Useful? The full article is on Gamasutra.
Gigi
You’re missing the point. Not only did the title of the original article compel you to click on the link, it actually compelled you to write a whole article about it on a prominent website that links back to the original. You swallowed the linkbait hook, line and sinker, which was the whole point of the original article.
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I haven’t read the article yet, I just feel compelled to comment on the fact that this is a thread about an article about an article… very meta.
OK, finally read it. I don’t disagree with either one of these articles, except the part of the second article that said the first was useless. They’re both lists of good things - the first article is very high level and the second is slightly more down-to-earth.
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at this point, if you have to study game design, you dont know what youre doing 
lol
(but yeah… pretty much all ive done with my life is play video games all day lool)
i tend to believe any articles about game design are totally off…
simplicity is LAME! … im trying to add as much complexity as I can…
… but yeah i guess like simulators are TOO complex… I wouldnt go that complex…
(lol like some black shark chopper simulator i could never get the chopper off the ground have to do soo much button flipping and stuff just to get rotor to turn on haha)
its because games are too simplistic, that i want to be a game dev…
like for a sword fight, i want to have like… at least 4-6 buttons , hi attack 1 , hi attack 2, hi block, low attack 1 , low attack 2, low block… … at the absolute least…
i HATE that 1 button crap… it just makes me think the devs were lazy… and incompetent
Quick Time Events are the WORST idea EVER in a game, EVERYONE complains that they are LAME
they were very prevalent in those “full motion video” games of the Beginning of the CD era (worst crap “games” ever made) (interactive crappy video)
"Squares, Circles, and Triangles"
is good though…
I don’t know if you opened this thread to criticize the first or the second article (maybe neither), but the author of the Gamasutra one feels incredibly flat-minded. He’s criticizing an article that he clearly didn’t even barely understand and completely misses the point. Also, his list of game design “constants” might be a fun read but are super-banal and very narrow-minded (and yes, I know that banality often equals truth, but not in this case imho).
I find the TechCrunch article very fascinating instead. Sure it starts from game design, but it’s just an excuse for a philosophical chat about game constants, which have nothing to do with “game design fundamentals”. The article is original in its own way and sparks some debate and thoughts. I bow to that: thought are great 
@Gigiwoo Did you post this because you got a link link in it?
Given the ten tabs that I’ve since opened, I’m preferring the second.
I would hate to be too mean to it, but the tech crunch article reads like lofty, pie in the sky wank that I could have won a game of buzzword bingo from.
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How long is a peace of string? I believe that game design is a variable, the only thing that can be certain is that a game must be entertaining… other then that it depends on the type of game your making and the target audience.
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How can you sum up all games in a few bite sized points. You dont need story (tetris), you dont need graphics (minecraft), and hell now you dont even need any gameplay (gone home).
Ah, now I feel I might’ve been too mean to the Gamasutra one 
Still, the TechCrunch article is indeed a wank but written for fun and with good concepts, which makes it an interesting wank for me and not pretentious at all (contrary to the Gamasutra one). After all, all philosophy is a wank, but sometimes it’s a good read.
I just find it appropriate that one is on tech crunch and the other is on gamasutra. One is casual and intended for a general audience who have probably never grappled with these notions already, and the other is intended for developers who can and should use the ideas.
I was hoping to generate conversation about the Gama article because … I wrote it! Try, fail, improve only works with feedback, which is what this thread is about. Apologies for the confusion.
@CaoMengde777 - “simplicity is LAME! … im trying to add as much complexity as I can…” is bad game design. My experiences across dozens of shipped projects, hundreds of hours observing users, and tens of thousands of hours in development are aligned with the cautionary tales seen in many game-dev postmortems.
From the player’s perspective, the system should appear as simple as is possible, which means for buttons, interactions, and interface, the old adage is true: Less is more. Or as Einstein advises, “Make things as simple as possible, but not simpler.” Or as Will Wright summed up, “Your garden is not complete, until there’s nothing else you can remove.”
The quicker you grok this, the quicker will may achieve excellence.
Gigi
Wooops! xD Sorry Gigi, I wouldn’t have bashed it so badly if I knew the author was present. Yours is an ok article as game design articles go, it just annoyed me that it was written as an answer to something it didn’t, uh, really understand. Ok I’ll stop I’m making this worse.
