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This is interesting. I want to think about it more, because I've noticed some similar trends.

I'm pretty sure that when I take any game and make it more epic and "encounter to encounter" it's not because I want a "decreased cognitive load" but because I want it to better emulate the media that inspires me to game in the first place. And I can do that with a rules light or rules heavy system as the mood takes me.

I mean, isn't every game designer basically just aiming for one of the sweet spots iin the giant, complex Venn diagram of "what gamers want"?

I think you're reading in a few unintended things to this post.  First of, no value judgement is really intended here.

Secondly, I'm not sure what you mean by "epic" and how that relates.  By "encounter-to-encounter", I primarily refer to the type of linear, 'railroad' adventure design that became popular in the 80s and continues to a certain extent today.

Basically, what I'm saying with that is pretty simple:  If you remove agency at the 'plot' level from players, you should probably have engaging mechanics to make up for it.  That's independent of how "epic" a game is.

That doesn't mean that all 'crunchier' systems will inherently have no agency, either - as I said, it's a range, not a single value.  The correction seems to happen mostly at the extremes, and often in slightly more subtle ways than "to hell with it, let's just railroad everything".

I mean, I've played GURPS in a very non-railroaded way, so I'm pretty sure that's not my argument ;)

I also think you had a good point regarding player preferences for different types of load.

For a one-shot, or drop-in game, I have no attention or ability to engage in the "big picture" cognitive load, preferring instead the tactical, short term decisions.

That totally makes sense, since the "big picture" stuff is completely irrelevant :)

There's also some points I want to make later regarding how cognitive load for a game system changes over time, and the impact of learning a new game system and how the increased cognitive load, especially for very new concepts, impacts perception of the game.

Hmm. Working in UX/human factors, "cognitive load" is a particular term, where here, you seem to be talking more about the amount of autonomy, rules complexity and decision-making available to the players in a game.

Is there really that much use of modules these days? They'r e often fairly linear or constrained because it's far more difficult to write an open ended scenario (particularly a short one.)

This is interesting food for thought, but I agree that "cognitive load" has some baggage the way it has been used. Perhaps it's still a good term, but maybe focus on how that load is distributed?

To me it's not so much that players want to think, or not, but what it is that they want to think about.

Even the most casual player's mind is occupied during a game. They just aren't thinking about the game itself so much.

For one shots I prefer to use established settings that all my players are familiar with, so they don't have to waste time thinking about the "big picture". I'm not rigid though. If they decide collectively that the setting should have been tweaked a little to the right we can go with that. It's still less time spent than sculpting from the ground up.

+David Hoberman:  Depends on the game you're playing and how you're playing it.  In Pathfinder, their Adventure Paths are a pretty big selling point, and modules or the equivalent are central to the organized play experience (PFS, LFR, etc.).

As far as cognitive load - I mean the general amount of information processing and decision making that players have to make.- basically, the amount of brain activity that they're engaged in.  The factors you mentioned lead to increased cognitive load - but essentially what I'm saying is that players have a preference for total cognitive load, even if they don't have a specific preference for high crunch, etc.

If that's still the incorrect definition, please let me know, but I'm pretty sure it's within spitting distance.

+Teo Tayobobayo: "Even the most casual player's mind is occupied during a game. They just aren't thinking about the game itself so much."

Which is a sign of seeking the minimum cognitive load of their range.  That's actually a pretty good point in my favor, I think - distractibility as a sign of low cognitive load.

Load over time is an interesting concept too. Within the same system the bearable load of certain elements can change drastically. In D&D people commonly refer to there being a point where characters are too high in level to be managed well by the system. I think it's actually just the case that they become too cumbersome for most players to have fun running, and more likely than that, too cumbersome collectively as a party to have running games for as a GM.

Autonomy, the amount of choice players have, I'd say has little to do with the complexity level of the rules, except insofar as they allow fine grain choice during character build. But once the game begins, far more depends on the style of play.

So, character personality trends?

Sorry, wasn't intending to imply there's a hidden agenda here. I just don't see anything that isn't explained just as well with "here is a large group of gamers with a preference to moderate-to-heavy rules crunch. Here is a group of gamers with a preference for playing through a 'story,' necessitating some amount of encounter-to-encounter play. We can succeed by targeting the overlap between these groups."

Also, I should know better than to use rubbery terms like "epic." I didn't mean big over the top action, I meant like literary epic - a "big story." That's going to lead to a certain playstyle. And honestly, if I pitch Dragonlance and at the end of the first session I get players complaining that I conspired to send them towards Xak Tsaroth, that just means I pitched really badly and those players didn't know what they were signing up for. There's no "oh no, my agency - quick, ramp up the crunch!" moment when everyone has used their agency to agree to playing through a loosely-predefined storyline, y'know?

