Abstraction is at the core of art. It’s not that art that isn’t abstract isn’t art or is “less” art, but the abstract is only possible in art (or other such human inventions that depend on concepts) and is what’s uniquely artistic. Figurative art is, in principle, also abstract. A painting is simply composed of different colors, pigments, tinctures, etc. arranged in various patterns. Some of these patterns may be interpreted by us as the figure of a person or a bowl of fruit, but it’s just paint on a canvas. So, even figurative art depends on our capacity for abstraction.
However, videogames are predominantly abstract in that the element that composes their structure is much more evidently non-figurative: rules. I like to say that they are ruled by the abstract. Rules -and the way players interact with them- are what (video)games are made of. Rules are only abstract and can’t be arranged in a pattern that makes them look otherwise; they are constructions that wouldn’t exist (they don’t exist, that’s the point: unlike pigments or light, which do exist in a physical sense) if we weren’t able to form concepts/ideas through the process of rational abstraction from the raw data we get from the world around us.
A rule that works as gravity comes to mind, though.
In Tetris the pieces 'fall:' they move downwards to the bottom of the screen. Is this rule figurative in some way? Is it simulating gravity? I think it’s not as simple as it may seem to provide a satisfactory answer to that question.
This is a mechanic that’s central to the system of this game and it doesn’t only have the effect of feeling like gravity, it also adds pressure in a different way than other directions would. If the pieces moved to the sides, they might feel as though they were going somewhere. In the language of videogames (especially in the age of Tetris), right and left represent directions of progression and regression, respectively. If the pieces went upwards, they’d feel lighter, as though they were floating away.
This rule is functional and constitutive to the system of Tetris. The fact that it looks like gravity is, I think, entirely accidental. To Alexey Pajitnov (creator of Tetris), just like the rest of us, it felt more natural and possibly allowed for a better sense of organization, to see these pieces falling down rather than to the sides or upwards (notice that in English the verb ‘to fall’ implies a downwards direction.) Even though art owes nothing to reality, even though the most important rule in art is coherence (even if, like all rules in art, it can and will be transgressed) and certainly not realism, our experiences do, obviously, inform the art we make.
Then, I thought, what about Call of Duty 4? It has gravity. Or, rather, it has a rule that seems to resemble gravity much more closely than that of Tetris. It is, however, a very different kind of game. If we were to set a scale for game classification in which ‘abstract’ was on one end and ‘realistic’ on the other—or, better yet: a Game-Simulation scale, CoD 4 would be closer to the Realistic/Simulation end than Tetris. As such, it requires certain elements that ground it in what we recognize as reality. As long as the action takes place on Earth, in order to feel like it happens on Earth, the simulation requires a force that pulls objects downwards with a magnitude similar to what we know. In this sense, is the gravity in CoD 4 really a rule, or is it an element of the game, like the trees or buildings? Perhaps when games are so close to the simulation end of the spectrum they become too complex to analyze and break down in such ways; maybe it’s an element and a rule. In any case, I think we can, at the very least, agree that the gravity in Call of Duty is not the same gravity as in Tetris.
Games that involve simulation require more complex elements (unlike the quite simplistic and more clearly abstract tetrominoes), so that they can be grounded in what we know as reality, through this façade, their rules are made a little more obscure. The highly complex system that makes up the background elements of physics in a game like CoD 4 or Half-Life is, indeed, not a system of rules in game terms, but a system of elements that compose the necessary background for the action to take place. They are more akin to the colors and shapes of Tetris than to the rule of "objects fall at a pre-established pace." Furthermore, CoD 4 or Half-Life may involve several players at a time. Each player-element in the game requires interaction with various different systems (say, the "background elements system" (which includes physics) and the "rules system" (which includes things such as how much damage you take from a certain projectile or from falling down a certain height) and also interact with each other. And so, it becomes harder to differentiate which of these rules are analogous to the aforementioned constitutive rule of Tetris and which are simply realism-ehnancing background elements as they become increasingly complex in order to support the simulation.
In Tetris, there are basically two such complex elements: gravity (which, remember, isn’t gravity) and collision. Gravity, which we’ve already discussed, and collision (the capacity for blocks to recognize each other and the walls+floor as obstacles) interact to form the physics system of Tetris: a much more simplified and more abstract version than that of CoD 4, et al. precisely because it works as a system of rules that the game is built on. When gravity is a force in the background (an "element"), not too different from ambience sounds, it can be as complex as necessary to sell the illusion; when it’s not gravity, but a rule that somewhat evokes the same concept in a secondary way -as in Tetris-, it needs to be made simple (the interactions it engages in with elements, or other rules, need to be clear) in order for the player to be able to recognize its importance and respond accordingly. This happens to an extent in games with complex physics systems, but in a very different sense. The player is able to recognize the similarities between the simulation and what they know from the physical world and thus make predictions based on that knowledge.
It is through this principle that the illusion that makes the world of a game like Gravity Bone is harder to break than that of, say, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. In Gravity Bone the player is never meant to believe that they are inhabiting anything other than a game-space (and they are, in fact, encouraged to acknowledge this) and thus the break from reality can be greater without affecting their immersion. A good example of this would be the game’s approach to NPCs (Non-Player Characters): whenever you approach an NPC, they speak to you only in gibberish. This means that you never expect them to be people; you only expect them to be functional entities of the game-world. Perhaps surprisingly, this makes them more believable. Not in the sense of their possible existence in reality, but in the sense that most matters in art: coherence. They are coherent with the game-world, they are coherent with a game-world, therefore you don’t expect them to be more than that and this actually helps your immersion. You accept the new rules and elements, you submerge yourself in the new world and, most importantly, you never compare it to reality.
In high contrast with this, is a world such as the one in most open-world games. Whenever you realize that those incredibly realistic NPCs are only repeating lines from a predetermined list, and aren’t the real people they try so hard to simulate, the spell is broken by its very weaving. This is, in my opinion, the consequence of approaching the creation of a game-world as the simulation of the real world instead of a world of its own. It’s the “arrow to the knee” phenomenon. When walking the streets of any given town in Skyrim, you might hear random NPCs utter the phrase "I used to be an adventurer like you, but then I took an arrow to the knee" several times. After a while, it becomes so clear it came out of a predetermined list, that it will instantly break any possible sense of immersion and dehumanize these NPCs that tried so hard to be human.
We really do seem to need to learn the difference between fiction and reality.
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