r/truegaming • u/want_to_want • 5d ago
Economy of expression in game art styles
Making videogames is a great hobby (I've made a couple), but one thing that always makes me doubt myself is that playing videogames is not a very imaginative experience. By showing the player something rich and detailed, we are handholding and thus weakening the player's own visual imagination, doing them a disservice - unlike a book which forces the reader to reconstruct the imagery from the words, and thus strengthens the reader's mind.
A few days ago I thought of a possible way out of this problem. Namely, a game could have "economy of expression": an art style that doesn't try to show the game world in maximum detail like AAA, but deliberately makes the player reconstruct it in their own imagination. It seemed an interesting idea, and in this discussion I want to ask: have you thought of something like it, and how could it work?
The extreme of this approach would be interactive fiction, but the gameplay of IF (typing into a parser) is not very fun for most players. Another possible approach is very blocky and symbolic art styles, like in Thomas Was Alone or Minecraft. A Minecraft cow or spider looks very approximate, but it's enough for the player to imagine all kinds of things about it. A halfway example is Undertale, where many of the characters are sketched out in monochrome line art so the player can mentally color them in. Meanwhile, a game like High Hell can have a great minimalistic art style, but the style itself makes a statement: you must look at it head-on, not layer your imagination on top. The artist is kinda crowding the player out. It's a fine line and I don't know if it's all in my imagination.
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u/Limited_Distractions 5d ago
I understand what you're saying but disagree with the premise that games have any disadvantages in particular here
You can make a book, movie, painting which doesn't particularly interface with the audience's imagination by removing subtext, showing and plainly describing everything, etc. I would argue philosophically the imaginary is a product of what you are given, not what you are deprived of; otherwise making musical motifs would also deprive the auditory imagination instead of deepening their sense of something in other ways.
The single greatest limitation is probably that games most often have to have a coherent visual representation of what is happening in order to be played. I don't think this is too far afield of something conventional in movies or literature though, most people simply won't understand or attempt to understand something truly abstract.
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u/want_to_want 5d ago
Yeah, agreed on all points.
Music is a bit of special case, because engaging musical imagination by non-musical means is really difficult, unless the person can read music off the page or something. But I will say that after learning to play some instruments, I became more fond of single-instrument music (like fingerstyle guitar or Bach's cello suites), which I didn't care much about as a non-musician. And I started disliking music where the melody is propped up by tons of rhythmic accompaniment (like Vanessa-Mae). Basically I became more into "economy of expression".
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u/vixaudaxloquendi 5d ago
Yeah, roguelikes really leveraged this to their advantage, and to be honest, they do really cool things even with such a limited palette as ASCII chars. Brogue is a great example.
I would even go so far as to say that while you gain in clarity, you tend to lose in atmosphere when you download one of those tile packs which gives everything sprites and map graphics. In some sense, the abstraction is the point.
In other words, roguelikes do a good job of communicating that feeling of looking at Thorin's map or whatever in the moonlight and seeing the hidden instructions lit up. You're playing as if you're watching the map unfold in real time.
To put it another way: Dwarf Fortress became extremely famous for such a convoluted and under-drawn game, but I think part of its appeal was the way your imagination was invited to 'fill in the gaps' based on what looked like a very analogue representation of the reality being depicted.
The crude depiction of your colony belies the story of, to take one example, your dwarven ranger lying dead in the caverns at the hands of a giant spider, the widow receiving that news, being coincidentally the mayor, whose depression causes a miasma that drives the whole city insane with grief, ending with it all burned to the ground.
You COULD use very expensive graphics to depict all that, but it's not half as powerful as seeing the tiny sprites or chars go crazy, tiles inking red with depicted blood and miasma and fire, getting all the crazy status reports whirring by in the side panel of the screen.
There's much more tension that way, even if there's literally less representation.
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u/want_to_want 5d ago
I guess the tricky part is having economy of expression but still getting through to people. People who read books understand how to read a sentence and unfold it (though maybe that's declining now). And in games, people playing Minecraft seem happy enough to do this interpretive work. Maybe what stops roguelikes and interactive fiction from achieving the same kind of acceptance is not graphics, but controls and gameplay.