+David Hoberman: Agreed.  You can have complex rules or simple rules, and high or autonomy.  And whether the complexity is at character build time or play time is a second interesting axis.

My point is that both player freedom ('what do we do now?') and mechanical complexity ('how do I use this ruleset effectively?') add load.

To oversimplify (and to probably cut out several factors):

Load from autonomy = A
Load from rule complexity = R

A+R = Total load (T)

People have minimum (m) and maximum (M) preferences for T.  If T drops below the minimum threshold for some reason, players will (eventually) find a way to increase it.  I don't think this isn't really conscious, it just kind of happens over time.

So if A is reduced (as in railroad scenarios), T decreases.  If T < m, players will find ways to increase it - in some cases, by increasing R.  (Or by distracting themselves, drawing their characters, etc.)

Similarly, if T > M, players will find ways to reduce either A or R.

m and M seem to vary based on the individual, as well.

+Topher Gerkey: Well, for starters, I'll ignore the false dichotomy between 'story' and 'railroad'.

Mostly you're talking about play preferences, and I agree that those definitely exist.  I'm talking about how the two interact with players, and how they react in combination.

In other words, even if someone doesn't have a strong preference for high crunch/high autonomy inherently, and can deal with either, if you minimize both of them you're going to bore them, and if you crank both of them up to max you may overwhelm them (and I do believe those are just two factors of many).

And I certainly don't think it's a matter of some lightbulb moment like that.  It's a collection of small things - dissatisfactions that drive the game in a particular way as an emergent change, not as a big, planned change.

As a point (and to bring this somewhat on topic), most of the people (in my experience, plural of anecdote, etc.) that dislike Fate because it's too "handwavy" or rules light seem to come from gaming backgrounds that are heavily predicated on predetermined stories - organized play, etc.  And the more I think about it, and think about what Fate does well Out Of The Box, the more I kind of agree - it's not a system I'd use to run that type of game.

+Robert Hanz, I suppose if we're only considering the load the system is presenting. Casual players are often more interested in the social dynamics of the players themselves, and the game system is just the focal point of that. They sit back, and enjoy the camaraderie, takes sides when conflicts come up, they may even watch the game like it's a TV show, etc. They are still thinking, and often, due to their detachment (I don't know that distraction is the right word since they never really signed on to be focused on the game) they can come up with "out of the box" solutions to problems.

I still think it's better to frame the "load" as "what" rather than "if". It still works in that sense, and avoids needless nitpicking by people who feel offended that you might be suggesting they don't think, or dislike thinking.

What you're talking about is worth thinking on, and deserves not to get dismissed based on someone reacting badly to the wording : )

Yep, social factors are definitely a source of load - whether that's a deliberate part of the game, or because people are tuned out due to insufficient load.

It's not just system - it's the sum total at the table.  A module isn't "system", nor is how a GM runs the game.  And even just looking at system in and of itself, the load it presents is variable - people that know the system and have internalized it will be under less 'system load' than someone just learning the game.  Which kind of suggests that new players to complex systems shouldn't be overburdened with an abundance of agency.

Given that one of the ideas worming around in my brain right now is "classic Dragonlance storyline done via Fate Core," it would be really interesting to see some experimental data on that. I don't have the time or energy to actually do it right now though. :(

Also: "story" is another rubbery term. Would it have been better if I'd said "plot"? 

(and there was no dichotomy - that's actually a really weird idea to me. Do you mean a false association?)

I'd say that Fate is charactercentric. That makes it strongly suited towards games wherein the choices of the PCs matter on a large scale, or actually are the "big picture". I don't think that makes it ill suited to running games where they aren't though.

Fate is just FUDGE with a lot of tweaks (As FUDGE is meant to have), and as such has a long, and storied past being used to run all sorts of huge narratives that are revealed in spoonfuls to the players. I know, I done did that plenty. 

+Robert Hanz, I've noticed more casual players in games that are consider to be complex. In games of Fate that I run it isn't so much that everyone feels like they understand the system, but that whether they do, or don't, what they say might matter. That keeps them engaged in a way that even something like Microlite20 doesn't seem to.

I credit this, in a big way, to the choice of using words instead of numbers to convey information. Basically, anything you say, or write can be seen in Fate terms by literate Fate players without you even trying to convert it.

I think thy it's worth pointing out that not only do some players have different load ranges, or preferences for types A and R, but they might handle each type better. Some players can handle a lot of A, but only a little of R, or vice versa. So, basically a multiplier on each one.

Absolutely, +Porter Williams. 

It seems to me that player engagement also plays a role.

