Is there a name for this sort of thing in game design?

It’s a thing Blizzard/Runic is particularly good at. I’ll explain.

A few weeks ago I got bang into Path of Exile, then as a result of that I got into a generalized ARPG frenzy with Grim Dawn, Van Helsing, Titan Quest and latterly Torchlight II.

And I noticed the thing I noticed when I played WoW. Because of the simplified, cartoon-like world, Blizzard/Runic can also afford to have every salient object have its own “personality” in a miniaturized, hyper-real way (e.g. you bump into a skeleton on the floor, it clanks and shifts).

Whereas if you have a more realistically depicted world like Grim Dawn’s you’re starting to multiply the range of expected objects’ behaviours - not only that but because of the more complex visual panorama, there are necessarily more things, but it’s more difficult to pick them out.

So the Blizzard philosophy of sticking with cartoon-like rendering seem to win on two counts, not just in terms of the oft-mooted tremendous responsiveness even on toasters, but even in terms of a kind of charming immersion in a simplified world, where there’s not much complexity, but everything that stands out as figure from ground can have its own little personality, so the world as a whole feels alive.

So is there a name for this, for making every salient thing be responsive to the player, have its own personality, etc.? I seem to recall there being a term for it, but I’ve forgotten.

All this makes me a little bit sad too, because I do prefer more “realistic” graphics on the whole - it’s kind of irritating that having more cartooney graphics provides so much bang for the buck.

Well, let’s try to compare apples to apples; Grim Dawn is a small indie level title with accompanying budget. Anything Blizzard is a massive endeavor, as large as anything else in gamingdom.

So let’s compare, say, what Blizzard is churning out to, say, a Rockstar title. Feels a little more even.

There, still, you’re going to see the same thing. A big part of that - yes - is due in part to the choice between realistic rendering of the world (and all that entails) versus a more stylized version of the game world. Let’s face it, the more realistic the depiction of the game space, and the more verbs they give a player, the more a player is going to expect that world to react in a way that they expect, and that feels natural. That’s tough to do with something that approximates reality, because reality is super duper complex.

But that’s not all of it. Games with large budgets that attempt to make the world feel real are shooting for the fences in other ways. Lighting, weather effects, etc., can help drive that same immersion, even if they fall down in having the ability to let you interact meaningfully (or at least somewhat realistically) with everything in it. Look at how awesomesauce the latest Red Dead trailer looks. Look at how the characters move, and feel grounded in that world. Sure, you may not be able to touch everything there, but you’re being placed there in other ways that your brain will appreciate.

So I don’t think it’s a “win” on either side, really. It’s just a choice made by developers in how they want to spend their immersion-bucks. It’s really hard to do what Diablo does with stylized graphics; that’s why so few titles attempt it, and those that do only succeed if their team knows that nailing that means a lot of work up front to define that style, versus the work on the back end to model and add materials to realistic looking shit.

Generally speaking, you’re talking about levels of abstraction, both in interactivity, and in visual design.

Im not sure if there’s formal terminology. I generally refer to it as “modeling”, in the scientific sense.

It’s a common point of contention for many game designers that “simulation” is actually distinct from game design. Simulation is trying the reproduce something exactly (i.e. with as little abstraction as possible). The choices of what to represent and what to omit are where the game design happens

Don’t forget music, sound, animations and fluidity, etc.

Blizzard had TOP NOTCH stuff for a lot of that. It’s certainly not just clanking and shifting things on the ground.

No mention of Epic’s Fortnite yet … same deal.

Probably not what you’re thinking of, but I call that “generosity” in design. Every nook and cranny of the game is interactive and rewarding.

What you’re describing about how the art style unlocks the opportunity to add these kinds of details was stated very explicitly in a GDC talk from the guys who made Night in the Woods. They weren’t so much talking art style as systems design (although their art style enabled it as well), but they said their design principle was “Go simple so you can be generous.”

Yeah that’s something that’s always puzzled me. There seems to be some appetite for simulation in games (e.g. consider the number of “realism” and “immersion” mods for Skyrim), and after all, the rules of the real world are already well-known, so in theory all you’d need to do is tweak them a bit (compress time and space, make things a bit easier, add some magic, etc.) and the game would be “learned” automatically by the player.

But I often see game designers (when they talk amongst themselves) baulk at realism, or say it’s too “boring.”

I suppose like all things it’s a trade-off - whether there’s enough interest in simulation for a good ROI for the time and effort developers would need to spend, etc.

