Practical Game Design

Depth and possibility space

You have probably heard about some games being described as deep. Depth in this context means that a game has a lot of complex systems and interesting choices hidden beneath the surface. Remember hearing about games that are easy to learn but hard to master? This cliche refers to a perfect-world scenario in which a game is accessible and understandable, yet filled with intricacies that take years of practice and offer near limitless replay value.

To create a game with a wide possibility space is to create a game with potentially endless combinations of interesting and unique scenarios to explore. Do games like that exist? Wouldn't they require an enormous amount of content to begin with? The answers are yes and ...