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Breadth and depth

Game communities call them both depth, which is a huge error.

I played an RTS that claimed to have depth because of the insane amount of armor and weapon types. In the end, the armor/weapon strengths & weaknesses were still just rock-paper-scissors. Having hundreds of them just meant you had to look them up on a spreadsheet, in order to make the simple rock-paper-scissors decisions. This is breadth with no depth. Although confusingly, gamers will still call it "depth," not having the distinction of "breadth" in their vocabulary.

Meanwhile simple ancient games like Go can achieve a large amount of complexity with simple rulesets. That's real depth. I think depth is probably hard to invent intentionally.



One could argue that Go from the design point of view is has no breadth nor depth.

There are few rules and rules are very simple.

Depth of the strategy and the gameplay comes out as emergent property of the game.

But that's just splitting hair.




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