Bushnell's law in a nutshell

Nolan Bushnell is an American engineer and entrepreneur who founded Atari. He came up with the idea to make an electronic ping-pong game for what is now known as Pong. He is known for his quote, which arguably became the most important concept in game design. He stated that games should be "easy to learn and hard to master".

Whereas his quote referred to Arcade games, as it was stated in the 70's, it was later followed by many genres and platforms, particularly mobile games.

So what in a nutshell (I'll expand on this topic in my next posts) does it mean for a game to be easy to learn and hard to master?

Easy to learn:

• Simplicity - the most obvious thing is to keep a game simple enough to be able to explain it in one sentence. Flappy Bird's description could be - tap the screen to keep the bird up in the air and avoid touching the incoming obstacles.
• Familiarity - if players get to play something that has an alternative version in real life, they'll subconsciously know what to do. Same thing if a game is similar to another one that the player is familiar with.

Hard to master:

• Emergence - one way of making a game difficult to master, is to make it emergent. This increases space of possibility, and the chances of choosing the wrong decision increase. In chess players get to choose very few decisions at the beginning, but as the game progresses, each move starts to make a significant impact on the final result. 
• Increasing content - similarly to emergency, adding new content as the game progresses increases space of possibility and the chances of players making wrong decisions. 
• Twitch mechanic - Flappy Bird revolves around testing player's reaction time. Tapping too early means the bird hits the roof of the pipe, tapping a fraction too late, and the bird hits the bottom of the obstacle.

Making a game easy to learn and hard to master, will cause what every game designer wants to do to a player - addiction. Players will be drawn to the game the minute they play it, as they won't discourage themselves reading the rules and learning basics, plus they won't find themselves leaving their mobile screen for more than a while, as they'll be trying to figure out ways to get better at it, and feel rewarded.

Sources:

Wikipedia: Nolan Bushnell [ONLINE] Available at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nolan_Bushnell [Accessed 1st October 2014]

Game Study #1: Bushnell's Law [ONLINE] Available at: http://www.teamliquid.net/blogs/155657-game-study-1-bushnells-law [Accessed 1st October 2014]

Gamasutra: Persuasive Games: Familiarity, Habituation, and Catchiness [ONLINE] Available at: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature  /132369/persuasive_games_familiarity_. php?page=1 [Accessed 7th Aug 2014]