ABSTRACT
Most writing on video games considers either narrative concerns or game-play and what is usually referred to as “interactivity.” Instead of focusing on the “game” aspects of the video game, this essay looks at the video game as “video,” or rather, as a medium ofvisual imagery. The video game began with perhaps the harshest restrictions encountered by any nascent visual medium in regard to graphic representation. So limited were the graphics capabilities of the early games, that the medium was forced to remain relatively abstract for over a decade. Gradually as technology improved, designers strove for move representational graphics in game imagery, and today they still continue to pursue ever more detailed representations approximating the physical world. At the same time, video games have come to rely on conventions from film and television, allowing the depiction and navigation of their diegetic worlds to seem more intuitive and familiar to players. Yet by limiting themselves to conventions established in other media, game designers have neglected the realm of possibilities which abstraction has to offer. This great, untapped potential will only be mined by a deliberate move back into abstract design that takes into consideration the unique properties of the video game medium.
