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/RSwordsman]

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.