Apple also has a long history of simple and elegant products. It might be the best company in the world at making complicated things simple and elegant. Apple has done that several times by crafting new kinds of interfaces. They created the first personal computer to use a mouse. The iPod’s scroll wheel was a simple way to scroll through hundreds of songs. The breakthrough of the multitouch interface on the iPhone shook up the phone industry. I’ll use a less familiar example though: Apple’s Time Machine software.

The core concept behind this built-in part of a Mac’s operating system is “make it so easy to back up your data that you’ll actually do it.” The problem with data backup software is not that it doesn’t do enough things, it’s that the average user is too lazy to ever actually do it at all.

Apple’s solution is a “zero click” interface, though maybe it’s more fair to call it one click. When you plug in any drive, a pop-up asks you if you’d like this to be your Time Machine drive to back up your files (it doesn’t ask if you’ve already set a Time Machine drive, of course). If you say yes, that’s all there is for you to do. Time Machine will then back up all your computer’s files and keep running backups every hour for the last 24 hours, daily backups for the last month, and weekly backups forever, until the drive is full.

The interface for recovering old files is slick and useful, but it’s the “zero click” setup that makes the feature so practical. Now that's subtractive.

Common Themes

There’s something all these examples have in common. Apple’s Time Machine and Google Chrome are both very sophisticated under the hood, even though they present simple interfaces to the user. Team Fortress 2 is not more shallow for its decision to launch with fewer maps; it’s actually deeper because of that decision. Portal and Braid did not, as Professor Strunk would say, “avoid all detail and treat their subjects only in outline.” Quite the contrary. Portal and Braid each fully explore their concepts—more fully than most larger, bloated games usually explore theirs. And finally, Ico’s sense of reality, immersion, and emotional power is not less because it subtracted all the extraneous elements; it's more. In each case, subtracting did not leave us lacking, it enhanced the experience.

The Controversy

Subtractive design is not all rainbows and puppies though. By fully committing to this idea, you are more likely to encounter resistance on your game development team, with your publisher, and with your players. The reason is that when we use vague language, it’s easier to get an agreement. When we use very honest, precise language, it’s easier for someone to realize that they disagreed all along.

“Some amount of collateral damage is expected in the mission.” Sure, ok.

“We are going to kill innocent people on this mission.” Wait, really?

When we distill a design down to the core concepts and remove the extraneous, it forces us to admit and agree what the core concepts actually are. For example, as designer of Street Fighter HD Remix, I made the statement that performing difficult moves is not part of the core concept of the game. It’s an imperfection that should be removed, so that there can be more focus on the essence of the game: strategy. Clearly, that is a troublesome statement if you believe that performing difficult moves is part of the essence of the game. I think subtracting some emphasis on that aspect enhanced the final product though.

Likewise, in StarCraft, the ability to play not just fast, but extremely fast is highly rewarded. When Blizzard made StarCraft 2, it had to decide what the game is really about at its core. Maybe a game in the “real-time strategy” genre should focus a bit more on strategy and less on extremely fast clicking? Creating more user-friendly features such as multiple-base selection, auto-mine, and no cap on the number of units you can select all point to them thinking that. (Though they also added other features intentionally meant to add more clicks, so I don't know.) The point is that during development, the mere proposal of multiple-base selection and automine raised deep questions about what the the game is really about. Is StarCraft really about strategy? Or is it equally about rewarding the most actions per minute that you can enter? It’s easier to agree that we like StarCraft overall (vague) than it is to agree on whether a new version of the game should or shouldn’t remove the emphasis on certain skills.

The card game Magic: the Gathering has an even deeper conflict about what it’s really about. When it comes to the wording on the cards, the Magic team has made great strides over the years to remove unnecessary words, creating as many simple, elegant cards as they can. Compare the original wording of the card Control Magic to the current wording: