think there are many many original games that are yet to be made, but still map quite cleanly and obviously with reality.

Absolutely. Part of what I’m saying is that all games, no matter how cleanly they map with reality or not, present a subset or synthetic reality, and the subtractive design you must apply to get to that point is, whether conscious or not, an act of abstraction. You’re paring away something that isn’t essential to the systems, the themes, the experience… take your pick.

So knowing that every game, from Operation Flashpoint to Geometry Wars, sits somewhere on that continuum, I’d personally like to see designers spreading our wings a bit by wielding the abstractions we employ more intentionally rather than pretending that we’re always some incremental step from a holodeck-like 100% mapping with reality.

There’s also the fact that of the 4 issues you mention, “player training/core fantasy/narrative context/marketing problems”, pretty much only player training is an objective Good that every game must have. The other three are only virtues if you’re making a blockbuster. Again my thinking is more about the breadth of the medium than of the market.

I’m not sure I agree. I think that we are mostly locked in cycles of derivative design. I think there are many many original games that are yet to be made, but still map quite cleanly and obviously with reality. Designers who find a new way of literally mapping reality into a game space and do it well tend to make a lot of money. Take a game like The Sims, for example. Nothing abstract, stupidly familiar, but incredibly original and seductively lucrative.

Making game element analogous to real life simultaneously solves a lot of player training/core fantasy/narrative context/marketing problems simultaneously. It’s going to be a real challenge to move away from that.

Also, abstract doesn’t mean arbitrary. You get total cognitive dissonance only when you replace a familiar reference point with something that has zero connection with it – that’s more surrealism than abstraction. The process of abstraction is more about taking the reference point and paring its information down to its “essence” – whatever qualities the artist finds most essential/intrinsic – undoubtedly a subjective process, but that’s why it’s an art.

Regardless, because we’re all human and we have a lot of general thought patterns in common, you can often abstract something heavily and still make a powerful connection with people. Doing that well means figuring out what information just adds noise, robs the piece of impact or makes it less universal… whatever you’re trying to express.

What impressed me about Wall-E (the first half at least) was that they took a few steps back from their already-semi-abstracted cartoon humans, and remained just as successful as they usually are. To me that served as a reminder that people have plenty of – more than they’re commonly given credit for – aptitude and affinity for meeting abstractions halfway.