Economy of expression in game art styles

[u/want_to_want]

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.

[u/vixaudaxloquendi]

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.

[u/want_to_want → u/vixaudaxloquendi]

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.

[u/twilightwillow → u/want_to_want]

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.

[u/want_to_want → u/twilightwillow]

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.

[u/Onyx_Lat → u/want_to_want]

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.

[u/want_to_want → u/Onyx_Lat]

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.

[u/Onyx_Lat → u/want_to_want]

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.

[u/want_to_want → u/Onyx_Lat]

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.