strategy to the breeding economy races because of how tightly interwoven all the dumb mechanics like circus performing are. **8:36** · This all begs the question okay then, if big flashy shallow ideas are the opposite of depth, then how can we as players spot the games with enjoyable depth that can sustain us for hundreds of hours? Well deep games basically do the opposite, instead of building themselves around singular high concept ideas, a deep game that’s rewarding to explore and master is instead structured around multiple overlapping ideas and systems that keep eachother in constant equilibrium. **8:59** · To use a practical example, look at a turn in any deckbuilder, let’s just say slay the spire 2 because I promised i’d come back to it later, you aren’t just maximizing damage in a single turn, you need to consider building up statuses to help on future turns and protect yourself from damage which is persistent across the entire run, with your card rewards and path through the spire needing to be considered in the context not just of your immediate circumstance but how they interact and synergize with your deck. **9:24** · These hidden meta-level connections and strategic interactions between a game’s various mechanics require a lot of work to get right, and a lot of design iteration to join them all up, and in games that seem superficially more complex or like they’ve got more stuff in them, this interconnected structure is often much less robust and thus less deep, with strategies feeling linear and inflexible and it being much easier to conclusively solve your strategy because each choice has substantially fewer ramifications. This is why games with a lot going on feel weirdly shallower compared to more elegant, streamlined games, a games depth comes from it’s internal interactions, not just the amount of stuff going on. **10:01** · In deep games, all the different aspects of play are constantly talking to eachother and feeding back into the overall equilibrium, with skilled players being able to navigate them in a way newbies have yet to master. To look at deckbuilders again, in something like Dominion, it’s hard to understand why the chapel, a card that gives you no money, no points, no card draw and no actions but instead removes actually useful cards from your deck that do is by far the best card in the whole game, but to an expert, the dynamics that make it powerful are so obvious that I’m going to leave it as a special secret for you to figure out yourself. **10:29** · Equally, in tactics games, the deepest ones and thus the best ones are constantly asking you to juggle multiple factors both in battle and outside of it with each conflicting and overlapping consideration making the strategy much deeper. Unicorn overlord gives every class some absurdly powerful moves like megadodging thieves, big tanks that can block for their friends and mages that take away your attacks so you need to carefully juggle how your squads are going to counter them by equipping their tactics just right and making sure they act in the right order, other tactics games help keep **11:06** · even the most generic of battles interesting by having permanent consequences that roll on between battles, the likes of fire emblem or darkest dungeon have permadeath that means your squad composition will always be changing and you’ll need to juggle risk and sacrifice as factors. **11:19** · A good litmus test for a deep game is how small of a change you need to make for the interconnected system as a whole to start feeling different to play. For example in 4X strategy games the mechanics each individual faction engages with is more or less always the same, the combat functions the same the buildings are mostly the same the fundamental rules are all the same, but something as tiny as the Kin of Sheredyn in endless legend 2 getting happiness for building military buildings completely upends how you play the game because it has knock on effects on what you research, your economy and your diplomatic posture. **11:47** · In Mewgenics which is a good game that I like, introducing a single new ability cna open up entirely new strategies you’ve never seen before like how the tanks rock crush ability suddenly lets you trivialize all rock based enemies and how adding a mind control bat lets you do really dumb stuff like tame an instakilling daddy shark who solos bosses for you by devouring them. **12:09** · And, hell you need only look at the subreddit for any dota clone whenever the devs make literally any change, to see how even tiny changes can cause major freakouts actually don’t do that it’s a bad idea, buffing one character or changing a small map detail can have major ramifications because the megagames of these titles are so tightly wound and full of interdependent systems. **12:37** · Of course, strategic depth can also be reflected on a much more immediate scale, deep movement systems in platformers don’t come from you sitting down and pondering Sun Tsu between jumps, they’re built around multifaceted movesets that tie into eachother and can be leveraged in novel ways. There’s a reason why basically every platformer copies nintendo's approach of giving mario multiple moves in the air, whether it’s air spins, dives, double jumps, fluttering, **13:00** · turning into a weird spinny bat, whatever, all these bonus moves aren’t just there to give you a chance to course correct midair, they also give you more flexibility and more options, meaning you’ve always got multiple approaches and things to consider at all times, creating a bunch of emergent depth in how you can string all these moves together. Trust