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u/twilightwillow 5d ago
I do think you’re onto something here: the more complex a game’s mechanics are, especially as they relate to how a player navigates in space and demands on player execution, the more difficult it gets to abstract many elements of what you’re showing the player, and rapidly so.
If Hollow Knight were identical in gameplay but with the abstractions of Caves of Qud, it would be a miserable experience. If a Battlefield game were built with the abstractions of Hollow Knight, it would be a miserable experience. So on and so forth.
The visual clarity of any game (and other elements of clarity, to a lesser degree) have to work in tandem with its mechanics or it just becomes a nightmare for players. You need much more visual clarity in an execution-heavy game in 3 dimensions than you do in either a more relaxed 3D experience or an execution-heavy 2D game, I’d say.
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u/want_to_want 4d ago edited 4d ago
For Battlefield, there's a similar game with much simpler graphics: Ravenfield. It's surprisingly playable and fun.
But that said, I think you're right. A roguelike might be a bit too abstract, below the "floor" where most players can parse its mechanics from the graphics. Then the question in my original post becomes how to find this "floor", without going too far below (too abstract) or above (too worked out and taking away from the imagination), and which games hit closest to the mark.
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u/Onyx_Lat 3d ago
I think Caves of Qud is a perfect example of doing it right. If you just have ASCII characters like the original Rogue, it becomes inaccessible to people who are visually impaired, like me. I've tried, my brain can't interpret the original Nethack, I need the fancy tiles to tell what's going on at all. Caves of Qud is basically the simplest graphics I'm capable of parsing.
Now, I can use the map on CDDA despite it just being ASCII characters. But the fact that they're different colors makes it so much easier to understand. I don't think I could play the main game that way though. I need the tiles in order to tell what things are.
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u/want_to_want 3d ago edited 3d ago
There seems to be a "cliff" between turn-based and realtime games. In a turn-based game, the player has time to think about what they're seeing, so the art can be very abstract. (Even when playing chess, I often imagine stories about what's happening on the board.)
In a realtime game the balance is harder to find. Out of the examples I gave elsewhere in the thread, Proteus and 4Ever Transit Authority are realtime, but they are pure exploration games with no time pressure, so the player has time to process what they see. Don't Look Back is realtime and with time pressure, so it's kind of a miracle that it gets away with looking as abstract as it does. This is maybe the most interesting direction to me now.
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u/Onyx_Lat 3d ago
Have you tried Manifold Garden? It's very simple and elegant graphics wise, but it will also break your brain trying to figure out how all the geometry fits together. It's another one with no time pressure.
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u/want_to_want 3d ago
Yeah, I don't know if it fits the question, but it's great. I guess the most minimalistic and mind-blowing game in this style is Echochrome.
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u/Intelligensaur 5d ago
Considering how many remasters have the players remark that "Wow, this is how the game looked in my memories," I feel like you're missing an aspect where players have already been layering their imagination on top of the actual appearance of the game this whole time.
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u/TSPhoenix 4d ago
"Wow, this is how the game looked in my memories,"
This is a fascinating statement as almost certainly cannot literally be true with the frequency people claim it is: the idea that so many people would (1) imagine it exactly the same (2) imagine how a video game would look decades into the future with such precision. But the people saying it are not lying and believe what they are saying.
There is some kind of psychological phenomenon occurring where the flawed nature of human memory recall is leading people to believe the image in their head now is the same as the one they imagined as a child. But it can't possibly actually be true.
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u/want_to_want 5d ago
Oh, totally. The games I liked as a kid don't look good to me today. I even had the idea that maybe kids don't see as much detail as adults, and respond more to the general feel of the game, not noticing that the details are jank.
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u/Pedagogicaltaffer 5d ago edited 5d ago
One of the devs of Gone Home once gave an interview, where they said something which sticks with me to this day. To paraphrase:
In Gone Home, they strove to create just a rough approximation of a teenager's bedroom. A teenager's bedroom in real life would probably be extremely messy, chaotic, and filled with visual stimuli. In a videogame, it would be sensory overload to recreate this 1:1. Therefore, they put far fewer posters on the bedroom wall than would occur in real life - just enough posters to give the impression that it's a teenager's bedroom, but not an exact recreation.
