OK, that might be a really weird post at first but you will eventually know where I am going.
I started to restudy by myslef probability math. I know that I studied probabilities in college while studying computer technology. I was at that time around 20 years old. Now I am 32, I picked up 2 books and I have a bit of difficulty getting back into it. So I am not sure if it's because the books are badly written, if I learn better from a teacher, if I am just more tired than before or if I am less mental fit than before.
On the nintendo DS, there is a video game called brain age where it's goal is to train your brain. I also learned that some aged people who continued to work with their brain had developed some parts of their brain that other people did not have. So with aging, there seems to be desintegration and a development of the brain.
Now what does it has to do with game design?
There some games out there that has what I call the "brain burning" syndrome. The idea is that there is so much thigs to think about that you cannot actually enjoy the game. Most of the time, mechanics seem to be added to the game just to make people think more and supposely add strategy. Rapidly, I can name many fantasy flight games in that category "Starcraft" and "twilight imperium 3rd edition" beign in the top of the list.
So my question is, maybe I don't like these games the way they are because I am not mentally fit to actually enjoy them. If I would have played these games 10 years before, it might have resulted other wise. It also raise the question that when you design a game, you would now need to consider the mental fitness of your target audiance.
It's also possible that with time, the more games people play, will the people will be able to handle more complex games. Or does it decrease, aging will force people to play more simple games.
I think this is the most difficult thing to acomplish but it's somewhat the ultimate goal. Make sure that the theme places the player in a situation that allows him to deduce the strategy because in real life he would act that way.
An example that came to my mind, one of my friend made me test a classic abtract game that plays on an hex grid. You place tokens on hex and try to make a line that would cross the board. After playing, he explained to me that you can place 2 dots in a certain way that it becomes impossible to prevent those 2 tokens from eventually being connected (because there is 2 path possibles). If I would have know this first, I would have played the game totally differently. But there is no way I could have learned that by myself. But maybe if the theme of the game could have strongly suggested that there is a strategy there I would have been able to guess the strategy.