Francois

What's interesting about abstract games is that they are just as fun as more mimetic games, (sometimes even more so.)

I'm not sure that mimesis makes games more fun or more challenging. A pure strategy game such as chess doesn't need mimesis because its main attraction is it's complex strategy. It's interesting that a chess game can be "reduced" to a system of letters and numbers, IE the pieces are so abstract as to not even need graphics at all. (Is text "more" abstract than pictures? maybe if numbers and text stand in for pieces and positions, but are text games considered abstract? What would a text game be like if it included wordplay (a metatext game?))

Mimetic design is very important for games like Resident Evil and Half-Life, where the physical appearance of monsters and how you sense the game environment (light and dark environments) are important to the emotional catch of the game.

But what is interesting about the article is that it posits that there are many possibilities for abstract design that have been neglected.

I try hard to think of how an abstract game would look today, with graphics as they are would it be rolling waves of colour that are affected by the player. When the author says abstract does he mean, pixelly graphics, or less anthropomorphized characters (and player characters)

Is tetris more abstract than space invaders? Even though it has better graphics, because in tetris you are disembodied force manipulating blocks, whereas in space invaders you are a pilot defending the world from aliens.

Some of the best games I have played are text based. Utopia online is free (though it has advertising,) near 100,000 people play it, and yet you have to imagine what is happening based on numbers and text. Text based adventure games often hold my attention much better than visually based games, maybe because the authors spend more time on story, or maybe reading text and imagining gets me in a narrative mood, and imagination is much more "real" than simulated visual input.

But again maybe I am missing the author's point. It's strange that this idea of games marching towards better mimesis is so strong that it becomes hard to think about what a more visually abstract game would be like.