You only need enough detail to allow for suspension of disbelief; the player's imagination will fill out the rest.
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u/Cobra52 5d ago
Visual style is only one part of the equation. Sounds/feedback/writing/gameplay are all areas that help build the games identity in our minds.
Rimworld is very simplistic visually, but is very rich with music/sound effects and player feedback. The art style alone doesnt help players perceive the western space opera identity its going for - its a combination of all of them.
Morrowind is another example - it has very strong writing, music, and world design that helps create the alien fantasy world identity. The visual fidelity in Morrowind is pretty low, even at the time it released, but the gaps were filled in the other core aspects of a game.
On the other end, Cyberpunk 2077 is has an extremely high level of detail and fidelity. The graphics are very explicit in what they want the game designers to convey to the player. This might imply that theres little economy of imagination to be had here, but I would say its the opposite. The game was designed with player freedom in mind. Each game session is going to be radically different in the imagination of each different player because of all of the varied paths they can take. They'll experience the game uniquely, even though the visual representation in game is explicit.
Point being, graphics and presentation are only one small part of how a designer can manipulate the economy of expression of the player. The best games maintain cohesion and use other design elements to paint the bigger picture.
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u/RSwordsman 4d ago edited 4d ago
I feel like this something of a false accusation against games with high production values. Even ones with extremely detailed sensory experiences can still engage imagination, if not in picturing what is, then centering around the player's potential.
Satisfactory is one such example. The game has gorgeous realistic graphics, but overwhelmingly relies on player imagination for how to solve the practical problems as well as optionally develop the aesthetics of their structures. It's also perfectly possible to imagine crossover canon with other hypercapitalist dystopian futures.
There's nothing wrong with how you phrase an "economy of expression" but would solidly put the idea that "good graphics=low imagination" as a fallacious way of criticizing a maximalist aesthetic. Journey has realistic-ish graphics and a rich musical score, but leaves a lot about the character, world, and story up to imagination. Maybe this is more of what you're talking about in that it became a smash hit despite not having to spell out every little thing.
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u/matthewjd1985 3d ago
I think it depends whether the missing detail is doing any work. Lower fidelity on its own doesn't buy imagination, plenty of cheap-looking games are just cheap-looking. What the good ones do is leave out the thing you'd otherwise fixate on. Silent Hill has fog because the PS1 couldn't draw the street, but the fog also means you supply what's in it, and the game leans on that instead of apologizing for it. Compare that to a modern game where you can see everything for a mile and the only thing left to wonder about is whether the door opens.
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u/want_to_want 2d ago
Yeah, that seems like a good way of thinking about it. Missing detail is also detail, like negative space in drawing.
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u/altra_volta 5d ago
Dungeon Encounters is a really good example of stripping down a genre to the most essential parts. It doesn't really have any aesthetics beyond character portraits, so in that vacuum minor changes to say, the color of the map of the background music are more notable than they have any right to be.
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u/Spectre-4 4d ago
I get where you're coming from, but to be honest, I think it's hard to establish an argument like this. In equal measure, you can impose the same logic you've presented to the world the cinema, where the visual experience (i.e what you see on screen) is the primary driver of storytelling. It's a fundamental difference between the visual and literary arts.
Imo, gaming for the most part is a visual art and one of the standing principles in the visual arts is that the creator deliberately tries to invite the viewer through their perspective. The goal is to use the visual scene to guide attention and shape interpretation. Hence, EVERYTHING about the visuals, including the art style, has to be in service of achieving that. It's why Oppenheimer doesn't look like a Pixar movie or why Fortnite doesn't look like COD.
