The Ivory Tower

December 2003

Abstraction: An Untapped Potential

Mark J. P. Wolf

Call me nostalgic, but there's something about older video games, something that you just don't see much of today. It's the abstract graphics and gameplay, the kind you find in everything from Yar's Revenge to Tetris , Centipede , Qix , Q*bert , Tempest , I, Robot , Pipe Dream , Adventure , or even Breakout . Except for a few torchbearers like Rez and Frequency , games have gone the way of increasingly representational graphics and gameplay, often trying to achieve the look and feel of movies or cartoons. Even many of the earliest blocky-graphic games made their graphics as representational as the technology would allow. But the game imagery perhaps most unique to the medium, which is the most unlike imagery found in other media, would have to be found mainly in abstract games. Today, abstraction has become the biggest area of untapped potential in game design, and there's a few ideas that some of the early video games began to suggest and explore before more advanced technology came on the scene.

1. Learning the game can be part of the game.

Part of the charm of some early abstract games was the way in which learning the game and what all the graphics meant was almost a part of the game itself. First you would have to identify the avatar and the graphics you controlled, and then the good and bad nonplayer-characters, and so on. Some games, like Tetris , had no avatar and merely allowed direct control of graphical elements. In this sense, the learning of the game, and even the identification of its graphics, becomes an active part of the game (many games experiment with novel graphical styles, but few are truly nonrepresentational). Many games try to make the interface as transparent as possible, but it need not always be so. Provided that there is some kind of logic embodied in the way a game operates, and a learning curve that is encouraging and not too steep, the figuring out of a game can be made as interesting as any puzzle the appears within the game itself.

2. Abstraction is not the same as Minimalism.

Just because something is graphically abstract does not imply that it is minimalistic, although Minimalist art and early computer game graphics are frequently both. Fractals, with their infinite detail, are perhaps the best example of complex abstraction. Likewise, animation and movement can also be abstract and complex; and so can a game's action and objectives. For example, look at the various styles of animations of Mathematica graphics, and then imagine interactive models based on them, which a player can change; and finally, games based on the manipulation of such models. While it may require different ways of thinking for game designers and players, it is certainly a rich vein of possibilities waiting to be mined (especially 3-D abstract graphics, which began with 1983's I, Robot and can be found in a few games today like Rez).

3. Many of the best board games are nonrepresentational.

Quite a few classic board games are fairly abstract in design, including Chess, Go, Scrabble, Checkers, and so on. (Sure, we could say that Chess has kings, queens, bishops, etc., but they are highly abstracted.) As these games prove, it's what's at the core of the game that matters, rather than what representational trappings these games may be forced into (for example, different chess sets are made for everything from the Civil War to The Simpsons). While representational graphics still dominates most contemporary commercial video game design, abstract design is occurring in other areas; while they are not video games in the classic sense, the many varied mazes at Andrea Gilbert's www.clickmazes.com show how different abstract ideas can be embodied in puzzles and games.

4. Abstract games can be just as involving as any other kind of game.

Representational games involving character identification may be one way of achieving affect, but they are not the only way. While representational graphics, especially those which tend toward photorealism, may be faulted for falling short of their goal (which is a lofty one indeed), abstract games are what they are and do not necessarily need high resolution or thousands of colors to look right. Many people were addicted to Tetris, which required amazingly little computing power, and other abstract games like Pac-Man have had great crossover appeal. In some ways, tying video games to animated characters, movies, and outside franchises is an easy way out for engaging and involving the player in a game, and too often it takes the place of innovative objectives, interaction, and gameplay.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not against representational graphics at all, and there are plenty of avenues of development that they have yet to explore. But it would be quite a shame to limit game design to representational graphics and gameplay and to ignore everything else that the medium is capable of producing.

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Mark J. P. Wolf (mark.wolf@cuw.edu) has a Ph.D. from the School of Cinema Television at the University of Southern California, and is currently is an Associate Professor in the Communication Department at Concordia University Wisconsin. His books include The Medium of the Video Game (University of Texas Press, 2001), and The Video Game Theory Reader (Routledge, 2003).