For some reason, these days complexity = bad.
Too many of these "fast-play" games reduce squads to firepower factors that you push around the table as a blob.
I think it's that in many cases complexity=long play times and we're often dealing with people that have the attention spans of goldfish. People won't read books, they complain if computer games employ too much text, and many of the Eurogame crowd are conditioned to expect a resolution in two hours or less.
The creep that lost his mind over
Supply Lines this year at Origins wanted to be a "war game designer." His concept of war game design was derived entirely from, yes, Academy Games. He'd been ojn their demo team and the idea that one might play a game longer than two hours, or that the sides might not be perfectly symmetrical in play and capabilities was completely beyond his tolerance. He didn't want to
learn anything, he wanted to be
entertained.
Which, to gary's point, does not mean that people who come to the hobby via a "gateway" game like CoH won't develop an interest in something more substantial and complex. There are people making new, complex games, and people playing them. TT gaming is on a upswing now though and there are many, many more players of these games than there were ten or fifteen years ago, when we were all considered freaks and nerds for playing them. Somewhat like the internet was the domain of technical, freakish, nerd types fifteen years ago the hobby has filled up with people who don't really understand the history and don't care, aren't in it to learn, but want primarily to be entertained. They'll play a WW2 game because they like WW2 movies, but they aren't in it for the same stuff a lot of us are.
Which is just fine. I might not want to spend a ton of time playing with these folks, or enjoy their particular games, but hey, no one says I have to, either. If GMT ends up making nothing but games for the Short Attention Span crowd that's fine - their old games are still around and companies like White Dog, Hexasim, Conflict Simulations, LnLP, Clash of Arms and others are making small batch games for me. Hell, I drink small batch whisky and not the PBR the hipster drink, I'm fine with my gaming being the same.
But I
will continue to make fun of people who call the COIN games any sort of wargaming.