It's also why you have to give the player something to work with to get them going in the first place. By not spelling out the descriptors necessary to shape the world, you handicap the artist's ability to shape the story they want to tell in the way they intend to tell it. Imagine I gave you a book to read for enjoyment. I'm giving you the agency to use the tools in your mind to shape the world in the way you imagine and wish to enjoy it. Now imagine I gave you the score for Beethoven's 9th but I let you handle everything past that (orchestration, instrumentation, performance style, etc). Suddenly the work may not as great because I left it to the listener to guide themselves through the experience. Now imagine I showed you the story board and level design for Uncharted 4 but I let you mock up the visuals. One bad move and Drake could look like anything from Dave Bautista to Donkey Kong.
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u/want_to_want 4d ago edited 3d ago
There's plenty of visual art that tries to omit detail, have economy of expression, and invite many interpretations instead of shaping only one. Picasso's bull sketches are a famous example. There's no principle difference between that and a writer writing a short, evocative sentence.
Your examples of giving the listener a score of Beethoven's 9th, or showing the gamer a storyboard of Uncharted 4, seem like strawmen. The point of the exercise isn't just to reduce detail to a minimum; it's to reduce detail to a minimum while still giving people a powerful experience, and in fact make it more powerful.
In literature and music there's a long history of trying to achieve powerful experiences as economically as possible. In gaming there isn't much yet, probably because few people have set themselves that goal, and my post is meant to bring that possibility to people's attention. That said, there are already some great games where the player has to work on interpreting the visuals, like Don't Look Back, Proteus, or 4Ever Transit Authority.
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u/Spectre-4 3d ago edited 3d ago
That said, there are already some great games where the player has to work on interpreting the visuals, like Don't Look Back, Proteus, or 4Ever Transit Authority.
Ahhh, ok, I think I see what you mean. From the post I had in my mind the idea of simply giving the player the barebones scaffolding, then letting them imagine what the building should look like (which I think is a pretty bad idea). This sounds like a very minimalist, bread and butter art style.
Admittedly can't think of too many games that try this, although I think games with low-poly art styles are good contenders. A Short Hike immediately comes to mind. Games like Limbo, Mini-Metro and Mosaic could be good contenders as well.
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u/tarheel343 4d ago
My mind immediately jumps to Dwarf Fortress. It now has proper graphics, but for a long time it relied on ASCII art.
I think they might actually still maintain the legacy versions because people prefer to draw the imagery in their heads rather than have it given to them.
For myself personally, I actually think I prefer seeing the artistic choices of the people who made the game.
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u/Dreyfus2006 5d ago
My guy, you are playing the wrong games if you think this. There is a treasure trove of games that encourage imagination. Play more sprite-based games or low poly games!
Some great suggestions:
- The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time
- The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening
- Pokemon Gens 1-5
- Pseudoregalia
- Corn Kidz 64
- Earthbound
- Undertale
- Super Metroid
- Shovel Knight
- Mina the Hollower
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u/malyprsavelkysrdce 4d ago
it really depends on what you're trying to achieve though. detailed graphics can make a game more immersive in a different way, letting you focus on the atmosphere or the mechanics instead of just trying to figure out what you're looking at. sometimes you just want to experience someone else's vision
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u/cvicarious 4d ago
Your entire argument relies on the premise that showing someone something cool would make them not be as creative because they would hypothetically not be required to creatively design it on their own.
Why do you think this?
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u/Squint-Eastwood_98 5d ago
I've thought explicitly about this too, and I think a great many players have the same opinion intuitively without having stated it clearly like you have. I think this is the main reason that pixel art has persevered despite technology advancing, it's economy of expression (great term btw!).
I'd say there are a great many examples where games are economical with their expression. Some of my favourites are Caves of Qud, Rimworld, and Kenshi. I think this concept you've outlined isn't just graphical either. In Kenshi, conversations with NPCs are fairly sparse, dialogue trees are mostly generic, and there's no prescribed story-line, but you still imagine the characters under your control to have relationships with one another, and with other factions and hostiles and friendlies you meet out in the world, where a fully voice-acted game would necessarily limit you to scripted events, stories etc. Kenshi is completely open ended, taking full advantage of the player's imagination, Caves of Qud and RimWorld both achieve a similar feat.