It’s a fascinating little side-topic though, this business of simulation vs. game, and I often think about it. I remember Doom was the game that got me into gaming, prior to that the level of abstraction in videogames was such that they just didn’t hold my interest. Either I’ve got a terrible imagination, or there was some threshold where there had to be enough “realism” to tweak my interest (in the case of Doom, a strong feeling of moving through a 3-d space for the first time ever).

I suppose the other problem is that you have a narrow interface with the game (keyboard/mouse, gamepad) so the developers have to make decisions on how to “translate” the simulated actions into actions that can easily be done with those implements, in a fun way, and that must be very tricky (because there are so many options, yet at the same time a queer constraint too).

Yeah, that’s a neat way of putting the trade-off I was getting at, thanks.

I happen to like stylized world building usually, for me, it’s easier to suspend disbelief in a world where the visual rules are made up. I find stylized words to generally be more engrossing. To me, there’s something boring about realistic world building.

As far as your question goes, simplicity in design is one of the hallmarks of design in general, regardless of what field it applies to. It also allows you to much more easily shift focus of attention when you want to, and make things stand out in the world. “Reality” is very cluttered, and that makes visual cues much more difficult to achieve. Most games depend on visual cues like this, and especially in games that require the player to react quickly to visual cues.

There are a lot of principles that apply to this design wise…visual clarity, proximity of objects, clutter and the difficulty that presents the viewer. Your mind can pretty easily get overwhelmed by detail, and it’s a problem in a lot of games that end up with too much going on at once. Even Blizzard is guilty of this, but is certainly one of the best at it.

It’s easy to burn out the viewer with too much detail over a period of time, especially in constantly moving/changing environments. As far as the actual name for this, I think it’s farfegnugen.

Heh. This feels like a massive over simplification of the work involved. Also, your comment about the difficulties involved in control are also a massive over simplification.

lol, there are so many things that are things that don’t have names.

Oh I’m sure they are in terms of the work involved, I was thinking more in terms of an abstract description of the goal.

This concept is discussed in Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics…which is about comics, not games, but your post made me flash back to this. An artist makes a decision to create an image on a continuum from photorealism down to a abstract icon. The artist can also choose to make backgrounds particularly detailed while making characters cartoony. McCloud calls this a masking effect. This passage loses something without the illustrations, but…

…by de-emphasizing the appearances of the physical world in the favor of the idea of form, the cartoon places itself in the world of concepts. Through traditional realism, the comics artist can portray the world without, and through the cartoon, the world within. When cartoons are used throughout a story, the world of that story may seem to pulse with life. Inanimate objects may seem to possess separate identities so that if one jumped up and started singing it wouldn’t feel out of place. [Here, he draws a comics frame of a cartoon man in a room with a radio, window, and table. On the table is a glass and a teacup and saucer.] If an artist wants to portray the beauty and complexity of the physical world, realism of some sort is going to play a part. [the comics frames zoom into the cartoony teacup and glass, then he switches his art style to show a much more detailed glass and teacup.]

… Storytellers in all media know that a sure indicator of audience involvement is the degree to which the audience identifies with a story’s character. And since viewer-identification is a specialty of cartooning, cartoons have historically held an advantage in breaking into world popular culture. On the other hand, no one expects audiences to identify with brick walls or landscapes and indeed, backgrounds tend to be slightly more realistic. …

This combination allows readers to mask themselves in a character and safely enter a sensually stimulating world. One set of lines to see, another set of lines to be. In the world of animation, where the effect happens to be a practical necessity [this book was written before the ubiquity of CGI], Disney has used it with impressive results for over 50 years!

…The resulting hybrid styles had tremendous iconic range, from extremely cartoony characters to near-photographic backgrounds. But… comics artists took the idea a step further. Soon, some of them realized that the objectifying power of realistic arts could be put to other uses. For example, while most characters were designed simply, to assist in reader-identification, other characters were drawn more realistically in order to objectify them, emphasizing their “otherness” from the reader. A prop like this sword might be very cartoony in one sequence [the writer, drawn in a simple iconic style, is holding an equally cartoonish sword] due to the “life” it possesses as an extension of my cartoon identity. But suppose I notice some mysterious writing carved on the sword’s hilt. In… comics, the sword might now become very realistic, not only to show us the details, but to make us aware of the sword as an object, something with weight, texture, and physical complexity. [The sword now looks ornate and damned interesting.]

…a simple style doesn’t necessitate simple story. The platonic ideal of the cartoon may seem to omit much of the ambiguity and complex characterization which are the hallmarks of modern literature, leaving them suitable only for children. But simple elements can combine in complex ways…

So if there’s a term for what you are talking about, it might be “iconic”, “cartoony”, “player-identifying”, or “human nature”.

Fiendishly interesting quote Djscman, thanks.