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I see you’ve hit bedrock. I could trade you a pickax for your shovel and you can keep digging your hole deeper.
Easy to learn, difficult to master. That’s how complexity should be handled. Personally, I wouldn’t use the term complex as a positive. The ideal is something nuanced and intricate. The general concept should be easy, but it should be multi-faceted enough that aspects of it should keep the player surprised and on their toes.
Well, that made me feel like I need to be indulging in a bottle of wine.
Only if it’s a diamond pickaxe, otherwise it will break with the depths I’ve reached
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Jesse Schell and Raph Koster called this Emergent Gameplay - aka the creation of simple systems that interact in complex and subtle ways. And Jonathan Blow took this to further by defining a good game as one that explores a single concept to it’s fullest, before ending in release.
Gigi
I definitely disagree with this. SOME players like simplicity. Some like complexity. Quite a lot of them like complexity, in fact, and I would even go so far as to say that anyone who identifies as a “hardcore gamer” generally prefers complexity simply for complexity’s sake. You more or less telling CaoMengde “No, you’re wrong. You don’t like multiple buttons. You like just one button.” right after he directly said that he prefers the exact opposite is the kind of rigid “designer knows best” mentality that drives me crazy. Especially having worked at companies that have user research labs, where the designers refuse to listen to any of the users’ complaints and insist that they know best.
If you take a look at games like EvE Online, one of its biggest draws is simply being very complex, and the way you get “good” is by scouring spreadsheets and reading innumerable articles and spending hours and hours figuring out how each system works. SOME players hate it because it’s too complex. But its fans love it for that reason; they take pride in its ridiculous learning curve and enjoy figuring out how to master a set of rules that most people find completely incomprehensible.
There are games with simple mechanics and ones with complex mechanics, don’t understand why this is an either/or scenario…Personally I prefer the Eve Online’s of the gaming world far more than the Mario Bros.
I get the feeling they are defining emergent gameplay outside the norm, but oh well.
Which is both it’s strength and weakness. I would love to try eve one of these days, but the month of studying I would need beforehand is what will probably keep me from ever getting around to it.
You are confusing game design with usability.
I am skeptical about your article because how can someone claim to know about game design when they dont seem to know the difference between gameplay and interfacing; Between Gameplay Design & Usability.
You immediately jump on this guy and say complexity is bad game design, despite the being an obvious lie proven incorrect vy quality games with complex systems.
How simple or complex the game’s design is, is irrelevant to making the players experience simple, usable, with understandability and flow in the interface.
A good interface can make a complex system simple without detractig from gameplay depth or freedom of choice.
Once more, I scratch my head at the article when it mentions stories being a requirement (with no rationale to explain the tetris example, which makes the “story” requirement point more whimsical opinion than rational argument).
Limiting choices as a requirement also sounds like a great invite to dull uninspiring game design.
Honestly, it sounds like your requirements hone in on marketable games for mass consumption, tipping on the opposite side of innovation. I can only assume based on your article that none of your games shipped are innovative, but are certainly successful enough financially because they are “safe” game designs.
No offense intended. I am just sharing my limited perspective on an article I had a hard time understanding.
Edit: I am still not entirely sure who is saying what and what they mean by it, so I wont delete this post. However…
Note that as stated in the next post, I interpreted CaoMengde777’s statement differently than you. I take back what I said about you being confused, as interpretting it in another way makes you sound totally correct. I apologize for any offense, although that was never my intention anyway.
I must mention that nearly always (but not always) complex systems result in horrid usability. This is especially true with indies, who very often make these types of games (more often than AAA companies) while also very often having horrid interfaces and usability even in simple systems. Indie is almost synonymous with a bad user interface.
With that said, it is easy to confuse complexity with a lack of usability. It is a much simpler task to design an interface for a simple game than to design a simple interface for a complex system.
Still… they are not mutually exclusive even of they appear so. Even if high usability is rare PERIOD for games or any other form of software, that doesnt mean we shouldnt strive for it.
How often can someone pick up a piece of software and understand it without any tutorial or assistance? Even more, how often does someone pick up a complex software like a 3D art application with limited documentation/assistance?
Even in the asset store, you make a purchase and end up scratching your head wondering why anyone would choose to do things this way or forget to include that obvious feature. Then there are the assets that flow like a dream where you barely even need to consult the documentation. “It just makes sense.”