Andrew Rollings and Ernest Adams on Game Design

Realism and Abstraction

As we said in Chapter 2, games can be divided very roughly into two categories, realistic and abstract. Realistic games make an effort to model the real world, and when playing them you can rely on real-world common sense. Abstract games bear little resemblance to the real world and have arbitrary rules that you have to learn somehow. However, it isn't really that simple. Realism is not a dichotomy, but a continuum. All games, no matter how realistic, represent an abstraction and simplification of the real world. Even the multimillion-dollar flight simulators used for training commercial pilots are incapable of turning the cockpit completely upside down. This event is (we hope) so rare in passenger aircraft that it's not ...