Elegance Vs. Obscurity

I had an amazing time at Tabletop Network '22. I came away with new ways of looking at design topics and several ideas for posts. This post follows some of my thoughts about another group's topic. 

I like this definition of elegance in board games: elegance is the elimination of unnecessary complexity. The elegance presentation at TTN this year did an excellent job of pointing to the various ways unnecessary complexity creeps into design. However, it is difficult for a designer to identify what is necessary complexity in their own designs. I think it could be helpful to take a look at what inelegance is in board games and how to avoid it. 

I think of the bad kind of inelegance as obscurity. I am not referring to hidden info or obscured scoring, but rather an experience that is hazy, foggy, muddy, or otherwise unclear. By identifying how much obscurity is in your game you also have a measure of how elegant the game is—the less obscurity, the more elegance is likely present. But how should we determine the amount of obscurity? 

Unintentional player confusion, via rules or components or what-have-you, is the easiest target to eliminate from your game. By this, I mean that you did not intend for players to be confused by those elements of your design and therefore their confusion is an undesirable by product of some sort of inelegance. Clarity and simplicity are the solution here. You can pretty well determine how elegant a game is or isn't by the amount of errata listed in BGG forums. 

However, sometimes inelegance can be a goal. Intentional player confusion can be a part of the play experience, especially in an atmospheric co-op. Or you may find that the game is more fun with a few rough edges left in rather than an overly smooth experience. These choices should be intentional. Intentional inelegance is a design choice; unintentional obscurity is not. 

I believe elegance is primarily about simplicity and clarity. Thus the more complexity  that is present the less elegant the game can be. However, a game can still be the most elegant within its genre of mechanism or weight. But speaking of weight, obscurity artificially increases the weight of a game. Many games would be noticeably lighter (and more welcoming) if the rules, graphics, and components had eliminated all unnecessary complexity. It feels increasingly gatekeeper-ish to me to publish a 'gamers' game that is heavier than necessary due to inelegant product design choices. 

Lastly, cleverness often gets conflated with elegance. I believe this is because the elegant choice is often the cleverest design solution. However, I do not believe there is full overlap between what is clever and what is elegant. Many times clever mechanics have to be removed from a game because they are too clunky within the overall play experience. Likewise, sometimes the simplest choices are the most elegant but not the most clever. 

To conclude, I'm not sure that complexity is the best way to think about elegance, because as designers we will tend to believe that all of our complexity is necessary. Obscurity (or muddiness, if you need a more visceral metaphor) allows us to ask questions of our design, such as "what is preventing players from accessing the fun parts of the game?" Or to put it another way, what poor design choices are obscuring the good ones?

ShippBoard Games is a board game design blog that updates most Mondays.