In my mind, a game is comprised of a goal and methods for reaching that goal. You can manipulate the more subjective concept of "fun" by changing the goal's attributes/complexity or adjusting the methods (adding, subtracting, manipulating challenge).
The point to reaching the goal is for reward, which is why I do not list it separately. Reward is often a gateway to more games. For example, the scoreboard is actually a metagame, where the goal is to get the highest score in a competition with other people. The game of "catch" is time-honored and does not involve much more reward than the gateway to the metagame of becoming more dextrous.
By methods, I refer to all the tools at your disposal to try to reach your goal. These can include tools outside the parameters of the game; after all, many people can have fun by cheating the game, and in some games, cheating is part of the point (reneging in Uno).
The point is, as far as I can tell, there are just the two parts to a unit game definition, and the interesting stuff involves all the tweaks you make to those two parts. A typical fun game will be comprised of many minigames.
So I do not agree with this --
Unlike video games, company games need to be simple and focused.
We just need to be clever about shaping motivations and limitations for the audience, be it video game players or "company game" players. The video game industry is seeing greater successes when the games are simple/accessible, too.
Anyway, what's the connection to the article?
I feel like the computational (and, worse, legalistic) overhead for RPGs can detract from the fun of playing. So I wrote a simpler system that was based on that. Finding the middle of 5 d10s is something you can do (once you're used to it) in 0.25 seconds, so it's "immediately obvious" what the dice say. Adding 5 d10s takes about 1-2 seconds for most people, which is enough of a pause to break flow.
However, the real flow-breaker of RPGs isn't computation, but looking up rules in a rulebook to figure out how many dice of damage you take from a third-story fall before deciding whether to leap. This is one of the problems with formal role-playing systems... but, as always, the quality of the session has a lot more to do with the GM and players than the system itself.
But if I were to do a role-playing system now, it'd be based on Tarot cards (the 22 trumps). RPGs are more about interactive storytelling than about combat and number-crunching.
