Abstraction Tells Players What Your Game Is About

What is your game about? As designers, we have an idea of what matters and what doesn't in our game. We want the player's experience to match our vision. But our mechanics can sabotage this because of how players perceive complexity. If a system's abstraction level does not align with its intended importance to the theme, it creates thematic dissonance. The more rules your game has for something, the more players will perceive it to be about that thing.

But first, what is abstraction? Any game with theming simulates a system. Within that simulation, we represent different aspects with varying levels of detail. The lower the detail, the higher the abstraction. For example, rolling a die to determine an attack's overall strength is highly abstract, while writing down the targeted body part is much less so. When iterating on a game, you can abstract a system to remove details and simplify it or elaborate it to create a more detailed representation.

For example, in the racing game Heat: Pedal to the Metal, moving your racecar, shifting gears, and managing heat is very detailed, with many rules and player choices. But the game barely addresses the real-world need to maintain a racecar with a pit crew; the closest it comes is its "spin-out" mechanic, which it explains in a few sentences. Contrast this with Pit Crew, another racing game that abstracts racing while elaborating maintenance. Most rules focus on how and where to play cards when repairing your racecar. Pit Crew abstracts the racing process to a series of frantic die rolls, where each six rolled advances the car. Heat and Pit Crew are both about racing, but focus on very different parts.

Players can't pay attention to everything, so when introduced to a new game, they try to figure out what matters. One simple heuristic is to look at how many rules are devoted to it. Dungeons and Dragons has a complex system of rules around combat. Entering combat changes the game flow into a concrete turn-based system. Combat involves much dice-rolling and math, and most abilities are combat-related. Even attacking requires rolling at least twice: once to hit and once to determine damage. By contrast, non-combat challenges often resolve with a single skill check. Dungeons and Dragons makes it clear that the game is primarily about turn-based combat, with role-playing as a backdrop. The D&D focus on combat contrasts with later systems like Dungeon World, where combat's abstraction matches other game elements.

Fortunately, abstraction is easy to evaluate without playtesting. Just read your rules and see how much text is devoted to each thematic element. If an unintended focus takes up too much spotlight, you may want to simplify it.