Games are an Abstraction of Concepts and Reality

Abstraction of Concepts and Reality

Vintage SimCity

Imagine trying to duplicate all the complexity of running a major city, creating an amusement park or gearing up for a military assault. These are involved and complicated processes and the backdrops for a variety of engaging and fun games. Games based on this complex subject matter work, not because they include all the complexities, but precisely because they reduce the complexity and use broad generalizations to represent reality. The player is involved in an abstraction of events, ideas and reality.

Games are based on models of the real world. A game may be regarded as a dynamic model of reality in which the model provides a representation of reality at a particular period of time.  This is known in the academic literature as an operating model, as distinct from verbal, graphic, mathematical or physical models. It is also important to note that the modeled reality may be hypothetical, imagined or fictional as is often in the case in games like Dungeons and Dragons and video games like the Halo series.

Abstracted reality has a number of advantages over reality. First, it helps the player manage the conceptual space being experienced. In other words, it helps the player understand what is going on within the game. It minimizes the complexity. The game Monopoly and the game Chess are abstractions to such a degree that financial monopolies and military strategy is literally reduced to the space of a game board. This makes it possible for players to engage with the concepts of strategy and financial acquisition without having to experience war or being in a monopoly themselves. It is possible to manage the concepts easily within the abstracted space.

The second advantage is that cause and effect can be more clearly identified.  In a large, interconnected system like a city, raising taxes might eventually cause people to move away and the long term impact might be an erosion of the tax base but waiting years for that to happen doesn’t provide a clear cause and effect relationship to those living in the city. Additionally, issues such as quality of life, availability of employers, quality of school systems and other factors influence people’s willingness to stay within a given location.  Games highlight relationships and make those relationships more clearly linked so that once a city manager raises taxes; game people begin moving out of the city in one or two subsequent turns.

Third abstracting reality removes extraneous factors. Reality is messy; there are a lot of events that happen in real life that would not make playing a game very interesting.  Every day occurrences in reality make for uninteresting game play. Few games force a player to stop all activity and get a haircut or go to the dentist. Important in real life, removed in games.

In games with guns, it takes many real life fatal shots to bring down the game character. A hospital visit for that wound to the shoulder—out of the question. Reloading is required but happens infrequently and for some reason cases of bullets are strewn all over the place.

If that wasn’t the case, every time a player got shot, they’d be required to visit to the hospital and be bed ridden for weeks or would die instantly and end the game. Games remove elements of reality to keep the player focused on the essence of the game. Removing extraneous factors keeps the game moving and the player involved. Too many elements of reality and the game cease to be engaging.

Fourth, it reduces the time required to grasp the concepts. In complex systems the ability to grasp all the concepts and ideas involved can be overwhelming. For example, without training, driving a race car can be a complicated and frightening ordeal but in racing games the controls are abstractions of reality and easier to use than in real life. The abstraction of the interface and the game concepts makes it easier to grasp complex processes.