The Design of Everyday Games
Tea Leaves (via Chris Hanson):
The take-away lesson for software developers, I think, is this: in terms of user interaction design, unless you have a damn good reason to do otherwise, design your game as if it will be targeted at a Gameboy Advance. Protect richness, but destroy, annihilate, and eliminate complexity as if you are Genghis Khan. You provide richness in a game by increasing the number of interesting choices the player has to make. Complexity, on the other hand, is created by making it harder to make those choices, or by hiding the interesting choices in a sea of boring ones. Richness is a virtue. Complexity is just retarded.
