Designing for Elegance

Doing More With Less

When I first started designing games, I thought complexity was impressive. Adding more subtle and interesting mechanics and combos was a way for me to show off how clever I was and give more discovery options for players who were deep into the experience.

Over time, I realized that what I wanted wasn’t complexity, but depth. Complexity comes from having more things in your game: rules, components, text, etc. Depth comes from players having a variety experiences and decisions that are revealed as they play. Relying on complexity to add depth was a crutch that hurt the game and made it less accessible to players. Now, I believe that elegance is one of the core values of game design—it is the secret to gaining depth without relying on complexity.

Let’s break down what elegance is and how we achieve it.

Elegance is the quality of being pleasingly ingenious and simple. Elegant games achieve a depth of strategy and emotion with a minimal number of rules and components.

There’s a feeling you get when a game is elegant. You don’t necessarily notice it consciously, the decisions feel meaningful, the play feels natural, and the systems feel unified.

Elegant games create surprising depth with relative simplicity, but achieving this effect is far more difficult than simply adding more material.

So what does elegance actually require?

The first principle is easier said than done: Have as few rules as possible.

Once you identify your core mechanic, your job becomes making the most of it, rather than obfuscating it with more mechanics.

Look at the ancient strategy game called Go. Black goes first. Take turns placing stones. Surround the most territory. That’s the foundation. Yet the strategic complexity that emerges from those few rules is staggering.

The same thing happens in digital games. In Portal, the portal gun never fundamentally changes. You place one portal, then another, and a connection forms. The brilliance comes from how the environments force you to rethink that same mechanic in new ways.

In Katamari Damacy, you roll things up and grow. The mechanic remains constant while the context evolves as you go from being afraid of mice to rolling up skyscrapers.

Context shifting is one of the most powerful tools in elegant design. Instead of adding a new rule, you change the situation around the existing rule. In doing so, depth appears without increasing cognitive load.

The second principle is closely related: have as few components as necessary. Every new piece, token, tracker, or button increases friction.

Players may not articulate it, yet they feel it immediately. A table covered in bits doesn’t signal depth. It signals work.

Elegant systems compress multiple functions into a single component. The Star Wars Customizable Card Game used cards in your deck not just as things you play, but as resources, combat randomization and even as a victory condition.

For an elegant game, one object carries multiple responsibilities and that compression creates cohesion instead of fragmentation.

When I’m developing a prototype, I constantly ask myself what happens if I remove something. If the answer is “not much,” it probably didn’t belong there in the first place.

The third principle is about how players process information: chunk it!

Our brains struggle with long strings of disconnected data. They excel at grouping information into meaningful units or in this case “chunks.”

Organization is one way we can chunk information effectively. Trying to memorize the number 8615429085 is very difficult, but breaking that number into a chunked phone number 861-542-9085, makes the process much easier. In games, we can chunk information like this by grouping information. For example, if every weapon has a range, damage, and ammo statistic, I know what to expect when comparing weapons. When every character follows the same stat structure, players can evaluate new additions quickly because they fit into an established framework. Iconography contributes as well. A sword icon communicates combat faster than a paragraph of explanation ever could.

Theme is one of the most powerful chunking tools available to designers. Introduce a Wizard and players arrive with expectations: spells, fragility, mana, etc. That thematic identity performs cognitive work before a rule is ever explained.

Elegance isn’t about dumbing a system down. It’s about structuring complexity so that it feels intuitive rather than overwhelming.

The final principle is: teach your game in steps.

Even extremely complex games can feel elegant when the ramp is handled carefully. Consider World of Warcraft. At high levels, players manage dozens of abilities. No one begins there. Abilities are layered in gradually. Mastery builds over time.

Elegance depends not only on what exists in your game, but also on when players encounter it. Handing players every option at once would not create depth. It would create chaos.

Over the years, I’ve come to see elegance as subtraction, resembling a sculpture more than construction. You begin with something messy and full of potential, then chip away everything that doesn’t serve the core.

The goal is to make the game sharper, with depth derived from the masterful use of minimal mechanics and components.

If you want to test your own design for elegance, try something uncomfortable. Remove a rule. Combine two components. Change context on a core mechanic. Delay a mechanic until later in the experience. Then test again. If the game survives (or improves) you’ve uncovered something important.