me go back and play a really basic platformer like the old castlevanias where you can’t even control your jump height and feel for yourself how stifling and tedious it is. **13:22** · Racing games are another area where depth can arise out of split second decisions because they tie into the wider race, changing gear in a more realistic game isn’t just about this next corner, it provides knockon considerations about your acceleration coming out of the turn and how you’re going to prepare for the next stretch of track, and in more arcadey stuff like F-zero, juggling **13:48** · your boost meter which is also your health in a risk reward dance necessitates planning and risk management which ties every choice and every mistake into new considerations about the optimal way around the track - something that’s much more fulfilling to master than in games where you can just go faster and steer. The bonkers sonic fan game Dr Robotnik’s ring racers takes this to an **14:08** · absurd degree by tying not just your ring boost and your health together but also your attacks, meaning you can’t just hold onto your defensive items forever like in mario kart because that locks you out of your boost meaning you go much slower, with you gaining access to a powerful melee attack only when you’re out of boost and in the danger zone - this seems like a needless imposition but in linking these mechanics instead of separating them the game forces you to make considerations and tradeoffs you never ordinarily would have to, resulting in a much more nuanced decision tree to master that pushes your skills to their absolute limits. **14:39** · But, none of this depth matters if us players never actually get to see it. This is what makes creating a truly deep game such a difficult and rare thing because it’s not enough for a developer to lay down all the overlapping systems and mechanics in such a way that they’re constantly interacting in different ways and creating a bunch of nuanced decisions if the player never so much as dips their toe into the potential depth the game has to offer. **14:57** · This is a problem that can be found in a lot of immersive sims - these games make their name on having a whole bunch of systems with emergent complexities that give players a whole bunch of gameplay options… options that usually go unused because people just go for the most direct violent approach they can most of the time as there’s very little reason not to. **15:17** · Performing a silent infiltration in hitman or making a rube goldberg trap in deathloop is fun largely because of the depth of the systems you’re working with, but they take ages and the universal problem solver that is extreme violence is right there. A lot of the time I’ve found it’s nonviolent immersive sims like CTRL ALT EGO and Rhell Warped Worlds that avoid this issue because the direct path of headshotting the problem away doesn’t exist and therefore your mind is freer to explore more abstract, creative solutions to problems that make better use of the mechanics. **15:51** · In a lot of ways, violence in general falls into that same interesting but not fun trap in almost any game that’s not solely about combat, it’s immediately compelling but often leads to quite linear, shallow gameplay that feels unsatisfying long term. **16:10** · This is also why balance is so important in any game that wants to be deep, it doesn’t matter how many potential strategies and gameplay nuances a game can throw at you if they’re all terrible compared to the one thing that totally invalidates them. The weird ubiquity of stealth instant kill strategies in many games highlights this very well, if there’s a simple, linear way to win every fight that involves no forethought then the extra gameplay complexity provided by the other tricker approaches may as well not exist. **16:31** · Same goes for Monster Hunter wilds which has an absurdly deep combat system but it kind of doesn’t matter a lot of the time because you only need one move and that’s the one that pops monster wounds to stun them - a problem that doesn’t exist in older, more simplistic games weirdly leading to them being deeper despite having less going on. Balance is maybe the keyest way to distinguish depth from complexity, in many complex games depth actually disappears because there are simply too many ways to break the game and oversimplify things by finding an optimal strategy. **17:02** · True balance, especially when it comes to fostering deep play isn’t the same thing as every strategy being equally good or there being a lot of choice, only that there is no one right answer or response to any given situation. **17:22** · Most competitive games are well known to have some good characters or strategies and some bad ones, but it doesn’t matter because the ones that are worth playing still have deep interplay, after all you don’t get people whining on chess forums about pawns and kings being too underpowered because the relative power of the pieces is all part of the game’s strategic metagame. Hell, the reason why starcraft is such a deep game in spite of the fact that some units kind of suck and never get used is because there are still always multifaceted responses to any move your opponent makes. **17:50** · Is a protoss going for an early expansion economic strategy? well you can punish them with zerg infantry before they get their crucial vespene gas reserves up and running, but equally the infamous zerg rush can be countered with bulky armored units that chew up zerglings and building walls on key chokepoints, something that makes it harder to move around your base, making flying flanking attacks