In a game design context, he is definitely using "uncertainty" in a wider sense, as popularized by Greg Costikyan's Uncertainty in Games book.

In that sense of the word, it's not only about random things, but also things like "will I click at just the right time to head-shot that enemy?" or "I will checkmate the next turn unless my opponent thinks of some clever move that I don't?"). And the theory is that once you run out of uncertain things there is no more a game, as the player know how it will end and there is nothing more that can fail or anything unexpected that can happen. Basically like reading the end of a book you have already read before, so you know exactly what will happen.

And depth from a game design pov is also not necessarily strictly positive. Make the game too deep and there is, as you say, pure random. You could keep adding rules to chess to make it 100% impossible for any human to remotely guess what kind of move to make, and that's when you added so much uncertainty that it became too deep.

There's been quite a few games in recent years where I notice some system and think "ugh, do I really need to bother with this, too?". Especially crafting or skill point systems which feel slapped on. Some games make them a fun and integral part of the gameplay, some seem to include them because it's trendy and it just adds friction and mental load with little payoff.

I don't mind complexity, some of my favorite games are ridiculously complex (Dwarf Fortress), but the complexity needs to pay for itself.

I’ve had similar thoughts too: the older I get, the less “extra features” translate to value if I’m expected to stretch my concentration across all of them to have fun.

I’m not as sophisticated as the average Dwarf Fortress player, but an emergent quality of that game that I’ve admired from afar has been how you can ignore various mechanics and you’re rewarded with an interesting ride.

It’s dynamic enough that by pulling various gameplay “levers” you can get wildly different outcomes (and thus value through replayability), but things will sort of run themselves (for better or worse) if you forget about them. So you’re half writing your own story, half discovering it as it writes itself.

My cynical take is that crafting systems are probably the most attractive on the ratio of "amount of dev effort required to implement" relative to "amount of play time added." They're also trivially tunable. You can add (or subtract) hours of play time just by changing the numbers required to craft things.

Unless they're an integral feature of the game (like in Minecraft), they always feel slapped on to me.

Remember, it's about prediction (point 1 of the 12). Pure random cannot be predicted. From a prediction point of view, it is therefore ironically, an already determined result. So it is solved, and therefore not interesting.

In Theory of Fun, I phrased this as "everything has patterns, but if you are not equipped to see the pattern, it becomes noise, and therefore boring."

But it's the same underlying point.

Yeah, you need to strike a balance. Maybe ambiguity is a better way to look at it than uncertainty or randomness; chess is fun, but the only random factor are the whims of your opponent. There's no randomness, but there is ambiguity about what their strategy is, and whether they're seeing something that you're missing.

An extreme example of more-is-better are games like EU4, where just understanding how trade works, is more complicated than most entire games, and that's just a single subsystem. You can ignore it, but mastering it can be satisfying. Or frustrating.

It also matters a lot what type of uncertainty a game has, and what the curve of learning to manage it is.

E.g. slight variations in inputs should produce a slight but ideally meaningful variation in output, so the outcome of pressing keys is both reliable as well as an open space for further mastery.

It's also important that you can trace and understand what happened in retrospect. Just missing because of a 5% chance isn't fun. Missing because you didn't consider wind direction and the movement of an object between you and the target on the other hand is perfectly grokkable.

In some sense though, 100% randomness is meta-predictable: something happens that I can’t predict. There’s a lot less tension. Idk where in the middle is the best spot, I guess that’s where the artistry is

It's like an image, you want neither a single solid colour nor perfect noise, but something in-between with identifiable features, highs and lows. When it changes unexpectedly it should change into something new and exciting, not more noise.