I was having a discussion with a friend of mine who has some very interesting opinions regarding complexity (specifically regarding how difficult action decisions are in Agricola versus Lords of Waterdeep) and this led to a few thoughts regarding hidden information that I thought I'd share and get some opinions from you guys.
The discussion arose regarding hidden scoring and hidden information in games where that information WAS visible and BECAME invisible, versus the same information in a game where it was NEVER visible.
Examples of the first type include Dominion, Incan Gold, and Magic The Gathering.
Examples of the second type include Lords of Waterdeep and Jaipur
The problem with hidden information that becomes hidden is that it encourages play that either takes up a large space of memory, or that requires the player to take notes. Tournament Magic players often take note of the cards that are in the other player's hand whenever they get the opportunity to look at them, to the point where it is very beneficial to take into account the art on cards, providing less information by always using the same card art, or by making sure to play the version of the card the other player has seen.
Then again, there's a complimentary problem, and I think it's the reason that hidden information is often used. If this information is NOT hidden, players must take into account all of the information available, which vastly increases the state-space that a player must look at... if that information is hidden, although the state-space is the same size, the immediately accessible part of that space is smaller, and it's hard to keep track of the rest of the information, therefore the game APPEARS less complex to players, while requiring more effort to play well.
All of this is out the window when hidden information is ALWAYS hidden... for example, face-down scoring chips or cards with unknown values. Here, the player must instead consider the range of values available, perhaps combined with the ones they know to exist, and determine a bound on what another player's score is likely to be, in order to estimate one's standing in the game.
I'll write more on this later as I recount more of the discussion, but for now, I wonder what BGDF thinks of hidden scoring / hidden information mechanics, and what purposes they serve. Should that information be open instead? If not, what does hiding it bring to the game?
I wonder how different it really is.
My friend is of the camp that believes that if information was EVER visible, there is no reason for it to be hidden, since to play truly optimally, one must remember that information and take it into account.
This is, on the surface, true... however, as was pointed out there are several very realistic problems with that.
First is that people don't have the capacity to remember/recall that much information anyway, and in all likelihood don't have the reasonable cognitive capacity to even take that much information into account, even if it's visible. Unless that information can be reasonably stored into chunks, a person probably can't even consider it in a reasonable amount of time; the brain's "bandwidth" simply isn't that high. Therefore, someone taking into account every possible maneuver on their turn would spend an exponentially increasing amount of time making that decision the more information is available to them. In many cases, this isn't ideal or acceptable. However... in a case where a player is LIKELY to play this way (many 2-player abstracts or extremely heavy economic games fit the bill) isn't a strong player almost certain to take all that information into account regardless of whether or not it is available? These are the kinds of games in which it is almost expected that moves require careful planning, and that turns may require a length of time in thought before a decision is made... So in such a case, what purpose does obscuring the information serve?