Novelty and complexity budgets
There’s a certain type of joke that’s struck a chord in recent years, perfectly captured in Parks and Recreation, by a character who’s created a board game called “The Cones of Dunshire”.
Naturally, he wants people to play—but the game is so ludicrously complex that it’s tedious to explain, and presumably even worse to play.
A similar joke is expressed by The Onion headline: “Explanation Of Board Game Rules Peppered With Reassurances That It Will Be Fun”.
Obviously, these jokes speak to the very relatable experience of playing a game that is way too complex for what its audience has patience for, and the comical flop sweat of a host trying to push through this social gaffe.
There’s also a different, but related, recurring joke of a character presenting an artistic work—or pitching a product—that is “very novel”, but farcically so, to an extent that completely alienates its audience.
Once again, the oblivious judgment of the creator is crucial to the joke landing.
Ultimately, I’d argue that both these recurring bits speak to the properties of novelty and complexity in a work (or a product)—and the implicit notion that you can go too far.
In effect: there’s “a budget” for the amount of novelty and complexity you can introduce in something—that of course might depend on the particular thing, and who it’s for—but that the possibility of exceeding those budgets is always real, and never far off.
These budgets are genuine creative constraints, but unlike more obvious budgets like time and money, we might not really think of novelty and complexity as finite resources. Embracing them as deliberate constraints can be good, or even necessary—but we can only do so if we know they exist.
But before something can go “too far” in these ways, it first needs to catch our attention. Usually it does so through novelty.
What is novelty?
Novelty is the elements in a work that are unfamiliar or unconventional for its intended audience.
In the movie Alien, the alien xenomorph—and its horrifying lifecycle—is the unfamiliar element. Hollywood audiences had never seen an alien quite like that, especially H.R. Giger’s disturbing, biomechanical designs.
Everything else about Alien’s setting—spaceships, an alien planet, an evil robot, flamethrowers—is pretty familiar. Even the “used future” aesthetic had been introduced to popular acclaim in Star Wars.
The genre of Alien is firmly horror—specifically the slasher subgenre—and uses familiar conventions established by movies like Psycho and Halloween.
Alternately, an element can also be novel by being unconventional. For example, in Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, the “Connecticut yankee” might be familiar to its audience (at the time), but it was, of course, not a conventional element for a King Arthur story.
A familiar element in an unconventional context — that was the novelty.
Introducing novelty strategically
Novelty can—and, I’d argue, should be—introduced strategically, with focus and limits.
Novelty is the unfamiliar (or the unconventional), so let’s first describe how to introduce the familiar, the conventional.
In my article about setting and genre, I discussed how setting provides familiarity by telling us how to understand a work:
The setting provides a familiar vocabulary of elements — what designers call “mental models” — which allow you to understand (“mentally grasp”) what those elements are, and how they relate to each other. The setting “affords” understanding. Its elements are affordances, and their presence signals the setting.
Knights and dragons tell you you’re in a fantasy setting; cowboys and Indians tell you you’re in a Western.
Likewise, genre provides familiarity by telling you how you’ll interact with a work, “which, for many forms of media, is how you’re supposed to feel about it.” You laugh at a comedy, cry at a tragedy, and solve puzzles in a puzzle game.
Both setting and genre are helpful as we seek out new experiences, since they help provide a baseline of familiarity:
when people encounter something they like, they usually want more things like it. They want the familiarity of the things they like — but just different enough that it satisfies their desire for novelty. This tension between the comfort of the familiar and the desire for novelty means that genre serves a similar function as sequels or brands.
Similarly, someone might develop a preference for “fantasy” or “Western” settings, and then can use that familiarity to seek out new media or genres with those settings, comforted by the knowledge that they’ll have some partial understanding of whatever they encounter.
Still: if you’re seeking out a new experience, then clearly you’re seeking some amount of novelty. Something unique. But what makes one particular thing more likely to catch your attention over another?
The unique selling point (USP)
In marketing, there’s a concept called the unique selling point (sometimes unique selling “proposition”) which is, as the name suggests, how a product is uniquely differentiated compared to its competitors.
This is, effectively, its reason for being—its essence—and therefore how it will be marketed and signaled to its intended audience.
I think the concept of the USP is useful even outside the world of commercial products, for any work that has an intended audience. Even purely artistic works should, ideally, have some feature that makes them unique and compelling. Why they’re worthy of your time.
