Abstraction: The Representation of an Idea

Picture the scene: it's 1982-ish*, and I've spent a good chunk of an afternoon typing in a program in BASIC from two magazine pages. It's called something like Dragon Run, and after spending ten minutes making sure that it is saved to tape, I excitedly type RUN on my flat Atari 400 keyboard.

If memory serves me right, the reality of the game falls somewhat short of the artistry that adorned the page of the magazine: a flourishing drawing of a big green dragon chasing a fearsome (yes, you read that right) knight. The game idea, we're told, is that you must reach the castle from your starting position, negotiating the forest, while avoiding the dragon.

A few seconds after typing RUN, we find that the truth of the gameplay demands some imagination, and that illustration of a dragon has been reduced to a single low-resolution pixel (in a 4-colour, 80 × 48), and the knight likewise. Trees were shown in another colour, each being single pixels.

You might think that is a harsh criticism, but that is not my intention. What we have here is an extreme case of abstraction, where the player has been primed to expect a dragon, a knight, a forest, and a castle, and makes the massive leap from pixel square to dragon. Was it successful? Perhaps!

So, we ask the question, "Is abstraction bad?"

My first answer would be that it's unavoidable, and that it's a question of "How much abstraction is necessary or acceptable?" We can't avoid abstration, which is the substitution of reality for a symbol of that reality. Even images on a live news broadcast are an abstraction of the depicted reality, because lots of information is lost in the representation.

Most modern games strive to be 'realistic' or as unabstracted as possible, often at massive cost (see my previous post), but is this really necessary to implement a good game idea? Most platform games and 2D shooters of the 1980s and 1990s are not very far from the pixel abstraction of Dragon Run, and some imagination was needed to translate the game symbols into something the player understood, whether or not the player noticed this translation into a workable reality.

Players can easily pretend that Pong is squash, tennis, hockey, or soccer (though the latter two are perhaps stretching the abstraction too far!), and that the clump of pixels at the bottom of a Space Invader game is a well-equipped fighting spaceship, so why do we have to spell it all out for the games we make now?

An honest (non-commercial) game would not need expensive graphics to reproduce the game experience, provided the player can do a little mental work decoding the abstraction. In most cases, this player orientation should be a brief learning experience. Game objects just have to exhibit some tell-tale behaviours to remind the player of their function, either in-game, or out-of-game. A good example of the latter (even though it is 'expensive media') is the animated sequences of Astrochase, where we see the astronaut climb into the flying saucer that the player controls in the game itself. The player will then carry this detail into the game, which represents the saucer more simply.

So, with a well-written game, the player can quickly become familiar with the plot, orient themselves, and continue to understand what's happening in the game environment. It doesn't really matter how abstracted the representations are, as long as the gameplay is understood quickly by the player. Further, it is often said that books can be better than films. This is because books make the reader's imagination work harder to fill in the gaps left by an implicit description, often producing a better result.

Concluding statements, then:

• Do we really need explicit representations within games, when the player's imagination can fill in the gaps inexpensively?
• Is there a danger of providing too much poor detail, which would be worse than having very little detail?
• An abstract representation in a well-designed game can produce an enjoyable experience.

*Further research [here and here] reveal that this game was in G&VG magazine in 1983.

On simplicity

I'll start with what is perhaps a controversial question, "Has the gaming industry lost its way?"

That's quite a bold opening punch, but I mean to be selective with it. Over the past few years, we've seen an increase in games having budgets in the millions, and creative contributors in the hundreds, all in the name of 'player experience', where the aim is to create enough content to immerse a player in the experience. Unfortunately, the type of content being generated needs lots of artistry, architecture, and skill. There are some negative side-effects that spring to mind immediately.

1. The first side-effect is that it's nearly impossible for an individual, small, or self-funded software company to generate the vast amounts of media and content that the newer big games have. This is my first attempt at justifying my opening statement. Are the big games publishers guilty of pushing a product that only they can create to the exclusion of all others? Is this a realistic aspiration: to be untouchable?
   
   
2. The second is that consumer gaming limits the long-term appeal of a game. Following on from my first point, the vast amounts of media, maps, and so on, give a sense of value: that the gamer has bought something that is finely crafted, and it's possible to see the amount of work that has gone into the product. It contributes to the gamer's sense that the game is worth paying for. Commercially, it makes sense to create a product that gamers are in awe of, but there is a flip-side to consumer gaming: limited play. Many recent games, particularly adventures, and their numerically-driven evolution, the single-player RPGs, lead the player through a scripted story. Like a paperback novel, once you've read it, there's limited potential in going back to do it all again. So a gamer's cash can be viewed as being spent on 'timed play', and currently, the rate seems around $1 (£0.60) per hour for those new-ish games.
   
   
3. There is less gameplay innovation, when you can pad a game out with massive media content. For any new game release, ask yourself this question: what is innovative about the gameplay? I'm not thinking of the typical developer's strategy of extending a game's life by "Using the maps in multiplayer mode", nor the technological haze that gets in the way of gaming, such as "new Rasp3X!G engine that can render ten layers of dragon skin", nor "full seamless HDRI multi-pass scene buffers", and so on. I'm thinking of the genuine novelty of something that takes a minute or two to learn, and then the penny drops when the player feels completely at ease with the game! Among the examples I could quote, I'd say Nintendo have succeeded in bringing new (HCI) interaction methods to games by bringing innovative game controllers to the masses. Given that the PC/console setup is mostly an unchangeable 'given', it would be a bit unfair to expect software developers to do anything that radical! I'm really looking new game mechanics, which are successful enough to create their own genres.
   

Summary and Closing Comments

You might sense that I'm generally not in favour of consumer gaming, and would like to see a return to old-style gameplay. You'd be right. I think the industry is becoming lazy, by defaulting to the safe option of creating lots of limited-life content to support a tried-and-trusted formula, instead of innovating with a unique idea that leads to interesting gameplay.

My opinion is that you can create a far richer game experience by concentrating on new gaming. Instead of spending time and money on content, spend programming time on code that generates the content: procedural generation, when managed well, along with a good gameplay model, it can produce a very replayable game.

Perhaps we should, as an exercise, return to the days when resources were scarce, and see what innovation results?

Finally, a some closing statements, as food for thought:

• Are modern publishers destroying gaming by changing the shape of games, in order to make a long-term profit?
• The less you give someone to work with, the more innovative the solution will be.