What Makes a Game Great?

What Makes a Game Great?

The Magic of Play

Imagine you're sitting in your room on a rainy Saturday afternoon. Your toys are all put away, your friends are busy, and there's nothing particularly exciting on TV. You feel a little bored. Then something wonderful happens—you pick up a controller, press a button, and suddenly you're jumping over gaps, collecting coins, and saving a princess in a magical kingdom. Where did that boredom go? It disappeared, replaced by something much better: fun.

But here's a strange question that might not have ever crossed your mind before: What exactly *is* a game? You play them all the time, but when you really think about it, a game is just about the strangest thing. It's not real. The characters aren't real. The worlds they live in aren't real. You can't actually touch the coins you collect or feel the wind when you fly. And yet, somehow, when you play a good game, everything feels exciting and real inside your heart.

Think about the last time you played a game and felt genuinely happy. Maybe it was when you finally beat a level that had been frustrating you for days. Maybe it was when you discovered a secret area full of hidden treasures. Maybe it was when you were playing with a friend or family member and you both couldn't stop laughing. Whatever the moment was, something happened inside you—something magical. A game made you feel joy.

That magic is what we're going to explore together in this book. And we're going to learn about a very special company that has spent decades trying to create that exact kind of magic: Nintendo.

A Question Worth Asking

Before we can understand why Nintendo makes games the way it does, we need to ask a very important question: What makes a game great?

You might think the answer is obvious—a great game is one with amazing graphics, right? Or maybe it's one with tons of levels to play through? Or one with so many features that the instruction manual is thicker than your school textbook?

Here's the surprising thing: none of those things are what makes a game truly great.

Think about it this way. Imagine two lemonade stands. At the first stand, the owner has set up an elaborate system with ten different types of lemonade, electronic payment machines, a speaker system announcing orders, and a complicated rewards program. At the second stand, the owner just has one type of lemonade—but it's perfectly sweet, perfectly cold, and made with so much care and love that every single sip makes you smile.

Which lemonade would you rather drink? Most people would choose the second stand, wouldn't they? The best lemonade in the world is better than a confusing mess of mediocre drinks.

Games work the same way.

A game can have the most realistic graphics ever made, with grass that looks exactly like real grass and water that looks exactly like real water. But if playing it feels boring or confusing or frustrating, nobody will want to play it. On the other hand, a game with simple graphics—maybe just colored shapes moving around on the screen—can be so fun and exciting that you can't stop playing it.

This is one of the most important ideas in all of game design, and it's something Nintendo has believed in for almost forty years: The value of a game isn't measured by how many features it has or how realistic it looks. The value of a game is measured by the joy it brings to the people who play it.

This idea is so important to Nintendo that we can think of it as their most fundamental belief. In this book, we're going to call it the "Fun Over Power" philosophy. It's the idea that fun should always come first—before fancy graphics, before complicated systems, before everything else. Power and complexity are fine, but only if they serve the main purpose: making players happy.

The Difference Between Complexity and Depth

Here's a puzzle for you. Which would you rather have: a book with one million different words that all mean the same thing, or a book with just one hundred carefully chosen words that can express a million different ideas?

That might sound like a trick question, but it's actually pretty straightforward, isn't it? You'd want the second book—the one with fewer words but more meaning. A book with a million redundant words would be exhausting to read. But a book with a hundred powerful words that work together in clever ways? That could tell you stories, teach you things, and make you think for hours.

Games work the same way. And this is where we need to learn about two words that sound similar but mean very different things: complexity and depth.

Complexity is when something has lots and lots of pieces, rules, or features. Complexity means things are complicated. If a game is complex, it might have hundreds of different buttons to press, dozens of status bars to manage, and endless menus to scroll through.

Depth is when something has layers of meaning that you can explore. Depth means there's a lot to discover and learn, but in a way that feels natural and rewarding. If a game has depth, you might be able to play it for hours and still be finding new tricks and strategies.

The amazing thing is that the most fun games in the world usually aren't very complex—but they have tons of depth.

Let me tell you about one of the most popular games ever made: Super Mario Bros. This game came out in 1985, which was a very long time ago. If you look at the graphics, they might seem a little simple by today's standards. Mario is just a small red and blue shape with a mustache. The enemies are simple blobs and turtles. There are no complicated menus or stat screens to worry about.

And yet, Super Mario Bros. has more depth than almost any game ever created. When you play it, you have three main actions: run, jump, and squash enemies. That's it. Just three things. But because of the way the levels are designed and the way the physics work, you can spend your entire life playing this game and still be discovering new ways to move through it. Speedrunners—people who try to beat the game as fast as possible—have spent decades finding new tricks and shortcuts. The game is incredibly deep even though it's not complex.

Now compare this to many modern games that try to overwhelm you with complexity. Have you ever started playing a new video game and felt like you needed a college degree just to understand all the menus and systems? Many games throw so many features at you that it stops being fun and starts being work. You spend more time reading instruction manuals than actually playing. That's complexity without depth—and it's not very enjoyable.

Nintendo understands this secret better than almost anyone else in the game industry. They know that adding more features doesn't make a game better. What makes a game better is taking simple ideas and exploring them in clever, rewarding ways. That's depth. That's what keeps you coming back to play again and again.

What Makes You Smile?

Let's play a little game right now. Close your eyes (well, keep them open so you can read, but pretend you're closing them) and think about the happiest memories you have involving games.

Maybe you remember playing hide and seek with your family, laughing so hard your stomach hurt when your little brother hid inside the washing machine. Maybe you remember playing a board game with your grandparents and winning a special prize. Maybe you remember staying up late with a friend, playing video games together, and both of you getting so excited that you forgot you were supposed to be quiet.

Here's what all of these happy memories have in common: they weren't about winning or losing. They were about the feelings you had while playing. The laughter, the excitement, the joy of sharing an experience with someone else.

This is another thing that Nintendo understands deeply. Games aren't really about winning. Games are about experiences. They're about the feelings y