Abstract
From its earliest developments video game design has arguably been closely coupled to technological evolution particularly in relation to graphics. In very early games the limitations of technology led to highly abstracted graphics but as technology improved, abstraction has largely been left behind as developers strive towards ever-greater realism. Thus, games are generally drawing from conventions established in the mediums of film and television, and potentially limiting themselves from the possibilities abstraction may offer. In this research, we consider whether highly abstracted graphics are perceived as detrimental to gameplay and learnability by current gamers through the creation of a game using very low-resolution display that would accommodate a range of display options in a playable city. The results of trialing the game at a citywide light festival event where it was played by over 150 people indicated that abstraction made little difference to their sense of engagement with the game, however it did foster communication between players and suggests abstraction is a viable game design option for playable city displays.
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Acknowledgements
We thank all the early play testers at Lancaster Institute for the Contemporary Arts and players at Light Up Lancaster for their enthusiastic playing of the game. This work was supported by the RCUK Digital Economy project, Creating and Exploring Digital Empathy (Grant Reference EP/L003635/1).
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© 2017 ICST Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering
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Gullick, D., Burnett, D., Coulton, P. (2017). Visual Abstraction for Games on Large Public Displays. In: Poppe, R., Meyer, JJ., Veltkamp, R., Dastani, M. (eds) Intelligent Technologies for Interactive Entertainment. INTETAIN 2016 2016. Lecture Notes of the Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering, vol 178. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-49616-0_27
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-49616-0_27
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