The unique selling point also, importantly, helps suggest a scope and a boundary for “how many new things a work should do”—in other words, its “novelty budget”.
The Novelty Budget
In another article, I talked about sequels, and how Civilization game designer Sid Meier makes the case that roughly “one third” of the elements in a sequel should be new. Not much more than that, and not much less.
I’ve also previously quoted Meier’s talk about the importance of leveraging setting and genre conventions to establish a foundation of familiarity for the audience.
Notably, in the same section where he talks about building this familiarity, he relates it to the importance of novelty:
But just satisfying the genre conventions is not really enough to make a new game, so that’s why I suggest you take advantage of all those conventions out there to make the game very comfortable to your player, but then do more. Add something new. A new button that does something cool. A new feature. But be sure to take advantage of these conventions, because they’ll make the player feel very, very comfortable in your world…
In another talk, he stresses why:
You can focus your energy and your resources on what’s going to be really impressive, what’s going to be new, what’s going to be hard to sell in the game and take advantage of things that the player is going to almost automatically provide through their own imagination.
This, to me, is his key advice: to make the setting and genre of a work overwhelmingly familiar, so that you can introduce novelty strategically—with focus and emphasis—to really spotlight your unique selling point.
I’m always struck by the clear, modest bounds of his ambition for novelty: “something new”, “a new button”, “a new feature”. He’s one of the world’s most successful game designers, but he’s hardly suggesting to do ten new things, all at once.
I find Meier’s humility deeply compelling—not only in his modest goals—but in his deep sense of empathy for his audience. He wants to make them “very, very comfortable”. He wants to reassure them with familiar elements, he tells us, so that when he does introduce some novelty—“what’s going to be a hard sell in the game”—that it’s not too stressful or confusing for them. These “hard sells” are focused, and limited. In other words, he has a budget for novelty.
Ultimately, his guidance is about building trust with his audience, so that they’ll stay engaged even when he introduces more challenging elements. Clearly he’s learned—over many decades and countless playtests—that if he doesn’t build that initial trust, that “contract with the audience”, they’ll be all the more likely to quit at the first sign of trouble. Because after all: if he’s only made them uncomfortable and confused up to that point, why would they possibly continue?
In screenwriting, there’s a rule of thumb coined by Blake Snyder in Save the Cat, that also suggests this idea of an implicit “novelty budget” in movies. He calls it “Double Mumbo Jumbo”.
I propose to you that, for some reason, audiences will only accept one piece of magic per movie. It’s The Law. You cannot see aliens from outer space land in a UFO and then be bitten by a Vampire and now be both aliens and undead.
That, my friends, is Double Mumbo Jumbo.
Let’s side aside, for a second, the glaring example of Marvel movies that nowadays have, like, Ten Mumbo Jumbos—due to all the characters and other claptrap that’s been meticulously introduced, movie-by-movie, over the past couple decades.
I’d argue that Snyder’s point still stands. Marvel didn’t introduce Iron Man, Captain America, Thor, and The Hulk all in the same film. They did it one-at-a-time, and by the time they got to The Avengers, well, them all being in the same movie was the novelty (that, and space aliens I guess).
Regardless, novelty budgets vary by setting and genre. “Art house” and “experimental” media maybe have the biggest budgets in this regard. Superhero and fantasy settings aren’t far behind. In The Lord of the Rings, so many fantastical elements are introduced early on, that by the time we get to talking trees and giant eagles, no one really bats an eye. (And how strange are those really?)
Anyway: novelty budgets vary based on setting, genre, and intended audience—but none are unlimited. In most cases: something new. One new thing. One mumbo jumbo. Make your audience “very, very comfortable”. Be kind to them.
Intrinsically related to the concept of novelty is that of complexity. Just like novelty, a work needs some amount of complexity to catch and hold our attention. And also just like novelty, there’s a limit to how much complexity an audience can handle. But how, exactly, is complexity different? Let’s start with a definition.
What is complexity?
Complexity is elements in a work that are—in space and time—densely arranged, irregularly arranged, or with varied elements arranged together.
In Immortals, the complexity of its (very cool) final shot comes from the dense arrangement of battling warriors:
In Mad Max: Fury Road, the complexity of this striking image comes from the irregular arrangement of Immortan Joe’s runaway brides:
In 2001: A Space Odyssey, the hard cut between a bone and a space station is an example of complexity through varied elements arranged together in time (and, literally, space):
Obviously, other media have other types of elements—words, notes, game mechanics. But the same principle of complexity still applies for dense, irregular, or varied arrangement in space and time.
