Baseball

Baseball dares be much more complicated than any video game I know of.  Also, unlike most video games, the complexity has almost nothing to do with the environment: there are no walls to shoot around, nor ramps to traverse, just a simple, open field with walls.  Yet within those walls exists the most complex set of mechanics imaginable.  Blocking the plate, ground rule doubles, the infield fly rule, balks, even seasoned sports fan sometimes fail to understand them.  If you were to introduce a game as complicated as baseball, consumers would have no idea how to digest that content.  Baseball is truly as complicated as it needs to be, but no more.

Baseball is about stillness.  Each player must sit on the bench for nearly half the game.  Even when off the bench, most of the playes spend their time waiting for the ball to be struck, so they can react.  The conventional thinking in video games is that your audience would get bored if subjected to such treatment.  All the sports games exibit this behavior: just switch to where the action is.  They take a game based on teamwork and turn it into some sort of single player body-jumping freakshow.