very powerful. **18:12** · Much like how necessity is the mother of invention, restrictions can also encourage us players to explore a game’s depth when otherwise we’d ignore it, so long as they’re used carefully. **18:20** · My favourite bit of the new zelda games are the shrines where all your gear gets taken away for this reason, suddenly you’re forced to get creative and use all the systemic mechanics you’ve not been using the whole time. Equally stuff like the duels in ghost of Yotei and enemies in brawlers who are weak to specific techniques are actually great for increasing a game’s depth because they exist to remind you of mechanics you had access to the whole time and show you the virtues of mixing them into your regular gameplay, increasing it’s depth. **18:42** · This is something that goes even further when it comes to player imposed challenges, something like a Pokemon Nuzlocke which imposes a whole bunch of bonus rules on you like permadeath and no items forces you to change how you approach the game, letting you view typically useless status moves in a new light, giving you a whole new appreciation for the battle system. **19:08** · Basically, we have to consider our own role as an integral part of the interconnected, overlapping systems that make deep games not just interesting but fun. Because, really, whilst I’ve talked a lot about how great game make their naunces easier to engage with or more palatable or just, y’know, more fun, the real secret of videogame depth is that there is an infinity of discoveries and a bottomless well of complexity waiting to be discovered in basically all videogames and in basically all art, the only thing that really differs between them is in how easy it is to access. **19:39** · People constantly dismiss titles that are really hard or really easy as not being deep, but this couldn’t be further from the truth, you just need to know where to look something like Noita is rock hard because of the incredible potential of it’s systemic mechanics that take a while to master because there’s so much going on with them, and there’s loads of brain-bending optimization depth to be found in the easygoing stardew valley, equally the great tragedy of **20:02** · many pay to win games is that they have some genuinely compelling battle systems that never really get used or appreciated in the way they could be because of the a manipulative surface layer in front of them you’re forced to engage with and Sure, Mewgenics might have a case of some of its classes being more conceptually interesting than they are fun, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t still use them as vehicles to explore the depth of the rest of the game and have a bunch of fun doing so - I had a mage who rolled useless skills so I turned him into a mutation **20:30** · farm to pass on his creepy amigara fault genes to future generations of killers, and another one that also wasn’t really pulling it’s weight accidentally ended up saving the whole team when my cleric flooded the lair of an electric boss by making safe insulated islands of ice with his otherwise crap passive, saving my run in a really funny way that made me appreciate how deep the game’s battle mechanics went, because it was still funny even when the game was fucking me over. **20:54** · Just think, in almost every game that has ever been made, from the greatest to the crappiest, there exists the potential for experiences as rewarding and multifaceted as the most sublime videogame experiences of all time, locked away in the amber of ignorance, and the only thing that separates them is a combination of bad luck and these hidden depths being harder to find, the real sin of the krosan beast, mewgenics’ mage and everything from stealth kills to bad jumps isn’t that they somehow by their nature destroy a game’s nuance, just that they present a design culdesac that makes every game’s limitless potential harder to find. **21:23** · This is why it’s so important for developers to give players the tools they need to access a games depth, and not to distract them with potentially interesting avenues that ultimately lead nowhere but also for players to be willing to put in the work to keep discovering new parts of games they love when the deliberately authored content runs out. **21:39** · Super Smash Bros Melee, was never intended to be a timeless competitive staple, it’s a hacked together, imbalanced and occasionally nonfunctional game that nevertheless incredibly passionate people have found hidden beauty in, and it alongside basically all competitive games got that way because people found incredible depth within titles that weren’t designed to be anything more than distractions but where their idiosyncrasies and quirks ended up fitting together in interesting, unexpected ways. Of course we can’t forget that combos, now a bedrock component of fighting games also started out life as a bug expanded upon and embraced by passionate players in street fighter 2. **22:30** · This adventurous, exploratory approach to games is also the fundamental impulse that drives the speedrunning and modding community after all. Both of these disciplines involve taking games, dismantling them, turning them inside out and putting them back together in order to do stuff with them that not even the developers could anticipate - and it’s only by looking at games through this lens that you can uncover a whole spectrum of experiences and a bottomless well of emergent depth that existed just out of sight and yet were weirdly right in front of you the whole time. **22:55** · Speedrunning something requires a totally different point of