Every day we navigate around complexity. The computer you’re using, the car or train you ride to work, or even the money you spend. You don’t have to understand how electronics work to use a computer or have a firm grasp of inflation to buy a cup of coffee. You can go your whole life only understanding a tiny portion of something you rely on every day.
We navigate the complexities of life by shifting the burden to someone else. In design this is called Tessler’s Law. Complexity doesn’t go away; you just change who is dealing with it. This concept can be acutely observed in videogames; and by witnessing that dynamic, we can get a better grasp of dealing with it in our society.
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Complexity is not something that you can ever really remove. While in Strange Journey complexity is a consequence of hundreds of demon combinations, in real life it’s a consequence of people themselves. In his History of American Law Lawrence M. Friedman comments that the early colonies had no lawyers and no legal codes, and that disputes were resolved by one local governor. It does not take a lot to govern a small group of people. As the population got bigger, more problems emerged and eventually new rules had to be enforced. Those rules started generating complexity, and eventually lawyers emerged to specialize in dealing with it.
Today, we are increasingly confronted with the difficulties of having one large government attempt to effectively govern millions of people. In order to do that, you have to create an equally large body of rules that covers all potential contingencies. At a certain point the complexity becomes too baffling for even the very people making the laws. The healthcare bill that generated so much controversy is more than 1000 pages long. Even if someone dedicated months to understanding such a document, it will impact millions of lives who do not have the time or inclination to grasp it. If a law is so complex that only a few can understand it, then there’s not much difference from the citizen’s perspective between that and having an authoritarian government.
Other examples abound of the complexity of law in our lives. The EULAs no one reads but assent to daily by merely visiting a website. The insurance contract that your life may literally depend on someday, but you’ve barely even glanced at. The copyright laws that are constantly changing and being enforced. Each of these things is important, but the time it would take to truly understand them is potentially months. Even if you try to purge the confusing legal jargon, all that complexity—thousands of terms and rules—is still there. The EULA or insurance agreement doesn’t become any less complicated; someone is just telling you the most important parts you missed. It is still a massive body of rules.
Strange Journey’s rule system is nowhere near as complex or confusingly phrased as a typical government law or contract. A couple dozen pages written in plain English are provided in-game on how things work, and the player is advised to read them when they have a chance. I did, including the part about stacking my attacks; yet now here I sit screwed because I didn’t take it seriously. There was just so much going on in the game that I didn’t really notice. You could blame this happening on me; you could blame it on the designers; you could mock the genre conventions or even the game itself. Each of these things is responsible in some way, and just fixing one will not necessarily resolve the others: the game tried to warn me, but some players missed its warning. With choices comes complexity, and with complexity comes the question of who is responsible for dealing with it.
