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Deconstructing the Role-Playing Video Game

To me, a classic JRPG is pure mechanism, a kind of puzzle. Was there some way of getting the fun out of building such a mechanism—of solving that puzzle—, wrapping it with the minimal amount of functionality, the simplest thing that could possibly pass as a video game?

This would obviously remove some player agency (and fun) from the combat; the opportunity to make choices and strategize would need to happen between battles: deciding whether to go further down the dungeon or back home to recover, when to use items, how to spend the gold, etc. I felt that the radical simplicity I started from had unexpectedly led me to an interesting concept for the game, so I decided to double down on “the simplest thing that could possibly work” as my design mantra, applying it to the entire project, not just the interface. Like its war gaming ancestors, Dungeons & Dragons was full of complexity: sophisticated rules for character building, catalogs of monsters and spells and armor, and battle outcomes decided by probability calculations.

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