view on the same familiar gameplay as mechanics you thought you’d mastered unveil entirely new dimensions and your existing skills are pushed from entirely different directions and not only is this a fun new way to play but there’s a deeper satisfaction in speedrunning that comes from cracking open a game to see it from the inside out, revealing it’s true potential. **23:12** · And modding far from just being a way to give cloud a skimpier outfit allows us to take the raw material of a game’s engine, rules and environments and realize the full scope of their depth that was always within them, when someone makes a crazy content expansion or a balance overhaul of a game they love, they’re not replacing something they thought sucked, making and playing this stuff is an expression of love and passion for the source material and just another facet in a game’s depth. **23:36** · Hell sometimes a game can transcend it’s original form completely and become something like the doom engine, where getting it to do stupid things like run on a calculator has become a deep game in it’s own right. By the way, ring racers that I mentioned earlier also runs on the doom engine for reasons that are brilliant and almost entirely explainable by mass application of autism. **23:59** · So yeah, 25 years ago mark rosewater designed some crap magic the gathering cards, and a bit more recently Edmund Mcmillen and Tyler Glaiel designed some classes that have cool ideas but that feel a bit boring in practice, and this goes to show that no matter who you are or how far gaming as a medium comes, there is always more to discover and more lessons to learn as we as a community continue to uncover how games as a medium tick and how deep the artform’s potential goes. **24:23** · I guess if there’s any concrete takeaway from this very rambling video it’s that the idea of artistic depth transcends mere good design practice, it’s a fractal, constantly evolving thing that constantly gets more complex the more you look into it, and even when games make mistakes on a strategic level or lead players astray on an emotional one these quirks make the story of the game as whole deeper and more nuanced So, the next time you play a game and you realize **24:46** · that something you were looking forward to was more interesting than it was fun, don’t despair, because I think we’d all much rather I have games that are deeper in some areas than they are in others due to design risks than games that aren’t deep at all because they spend all their effort on surface level gimmicks.chances are that even if there isn’t any compelling depth to be found where you thought it would be, if you look hard enough, there’ll be more than enough to satisfy you basically everywhere else if you just keep looking, that is of course why I have 100 hours in mewgenics, not because I like it eww no gross I’m doing dry intellectual design **25:17** · analysis obviously it’s not fun it’s not my favourite game of the year so far nooooo Hello and welcome to the after the video segment, phew, I’m sorry this one took so long it has to be brief been a fucking nightmare to put together, I had to scrap a whole video completely three weeks in and cobble this one together at lightning speed to get it out, my bad. **25:39** · Anyway, if you don’t want to listen to me complaining what you should want to listen to is a little recommendation and that is for a videogame comedy podcast by the name of button boys, it stars three people that english standup fans may recognize in the form of Glenn Moore, Sarah Keyworth and Pierre Novellie. **25:57** · Button boys is great primarily for the fact that it’s the only videogame podcast that makes a point about not talking about industry news which gets pretty repetitive and instead, these two boys and one not boy are able to focus on being easily the funniest gaming podcast I’ve ever listened to and I highly recommend watching the three of them make a lot of really bold predictions about games they’re looking forward to only for most of the picks to be absolute crap. Check em out. **26:31** · Of course if you do want to listen to me complain well then please consider supporting the channel on patreon or youtube memberships because if you do you get special privileged access to all kinds of extra goodies that I spend a whole bunch of time and effort on - you want bonus videos? Extra game recommendations? Your name in the credits? Behind the scenes stuff? You got it, along with my eternal gratitude for helping the channel keep running and my preemptive forgiveness for you adblocking this video, one month of direct financial support is worth a lifetime of ad views so go ahead and adblock them if you give me money, that sounds fair. **27:01** · Of course there’s one other thing and that’s for my 10$ supporters who get a voiced shoutout right at the end, and those people are… Aly Wright Andrew Lubrano Auno94 Baroness Caroline Bobby Chao Constantin Amend Cosmix360 Daniel Mettjes Daniel Ursin Derk-Jan Karrenbeld digletteer Dis\_Ely ecton Edward Franklin Woods EdwinaTheSpaceBun Eric Walston Eugene Bulkin fulibacsi Furious Hulk Gazkul Hao HeckitsNoah I support trans rights. **27:34** · I'm So Glad You Weren't Eaten Jacob Dylan Riddle Jinkeloid KevinHelpUs (on YouTube!) **27:38** · Konulv Kängi Leap Year Everyday Luke Corcoran Macewindow54 Mark Valent Micah Oi Michael C. Mike Oxlong Nate Graff Oliver Maurhofer Patrick Rhomberg Peter Tomasic Rederdex RegalRegex San Dimas Vestibule Consortium Sezlux SilverFolfy Tyler Duncan Tymoteusz Beczek WhimsicalWisp Zach Brantmeier Chao Okay that’s it from me, the next one will be quicker I promise, bye!