Is there a term for thematically unjustified complexity?
I've been mulling over this thought for awhile, it's something I don't think I've ever seen discussed, and I just wonder if there's a word for it, or if I have to invent one. Board gamers have "chrome," which I understand to be fiddly special-case rules that add complexity in order to enhance the theme or narrative. Stuff like "Huns don't need to build houses" or "Olaf's troops get a morale boost when it's snowing." Chris Crawford discusses the adjacent concepts of dirt and color - dirt ("factors that do not comport with the central theme of the game") seems related to what I'm thinking about, but not quite.
The sort of thing I'm thinking about are rules that seem to exist for the sake of complexity, rules that are often integral to core gameplay, and have no relation to the theme or narrative whatsoever. If you tried to explain them to someone who wasn't a gamer, you'd sound like a crazy person. Doom Eternal expects you to chainsaw weak enemies for more ammo, to use your flamethrower to get more armor, and your bare hands for more health, but only on demons that are glowing purple because you did enough damage to trigger their stagger state but not enough to kill them. Rebelstar Raiders lets you shoot targets off center by purposefully aiming wrong. Doing well in Street Fighter requires that you understand the differences between kara cancelling, renda cancelling, and special cancelling, and you couldn't possibly explain any of these things to a layperson who just sees two karate people jumping around the screen and hitting eachother until one of them can't stand up. Abstract games like chess aren't really subject to this - knights moving in funny patterns is just how the game works - but throw chess-like moving rules into Fire Emblem and now this situation applies.
I suppose you could also consider wargame victory points in this category. We accept them because a game needs an objective way of determining a winner when there isn't a simple pass/fail state, but war historians don't actually assign victory based on points (as far as I know).
Am I making any kind of sense? Is this a thing? I feel like I have some idea of what I'm thinking about but I'm not sure if I'm explaining it well.
I follow what you are saying, but I am not aware of term used to describe it.
Complications versus complexity?
Artificial versus organic?
I work in the industry, and we don't really have a word for that. "Cognitive noise" maybe, but it is something we don't want in the game.
I think it mostly occurs unintentionally, but it's inevitable in the competitive scene, where players are going to exploit the engine for every advantage they can. Another example that comes to mind is "snaking" in Mario Kart - drifting gives you a speed boost when you come out of it, and really good players drift nonstop, drifting left and drifting right on straightaways for as many boosts as possible. This is not the intended design of the game, but players who snake will consistently beat players who can't.
Then there's Crash Team Racing which has a similar mechanic, but it's very intentional. Ingame tutorials tell you how to do it, there's visual feedback to show when you're doing it correctly, tracks are designed with the expectation that you'll use it, and it's much easier perform, though it's still a challenge to do it optimally.
And it's not a bad thing. Drifting makes the game fun! But there's no logical reason, not even in the context of cartoon physics, why drifting through a straight should be faster than going through it in a line, and that goes for both Mario Kart and CTR.
"Tryharding" or "mechanics abuse" in MP games. Pro-level SMAC games for example are a race to frankly counter-intuitive strategies that reward the player greatly, there's a reason I find it exhausting. Dominions games (particularly lategame) have such a depth of strategies/tactics that are the result of jank in development but are extremely useful in play: the only problem is how much of your time and effort you want to put in the game (for example, when you recruited a mage was important to know the turn order in battles, so you could script properly counters or spells before an opponent that wasn't doing so, or the arcane art of "gembaiting", finding ways to waste your enemies' resources with calculated effort). In most cases this is the result of the developer not even thinking about the minutiae of the game and some players having far too much free time. In other cases the developer goes with it and integrates it in gameplay (a good example, skying in Tribes, that made an extremely slow tactical squad FPS into a Sonic Capture the Flag with rocket launchers).
"Excessive finetuning" or "complexity for the sake of complexity" in SP games. Rules and complexity done for the sake of complexity and not for any gameplay value whatsoever. A good example are often poorly designed RPGs (Knights of the Chalice 2) or "peculiar" games (Darkest Dungeon's expansion bosses, for example). Amusingly enough, and the Scribe can correct me, mobile and gacha games revel in such mechanics to push to spend and to lose time on the game itself.
What you're describing is not entirely negative though. Doom Eternal has a combat loop that has been built for fun and not for "realism". Game rules for the sake of the game are essential , and not everything needs to be thematically justified. Or I'm not getting it properly?
I agree it's not inherently a negative, but it is often a tradeoff. You sacrifice some ludonarrative consistency, if it had any to begin with, and I consider that valuable even in games where the plot is irrelevant or nonexistent. Doom's narrative - a thing I define much more broadly than just plot - says that the demons are my enemies, and gives me no reason to think of them as piñatas stuffed with energy drinks and shotgun cartridges, but for Doom Eternal's gameplay purposes that's exactly the role that some of them fill. And that kills my engagement with the narrative, which to me is a big part of immersion.
I'm not sure I agree it's always essential, though. OG Doom is relatively free of rules that don't chime with the theme. The chainsaw here isn't a tool for recovering ammo or buying invincibility frames; it's simply a weapon for killing demons while conserving ammo, and experience will teach you when it's super effective (e.g. lost souls), when it's risky (shotgunners), and when it's suicide (the Cyberdemon). My wife who has never played a first person shooter before could understand everything you need to know about the chainsaw by watching me play. But 2016 and DE have lots of rules about what the chainsaw does and when you can use it that she would just find incomprehensible.