Complexity creep is the concept that over the course of development designs will take on more and more complicated mechanics (and edge cases) than would be suitable for ease of play or to attract new players. Designers, who know their own game very well, often do not notice how difficult a game is to learn until they play it with new players. Complexity creep is not a positive trait in design.
And yet.
As we build this hobby industry, I see complexity creep everywhere and not all of it is bad. Consumers are becoming more sophisticated in their gaming tastes. Publishers are taking on ambitious projects. Genres are blending together. I want to discuss some of the types of complexity creep I see outside of a design with too many mechanisms.
The first is the rise of expansions. Expansions are essentially a way to introduce complexity in a controlled manner to players: "Here learn this game. Now learn a bit more for a new experience." Expansions allow designers to design games that are accessible to new players but also introduce additional depth down the road. However, too many expansions (and FOMO) can lead to a game feeling bloated or like the players are having to design their own play experience because playing with everything isn't feasible.
I want to pivot a moment and talk about wine culture. Most people (in the USA) start drinking wine with wines that are light, simple, and cheap. Many people never move on to more sophisticated wines. People who are really into wine buy wines that are complex, bold, single estate, small batch, or otherwise more difficult to approach than a bottle of Barefoot.
I hope the parallels to hobby gaming are obvious. Few hobby gamers start with A Feast for Odin. As the board game industry has developed, so have the tastes of the players. Some gamers will always prefer to stay with gateway games. But few players skip gateway games and go straight to heavy games. Instead, they experience their own version of complexity creep as they learn the language of board games and become able to easily parse more complex rules. There is nothing wrong with this tendency to drift toward more complex games. The difficulty comes when more complex tastes are seen as better, much like wine snobs. After all, few people would be playing complex games if they hadn't started with simple games. Getting people excited about something cool does not require tearing down something else.
I have seen some of this same complexity creep among reviewers, though to be fair most reviewers continue to express appreciation for gateway games. Instead, the struggle appears to be recommending new games when there are older games that are still in print and are better designed or cheaper. This complexity creep comes from having played 6,000 games and using that mental database as a standard to determine if a new game is good. This means the bar for a 'good' game rises for many reviewers over time. I'm not sure this is a bad thing either. As I wrote before, I think we need high quality criticism in order to progress as an art form. Your mileage may vary depending on what you see as the purpose for game reviews. (I like viewing detailed critiques of games because they makes me a better designer.) The biggest drawback that I see is reviewer fatigue from playing hundreds of games of varying quality. I doubt gaming fatigue produces better reviews.
Complexity creep is something that happens in your brain before it happens in your design. Familiarity breeds boredom which leads to complexity creep. It happens in other areas outside of design in much the same way. However, just because more hobby gamers are buying complex games doesn't mean all hobby gamers are in the same stage of complexity creep. Where consumers are on the complexity scale has to be taken into account when designing games. Your target audience may not be ready for that unusual auction mechanic. Publishers, players, and reviewers need to continue appreciate gateway games as the building blocks of the hobby while also continuing to raise their standards for what 'good' design looks like. These expectations are vital to me as a designer because they create the loose framework in which I design. Games don't look like they did twenty years ago and that's great. But it is also (kind of, sort of) complexity creep.
Hmmm...some of the claims in this one could use some refining, I think. Expansions can be--and often are--motivated by multiple impulses (giving a game franchise a longer revenue tail I think being one of the more common ones). Whatever the motivation though, I don't often see the effect being a bloated game or underdeveloped play experience. I think most designers feel the base game needs to be very good and complete to even make expansion content commercially viable, so it's not clear to me that expansions are reflecting or driving complexity creep in any substantial way. The more interesting point you raise here is whether normalization of certain otherwise complex concepts in hobby gaming is leading to complexity creep. I think you're right that it is and in fact I've seen it happen with friends of mine who I introduce hobby games to. I often half to remind myself that they don't understand concepts like "tapping" cards to indicate that they've been used, or even simple things like a discard pile may not be intuitive (I had to explain it once). Yet knowledge of common mechanisms and game types is essentially assumed when designing hobby games! Doesn't necessarily feel like a good or bad thing to me (it's nice to be able to bake in added complexity without the added cognitive tax even if you are thereby relegating your game to niche status). But a useful observation anyway.
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