Luminous

I was pondering over this conundrum the other day, and figured it'd be interesting to see everyone's opinion on the matter.

I think it's fair to say that gaming has evolved since the days of Super Mario, where A was to jump, and d-pad was to move, and with flower power, you might just use B. As newer generations have arrived, button count has traditionally been upped each time, and usually have some analog sticks thrown in for good measure. This has allowed for more complexity and variety in what you can do in a game, but has it made it any more fun?

This generation, Nintendo has switched things up a bit with their Wii design, going for depth in simplicity. If you look at a lot of third-party Wii games, you sometimes find odd configurations, since the standard 'Mote+ Chuk combo only have 4 readily accesible buttons, and people have to squeeze games that have typically used more into it. This led me to thinking, are all of these different functions needed? Surely we don't need 6-8 buttons to have a functional and depthy game, right?

Well, that's my question to you AO. If all of the games in the world were made for you, would you want them to have depth in simplicity, or depth in complexity? Does more buttons and added functionality contribute to the fun factor through variety and added options, or is a immediately easy to play and figure out game more appealing? Is there a lucky balance betwen the two? What would it be?

This can apply to all consoles and platforms by the way, the Wii was just an example. The question could just as easily be "Do 360 games end up funner with more buttons and combinations?".

Post away!

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