Here’s a game design aphorism you’ve surely heard before: a game, so it goes, ought to be “easy to learn and hard to master.”
This axiom is so frequently repeated because it purports to hold the key to a powerful outcome: an addicting game, one people want to play over and over again once they’ve started, and in which starting is smooth and easy.
It’s an adage most frequently applied to casual games, but it is also used to describe complex games of deep structure and emergent complexity.
In the modern era, this familiar design guideline comes from coin-op. The aphorism is often attributed, in a slightly different form, to Atari founder Nolan Bushnell. In his honor, the concept has earned the title “Bushnell’s Law” or “Nolan’s Law”:
“All the best games are easy to learn and difficult to master. They should reward the first quarter and the hundredth.”
Bushnell learned this lesson first-hand when his first arcade cabinet Computer Space, a coin-op adaptation of the PDP-1 ur-videogame Space War, failed to become a commercial success.
Computer Space was complex, with two buttons for ship rotation, one for thrust, and another one for fire. While the same layout would eventually enjoy incredible success in the coin-op Asteroids, four identical buttons with different functions was too much for the arcade player of 1971.
Pong was supposedly inspired by this failure, a game so simple it could be taught in a single sentence: Avoid missing ball for high score. It seems so obvious, doesn’t it? Games that are easy to start up the first time but also offer long-term appeal have the potential to become classics.
Except for one problem: the “easy to learn, hard to master” concept doesn’t mean what you think it does.