A good game is trivial to begin and impossible to exhaust.
Bushnell's rule for arcade machines, where a player who could not start within seconds would walk away and one who could finish would stop paying. The constraint produced a design pattern that outlived the coin slot: shallow entry, deep ceiling, and the whole difficulty range visible from the first minute.
In practice
- A product whose first five minutes require a manual has lost the users who would have stayed for years.
- A tool that is fully understood in a week is abandoned in a month.
- Further reading
- Wikipedia
- Subject
- Play & Game Design
- Essay
- Small worlds with visible rules