Honest complexity

The visual content of any movie is much more than its plot. The scene may have couches on which no one sits, mountains that no one even starts to climb, or indicator lights that no one checks. Plenty of things are made visible to viewers, but ignored by all characters and epiphenomenal to the plot. Appearance suggests a world with many mechanisms that, in effect, don't exist.

Other media also tends to work like this, to various levels. In many novels, any eating scene that goes well enough serves only to offer a setting for those other things characters do. Details of the meal only have a chance to matter later if someone gets poisoned. A board game might use player-tokens of complex shapes, but the features there have no more impact on gameplay than would a colour. The arms and legs of a figurine aren't matched by limbs accounted for in the game rules. A video game may show eyes on the face of a character when their sight goes all around, or vary ground materials when the dynamics of walking are the same everywhere.

We may call these features, that affect only the viewer's (or reader's, or player's) immediate experience, "dishonest complexity". "Honest complexity" consists of features shown to the viewer that may also affect later in-universe events, like psychoactive pills, a character's journalling habits, or the hexagonal geometry of a world's grid.

Honest complexity is better insofar as it allows for a denser plot. With little dishonest complexity, the viewer can experience more twists and meaningful events with less material to go thru depicting it. The more honest complexity is included, the better basis viewers have to anticipate characters' actions and consequences, or to speculate on plausible alternatives.

But audiences want complexity in their media. Using complexity honestly can be hard, for the author. So most media ends up with dishonest complexity.

Chess gives six elaborate shapes for its pieces, which shapes have no relation to their movement-patterns. The types of pieces could just as well be shown as a range of colours, or letters, or shapes that accurately represent their movements. Go uses mere circles and two opposed colours, about as honest as it gets. Nonetheless, chess is the more popular one.