And, as we know, there’s a limit.
Complexity Budgets
Game designer Richard Garfield (creator of Magic: The Gathering) coined the term “complexity budget” in regard to his game designs.
In an interview:
[G]ame designs have a complexity budget. You can only have a certain amount of complexity and you have to figure whether it’s worth spending.
If you figure you have 10 units of complexity budget and somebody wants to add something of one unit, but it only adds a small value to the game, then that’s not going to be as good as somebody who wants to add something that’s even more complex — it adds two units of complexity — but it adds a lot of value to the game.
When people begin thinking about it as a budget that they can use up, it makes it easier to understand why a mechanic may not be strong enough.
Like with novelty budgets, which I derived from Garfield’s term, different games might have different complexity budgets depending on their setting, or genre, or otherwise intended audience.
A fascinating example of complexity arguably gone “too far” was the original Minecraft’s crafting system: in order to craft items, you needed to drag-and-drop ingredients into a grid and discover, through trial-and-error, if any given pattern of ingredients would result in an item being crafted:
Discovering — and remembering — these crafting recipes was tedious, and so almost immediately, players created online wikis just listing all the valid recipe patterns. These wikis were used by almost everyone. By the time Minecraft was ported to mobile and consoles, the game’s developers clearly understood that this system was “too much” — especially for the more casual mobile and console audiences, who might not have a wiki open at all times (or even know to look for it). So the mobile and console versions of Minecraft simply let you choose crafting recipes from an always-available list:
Indeed, this “recipe book” feature was quietly added to the PC version several years later, and most Minecraft-inspired games notably do not use its original (complicated) crafting grid system.
Complexity and cognition
Like with novelty budgets, the concept of “complexity budgets” carries over perfectly well to other media, even writing, music, or film. A novel can only have so many characters and storylines. Songs can only have so many notes and instruments. Movies can only have so much visual complexity.
In many of his interviews, filmmaker David Lynch uses the terms “fast” and “slow” to describe this relative, cognitive complexity of different elements: “just like in a painting, there are fast areas, and slow areas”.
An empty room is a certain speed, and a person standing there is another speed, and that proportion is, you know, can be beautiful, if the room is a 2 and the person is a 7. I think a person is around a 7; fire and electricity can go up to a 9, for instance, or really intricately designed, you know, decorative room is pretty disturbing, sometimes — it’s too fast…
These relationships are kind of critical, and how a thing flows is critical, but again, it’s not an intellectual thing. It’s an intuitive thing. You can’t really talk about it, but things have a way of wanting to be.
Different types of elements, in different arrangements, have an inherent complexity, which contribute to the complexity of the whole. And you can only introduce so much complexity at once in space and time.
Works are fractal—and so are budgets
Most works are composed of smaller, distinct parts that form the whole: novels have chapters, films have scenes, songs have verses, games have levels.
Each of these fractal units, I’d argue, likewise has some proportional budget for its particular novelty and complexity. It might not be the same for each unit—but it also shouldn’t be orders-of-magnitude different.
The first unit experienced in space or time is, arguably, the most important in this regard, since it’s usually the first—and possibly only—opportunity to capture the audience: the first chapter of a novel, the opening of a film, the “hook” for a song, the tutorial for a game.
In each of these cases, a work needs to strike a careful balance in presenting some novelty, some complexity—enough to catch your attention, but not so much that it’s overwhelming or confusing.
So there’s novelty. And complexity. They both, apparently, have budgets that can be exceeded. But what’s the relationship between the two?
The Wundt curve
In the field of perception and psychology, there’s a theoretical curve to describe the relationship between novelty, complexity, and “hedonic value” (which we’ll, uh, just call “engagement”). This is the “Wundt curve”, first proposed by Wilhelm Wundt, then refined by Daniel E. Berlyne:
On the x-axis, stimuli are measured on two dimensions: simple vs. complex, and familiar vs. novel. So a given stimuli can be “simple familiar”, “simple novel”, “complex familiar”, or “complex novel”.
The y-axis is pretty straightforward: up is more engaging, down is less engaging.
As the curve suggests, “simple familiar” things are not especially engaging, but they become more engaging as they become more novel OR more complex—reaching a theoretical, ideal peak.
However: as novelty and complexity increase, especially in combination, then engagement diminishes, and eventually becomes negative.
