Right; when I said game systems being trivial, I meant trivial in that the player can completely predict the outcome with very little effort — not that the rules defining the system are trivial. Conway’s game of life (and Turing machines even) is the quintessential example of trivial system definitions producing very non-trivial systems.

And in fact that should be the goal — maximizing system complexity, minimizing system definition (perhaps there are better terms for this…)

Games that manage to do so successfully have the opportunity to be replayed through multiple lifetimes