In other words, the amount of brain power I'm willing to invest in the plot of the story depends entirely on how engaging the story is. If the game has an engaging plot, then I'm willing to put a lot of energy into that aspect of the game. If I find that the plot is uninteresting, then there had better be other aspects of the he game that hold my interest.

Likewise, the amount of brain power I'm willing to invest in the mechanics of a system depend on how engaging those mechanics are. Personally, If the rules offer a lot of tactical options and meaningful decision making, I'm willing to deal with more complexity. If it's just complexity for complexity's sake, then I'm less willing to engage.

While there is a maximum limit to the amount of energy that I'm willing to put into a game--that's not usually the limiting factor, especially when I'm a player. I will typically hit the limits of the game's ability to engage me well before I redline my mental engine. As a GM, however, I'm much more likely to be running close to my mental limits.

Also, people will find different aspects of play more engaging than others. This leads to preferences for different types of systems.

And, at a certain level, game mechanics and plot are at least somewhat mutually exclusive. If I spend two hours running through a tactically complex combat scenario, I'm probably not going to have enough time to make the plot very engaging.

Likewise, if I'm engaged with the plot, I might resent anything that slows the plot down. I may want fast, light combat, because the important questions (What price are you willing to pay to get what you want? What effect does this fight have on the rest of the world? Etc.) aren't typically answered by a detailed blow-by-blow tactical exercise.

Plot, most basically put, is what is happening. A tactically sloggy scene is just a macro shot of plot. I suppose that's what make me still like them. I suppose the thing I like about Fate is that a shite plot can be spiced up by everyone at the table. Nobody is trapped, as in other systems, or by other GMs conditioned by systems that imply (I say that because few explicitly say a player can't do such things) a firm line between the authority of the GM vs. players.

I've always seen an engaging plot as being as much the responsibility of the players as mine though. You can put the makings of a great story in front of players, but if they do nothing with it... well, it doesn't matter at all.

+Teo Tayobobayo, At their best, a tactical scene also move the story forward, and story-based scenes are also tactically interesting. However, this clearly isn't always the case. 

I've played in a number of games where other players have gotten upset because I deliberately made bad tactical decisions--just because that's what my character would have done in that situation (either because of limited information--e.g. not acting on player knowledge that the character does not have, or because of his motivation in that particular scene).

One of the things I like about Fate is that it can actually reward this sort of play through compels. Yes, you may make a tactically bad choice--but you get a fate point for it. With creative use of scene aspects, you can even reward a player for ignoring player knowledge and making a bad decision based strictly on character knowledge (e.g. compel a "fog of war" situational aspect).

Part of what I was getting at is also that time acts as a limiting resource. And there's an interesting relationship between time and engagement. In order to be engaging, you must invest time in a particular element--and the more engaging an element is, the more willing people are to invest their time.

Again, one of the thing Fate gets right is that mechanical elements are usually only important if they are also narratively important. That means we are more likely to spend our time on scenes that are both mechanically and narratively interesting.

Or, to put it another way, we don't need to waste time looking through long lists of possible modifiers trying to determine if any apply, or considering a long list of special-case rules.

Fair enough, I do think that even using Fate we could get bogged way down in tactical choices if we so chose, but point taken. The whole experience is more express, because of the system being hewn down to a sort of Universal Theory of Gaming.

I appreciate that the rules of Fate (often seen as simple) are flexible enough to cover different instances of contested happenings in way that makes fluency nearly complete among my players (usually the stuff they don't know is a house rule I made up). Still, in my experience, the time that is taken up in other games is often not the tactical choices being made, but the relearning, teaching, interpretation, and argumentation that goes into those choices, and administrating the outcomes of them.

That brings me to the fact that many people actually enjoy all those things that I see as hindrances to game progression. They may like the argument, and manipulation of the rules to their ends, whether it's in good faith, or not, and I suspect not a few of the people I stopped playing with presented false reasons for disliking Fate.

More bluntly: universal literacy combined with distributed authority means certain people can't cheat, or rely on favoritism anymore.

Another thing to consider (perhaps), games like Fate, Risus, and others that are very easy to pick up allow for a more dynamic line up of players. The group can shift membership very easily, most especially with people that are already literate. In great part I think this is because the culture of Fate (and Risus) is written into the rules. 

The flip side of compact systems is that people who like to learn new things may feel they already know all there is to know about the game.

+Teo Tayobobayo, the point about rules literacy is important. I had assumed we were talking about players who were already reasonably literate--or supportive environments where other players/GMs help others with the rules. However, simply becoming competent in the rules is a major hurdle in many games.

In fact, some games reward players for mastering the rules, and some players like using their skill with manipulating the rules to dominate the game (for varying definitions of the words "manipulation" and "dominance")