This, ultimately, is the lesson: introducing some novelty in a work—or within its parts—is engaging. Introducing some complexity—also engaging. Introducing them both, especially a lot of both in the same space or time: overwhelming! Confusing! The opposite of engaging.
Novelty + Complexity = Cognitive Load
And that’s the thing: the novelty budget and the complexity budget are—in a very real way—the same budget. The novelty-and-complexity budget, or what we might more simply call the “cognitive load budget”, since both novelty and complexity contribute to an audience’s overall cognitive load.
So how, exactly, does one introduce novelty and complexity in such a way so as to maximize engagement, but minimize extraneous cognitive load?
An interesting example of how to do this effectively comes from Super Mario’s level design—and East Asian poetry.
Super Mario’s 4-step level design
In an interview, Super Mario game director Koichi Hayashida talks about their approach:
[I]n Japanese manga, for example, is a phrase, kishōtenketsu, where you [1] introduce a concept, and then in the next panel you [2] develop the idea a little bit more; in the third panel there’s [3] something of a change-up, and then in the fourth panel you [4] have your conclusion.
So that’s sort of what we try to do with the way people relate to gameplay concepts in a single level. We [1] provide that concept, [2] let them develop their skills, and then the third step is [3] something of a doozy that throws them for a loop, and [4] makes them think of using it in a way they haven’t really before.
In effect, what’s he describing is introducing a novel element in a simple way, and then—as the novel element becomes more familiar—adding complexity until the level reaches an ideal peak of complex familiarity.
And this is something that ends up giving the player a kind of narrative structure that they can relate to within a single level about how they’re using a game mechanic.
Then, for the next level, they wash, rinse, repeat. It’s stunningly effective.
The concept of kishōtenketsu originally came from poetry, but was applied here to game design. However, it can be applied to many other forms of media: introducing new characters in a story, or melodies in a piece of music, and so on. It offers an effective approach for introducing novelty and complexity.
Budgets, but no formula
Novelty budgets, complexity budgets, cognitive load budgets, 4-step design—it might all sound mathematical, like everything can be reduced to a formula. But, of course, it can’t be.
“How much novelty” is appropriate for a given work, with a given setting, and genre, and intended audience—is ultimately a subjective call. An artistic call. “How much complexity”—is the same.
Same goes for how you introduce novelty, and complexity, and how you divide them into a work’s parts. Again, as David Lynch puts it:
These relationships are kind of critical, and how a thing flows is critical, but again, it’s not an intellectual thing. It’s an intuitive thing.
However.
These concepts are still useful to keep in mind as creative constraints. In particular, your audience will usually tell you—either verbally, or through their behavior—when you have too little novelty or complexity or, as is more often the case, too much.
Scope creep
In many domains, there’s a term called “scope creep”. It’s the tendency of projects, as they develop, to have more and more novelty and complexity creep in through the creative process.
Presumably, it’s related to makers becoming so familiar with their project—and whatever novel and complex elements it might already contain—that they lose perspective. Sometimes called “the curse of knowledge”; it’s hard to preserve a beginner’s mind. So they add more and more stuff to the work, or to parts of it, until it becomes overwhelming or confusing for its intended audience.
Obviously, this problem is not unique to any one domain. There are countless stories of thousand-page novel manuscripts full of unnecessary subplots. Or four, five, six-hour “rough cuts” of movies. Or bands that record dozens of songs for a single album. Or the F-35 fighter jet.
Design by subtraction
In almost every story about an overwrought work-in-progress, the solution is almost invariably to figure out what’s essential to it—which is, naturally, another wildly subjective, artistic decision. But the unique selling point is often a good place to start. Or a conceptual theme, or experiential goal.
And then: you simply “cut away” everything that is not essential. Write drunk, edit sober. Kill your darlings. Design by subtraction. Design until “there is nothing left to take away”.
The sculpture is already complete within the marble block, before I start my work. It is already there, I just have to chisel away the superfluous material.
—Attributed to Michelangelo Buonarroti
But when you embark on a new project: consider embracing novelty and complexity budgets as deliberate constraints. Doing so can lead to better creative work. And if a project has clearly become “too much” or gone off the rails, novelty and complexity budgets can be useful lenses to make tough editorial choices.
If you’re lucky, they’ll help create a work that’s innovative and unique, but not alienating. Complex, but not confusing. Maximally engaging, all the way through. Perfectly calibrated for its audience.
Or, at the very least, they’ll help it not become a punchline.
