When I ask people to give me examples of great stories in any medium a rare few suggest simple, personal, childrens, or short stories like those found in some commercials. I find this odd. So, I've come up with a theory, which also explains why many have such a hard time putting a game like Super Mario Brothers at the top of their list of great video game stories when it ranks high for its gameplay. My theory is that this bias against simple stories exists for two main reasons.
The first reason is that as we grew up, there were pressures from various areas to "upgrade." It's the old "putting away childish things" idea that people unconsciously apply to various areas of their lives including entertainment. I vividly remember my middle and high school days when my peers openly rejected cartoons because they claimed they were too old. Or my high school and college days when many thought they out grew video gaming. Apparently, an easy way to measure the maturity and quality of a story was based on its complexity. And everything simple was for kids, or less intelligent, less mature people.
Complex Metal Gear vs Simple Katamari
The second reason why people generally consider more complex stories to be superior to relatively simple stories is because of an intuitive understanding of emergence. This is not the emergence of gameplay, but of numerous comparisons. Think about it this way. With few complexities in a story, there's little room to elaborate or derail the execution. Setting, characters, plot, and theme are more likely to be straight forward making for fewer "ah-ha" moments that come when you piece together "hidden" details. For example, take this story: One day a man woke early up, went to work, and fell asleep. You see? Not much to it.
The more complex the story (more details) the more individual details there are to cross compare, obscure, and elaborate with. Every detail added can do increasingly more to a work depending on how it supports and deconstructs the other details. This is why it's inherently difficult to develop the execution facets of efficiency, coherence, and pacing in complex stories. There's just more story stuff there for the creator to keep track of and present clearly. So, it's no wonder that we tend to assume that complex stories are great. It takes a lot of work to sort out all the details of a complex story. And if a complex story confuses us, perhaps because it's poorly crafted, we tend to fault ourselves. Perhaps we missed or overlooked a detail. Perhaps we just need to think about the work longer. For these reasons, we tend to give complex stories greater leeway.
With that said, I've seen more complex stories falter and fail than simple stories. However, many, if not most, of my favorite stories are complex. Here's the deal. In the same way that emergent gameplay possibilities explode at a rate that's exponential and beyond, so too does the number of comparisons increase with increasingly complex stories. The more complex a story, the more one must re-experience, study, and reflect on the content to understand how the story builds up into a stronger work or falls apart. There's no way around this requirement. You can get faster at such analysis and critical thinking, but the work load remains the same. So, if you're the kind of person who doesn't typically do the required work to understand complex stories you should consider if you're only getting as much meaning out of the story as you would from a considerably less complex work. What's the point of preferring deep and complex stories if you're never going to dive deeply into them? If you're going to stay on the shore and never get your feet wet, you should at least appreciate simple stories as much as complex stories.
Complex Killer 7 vs Simple Shadow of the Colossus
When I think about all of my favorite games, stories, people, movies, plays, TV shows, etc., I realize that I've put the work into each. Whether it's thinking time, debates, cross comparisons, or just experiencing it multiple times, I tend to like anything better when I put in the work to understand as much of it as possible. The more work I put into it and the more it holds up under my critical analysis, the more entertainment I derive. The best part is, the entertainment value outweighs the work requirement.
With all of this focus on complex stories, I should say that it's not uncommon for the stories most would consider simple to have depth, elegance, and a high level of craft. The common idea is that simple stories are inferior to complex stories because they have less intellectual potential. People feel that they "get" simple stories after just experiencing them once. The truth is simple stories can have much to uncover like complex stories.
To prove that the seemingly simple can extend deeper than you know, I present my poem "Starfish" and my analysis. The following is an excerpt of a paper I wrote for my creative writing fiction course last year. The thesis explores how characters with complex psychologies are presented (execution) across various mediums.
Starfish
I learned about stars in Elementary
Books, and planets, and orbits,
But mostly far away things. My
Teacher used to point down into
The pages, finding the points and connecting
Them from the hundreds of stars on the page
With her fingers. I could never find
The shapes and figures at the end
of my brown fingertips. I searched anyway.
I remember pointing at the fish off the bridge
At the zoo, and turning my
Mother’s purse inside out for a quarter.
I turned a knob and out came a handful of feed.
Then I threw the whole fist in at once
Hundreds of little brownesses racing
To reach the surface of the water,
to touch the frenzied fish,
because my little arms couldn’t
Reach the waves.
But you, you’re a starfish.
You’re a star. And a fish.
Five points. Five Fingers.
You get to touch everything
Because you don’t have any eyes.
I guess that’s the point.~Richard Hakem Terrell