Complexity is not the same as 'complicated'. The best entertainment and serious games are essentially very simple. Adding more elements to a game does not necessarily make it more engaging. With more information, actions and rules, a serious game is not necessarily better for learning or decision-making. As in art and writing, 'less' can be 'more'. Dennis Meadows called it 'learning to be simple'. Some of his games, like Harvest or the Hoop, demonstrate persuasively that complex behavior can be experienced with just a few players, trivial objects and rules. Of course, there can be many reasons why a serious game needs a larger number of game-elements and rules. Players often want to see in the game the many variables from their professional life. However, when complex behavior turns into complicated behavior, the point of the matter gets lost.

Games capture the player because they are full of surprises ! We do X in the game and something 'unexpected' happens. It would be very difficult, even impossible, to predict this behavior in advance even if we would know all the elements in the game. This is called emergence {1 + 1 > 2}. Since Aristotle, emergence is the distinguishing feature of complexity. Take the example of SimCity - it is impossible for two players to create exactly the same city, even if the players take the same decisions. The smallest difference in the decisions of the two players - one being a fraction of a second later, a millimeter further to the right  - may be the cause of a completely different city after hours of game-play. This is the Butterfly effect (Chaos theory) one of the branches of complex systems. Understanding and managing complexity is key to all grand challenges in modern society - climate change, migration, international relations, financial stability, virus control, terrorism, cyber security and so on. They are full of emergent behavior, which makes them difficult to understand, let alone to communicate about them and find the effective strategies to manage them. Because games themselves are complex systems, the aforementioned grand challenges can be modeled, explored as games, and management strategies can be tested within the game environment.

The june edition of the Magazine Nationale Veiligheid features an article that I have written about the war games played at the NSS, the Hague. Download the article in Dutch. or read the translation in English below.