On The Untapped Potential Of Abstract Videogames

Thanks to the IGDA for their 'Ivory Tower' column discussing why abstract graphics and gameplay are often unfairly ignored when making today's videogames. The writer notes that: "Quite a few classic board games are fairly abstract in design, including Chess, Go, Scrabble, Checkers, and so on... it's what's at the core of the game that matters." He goes on to argue that "the figuring out of a game can be made as interesting as any puzzle the appears within the game itself", and references newer titles such as Rez and Frequency as carrying on the abstract aesthetic pioneered by games like Tempest and I, Robot.

Comments

Abstraction, Representation

[whatever3003]

My two cents as a geek and (traditional) artist ... As soon as 'abstract' and 'art' are mentioned, everything, for most everyone, gets muddy. Abstract, in art generally, can mean: an abstracted concept/theme/meaning an abstracted representation and the formal natural of the work For that reason we generally stayed away from that (and other) ambiguous terms. It was either 'figurative', which was anything drawn from a model (a model being any object including a naked person) or 'non-figurative', which was a work with absolutley no representation of any model, the emphasis being entirely on the formal nature of the work. So there are degrees of representation, and abstraction is another thing altogether. This may help clear up that Minimalism stuff ~ Minimalism was an art movement with an emphasis on formal properties (the objective nature of a work) and simplicity.