At IndieCade 2011 this year, I led a discussion on the idea of depth in games with my friend Paul Sottosanti, who is not only a great designer himself, but who is also one of the two elite SpyParty playtesters. We decided we don't really know what depth in games actually is, so instead of trying to give a lecture about it and flail around, we simply asked the audience what they thought.

Both Paul and I did both give quick intro talks about our thoughts on the topic to get things started, and then we opened it up to questions and comments. I put a slide up at the end of my short talk to try to tease apart some of the things people often conflate with depth, and it had this taxonomy of ideas:

Depth Topics

deep	vs.	hard mental hard physical complicated meaningful emergent wide
single-player	vs.	multi-player
player-skill	vs.	avatar-skill

Welp, the web service I was using for the slide syncing died, so I'll have to redo it on youtube I guess.

Here is the raw ppt and mp3.