A poet once wrote of “the fascination of what’s difficult”, and there is doubtless a similar attraction in wrestling with a videogame. One of the medium’s core satisfactions is that of interacting with a complex, dynamic system whose various interdependencies can be manipulated by a skilful player. But is more complexity always good?

It’s true that we need a minimum level of complexity in any game for it to be interesting. Tic-tac-toe quickly becomes boring because it is combinatorially trivial - you can see all the possible games quite quickly. Move up an order of complexity to something like Connect 4 and you have a very entertaining, playable game (even though it has been officially “solved” by brute-force computing). Add another order of magnitude to arrive at something like Othello and we begin to talk of deep strategy, in a game which still only has a handful of very simple rules.

This last example reminds us that there are two quite different attributes we might call “complexity”. There is, firstly, a sheer numerical quantity of options or commands, as with a board game that is festooned with a panoply of different types of cards and counters, or the kind of strategy videogame that boasts of its enormous variety of resource types, materiel and so on. Let’s call this surface complexity. Secondly, there is the complexity that arises from a perceived depth of possible tactics or strategies, which can emerge from a very simple set of initial rules. Call that deep complexity.

Robotron 2084 is a very simple design combining eight-way movement and eight-way firing with a handful of different enemy behaviours. Eugene Jarvis remarked on the emergent deep complexity of his masterwork when he recalled watching someone play it: “He was using tactics I never imagined, strategies I didn’t think possible.” And the western paradigm of the complex game is still chess, which has a small set of simple rules, but which can generate more possible games than there are atoms in the universe. (Japanese Go is even more complex.)

My most surprising recent gaming experience was a hugely entertaining evening playing Conflict: Desert Storm on Xbox in cooperative mode. Now any aficionado of the numerous classy squad-based combat games developed on PC is likely to look down his nose at what he perceives as a travesty of his genre. The surface complexity which usually characterises the tactical squad shooter has been rudely circumscribed; nonetheless, C:DS is terrifically enjoyable.

It has, for one thing, possibly the best console implementation of a sniper rifle, in terms of feel, since GoldenEye. It gives a strong illusion of tactical freedom: you want me to sneak into that hangar and plant C4 on the MiG when it’s crawling with enemies? Sod it, you open the hangar door and I’ll just fire a rocket in there. The fact that its soldiers tend to walk in a somewhat constipated half-stoop, and sometimes have trouble following a straight line, can be forgiven. My friend and I spent many happy hours scoping out the terrain, dreaming up strategies, and shouting abuse at each other - “Okay, you snipe from up here and cover me while I run across the bridge to plant the explosives.” “Where’s your guy? You’ve lost him, haven’t you?” “That’s me you’re shooting!”

The fact that the command system is so manageably limited could be argued to be a virtuous simplification, given that the player also has to worry about who has the right weapons to do the job, where the sheikh is, which office block conceals an enemy sniper, and whether you have time to deliver a medipack to your lovable Cockney SAS comrade, groaning somewhere in an alleyway. Now, I am not arguing that surface complexity and depth complexity cannot coexist: clearly, they can. But in a context of sociable action gaming, any more surface complexity than C:DS has already would act as an obstacle to immersion. If we’d each had to read a manual and memorise thirty different key commands, we would have given up after half an hour. The extra tactical depth that such an increase in surface complexity might have afforded simply would not have been worth the price of entry.

Note that this isn’t at its core a PC-versus-console argument. There are console games with surface complexity but little depth - such as Ratchet & Clank, with its impressively large variety of gadgets and weapons, but insufficient freedom to use them in creative ways. And there are PC games, such as Serious Sam or Gridrunner++, which offer rich experiences through the interaction of relatively simple components. What is obvious that surface complexity is much easier to advertise. If a developer can point to a wide range of commands and actions and call them “features”, that is much more understandable to a publishing suit than some vague hand-waving about how the game is, like, really complex and satisfying once you get into it.

One game great which does revel in surface complexity is Deus Ex, with its bewildering array of biomods and skill enhancements, which were the game’s primary selling point. But these are arguably not essential to what makes the game so compelling, which is its rich illusion of absolute freedom to tackle situations in the way you choose. Of course, if you choose to specialise in lockpicking then you’ll need fewer lockpicks to open a given door, but when playing through the game again recently on PS2 I couldn’t be bothered to experiment with different upgrades and replay levels to see what effect they’d have. The game is already sufficiently long and rich in tactical incident.

It seems an increasing number of developers are deciding that less is more. Advance Wars offers the core of turn-based strategy gaming stripped of irrelevant surface complexity. Then there is Quantum Redshift, where the limitation of three weapon types tends to make races much more tactical than in other sci-fi racers, as you decide whether it’s worth falling back in order to use the homing missile on the guy who’s on your tail. And we all know the kind of mind-bendingly complex gameplay offered by the one-handed torture device that is Super Monkey Ball.

But just when you are thinking that simplicity is the new complexity, along comes the glorious Steel Battalion, with its twin-stick, three-pedal, 40-button metal behemoth of a controller. Cunningly, while revelling in outrageous complexity of the control system, the game actually offers compellingly direct point’n’shoot gameplay. The four brushed-steel switches that initialise your mech’s systems will never be used in the rest of that session, but it sure feels good to flick them. This is surface complexity engineered as the glamour of competence, and its over-the-top grandeur makes you hope that, after all, arbitrary complexity will never quite go away.