Mark J. P. Wolf, "Abstraction in the Video Game"

(In The Video Game Theory Reader)

- Concerned primarily with abstraction in the visual imagery of games
- Restrictions of early game technology forced designers into abstraction
- Later technological progress allowed for more realism/representation
- Wolf sees an untapped potential in abstraction
- Weak analogy to action painting (assuming a connection between abstract art and early game graphics, highly suspect)
- Implied avatar (invisible or offscreen) vs "surrogate" avatar (visible or onscreen)
- Wolf uses the term "player-character" rather than avatar (still early in the history of digital game studies... when does the term avatar become universal?)
- Scott McCloud's notion that abstraction/simplification allows for identification (creates a vacuum)
- Gradual formalisation of conventions and increasing complexity
- Abstract graphics are not as useful for demonstrating the power of new technology
- Discussion of the medium specificities of the Atari 2600's graphics
- Representational box art contextualizes abstract graphics (Wolf claims this is somehow disingenuous or a betrayal of the more "pure" abstraction of the "real", which is completely ridiculous. Cultural objects are always received in context of other discourses, even the most abstract of paintings has a title, is displayed in a gallery, etc.)
- Throughout, Wolf seems to blur the distinction between "representation" and "realism" (almost all the examples of abstraction in games he cites are examples of abstract representation, not total abstraction)
- Another silly analogy, this time to the Lacanian mirror stage, as if learning the rules of a new game is somehow similar
- Empathy/identification vs abstraction
- Abstract games as a genre (Tetris, other puzzle games)
- Wolf seeks "new possibilities for abstraction" (which in many ways has been realized by indie/artgames movements and renewed nostalgia for 8- and 16-bit gaming culture)
- Bizarre notion that texture maps are abstract, but the 3D models they are mapped onto are representational? The logic being that some abstract art features splatters, rust, corrosion and so on, and so do some texture maps in games like Doom? Absurd!
- Simplicity vs complexity in abstraction (goes both ways, contra McCloud)
- All games, because they simulate rule-based systems, are abstractions
- Perceptual vs conceptual abstraction
- Wolf idealizes abstraction in a very modernist-essentialist-medium-specificity sort of way, and makes some pretty shifty (or just plain strange) claims throughout