Many years ago now, I saw an article on Reddit (which, for the record, I have long since abandoned) that made me so mad that it changed the way I think about art. The article in question was a huge list of cliches and tropes in RPG video games, everything from "you're always the Chosen One" to "The church is very bad and nobody knows except you." Obviously, the article was not meant to be taken seriously. It was a joke, just someone tongue-in-cheek poking fun at tropes. However, I am incapable of just taking things at face value, especially where People Being Wrong On The Internet is concerned. More than that, though, there was a deeper sense of smug superiority throughout the article that concerned me.

The Article

Some of it was just basic on-sight trope demonization with all the depth and nuance of your average CinemaSins video. Your hero is an orphan whose Real Parent(s) has/have some sort of deeper connection to the narrative? Ding! Add a tally to the sin counter. Never mind where these tropes come from (typically Dragon Quest, Dungeons & Dragons, or just standard fictional archetypes) or the role they serve artistically. However, while that aspect of the article did make me roll my eyes, it was the other half of the entries in its smug list that really ground my gears.

I began to see a pattern of criticism that belied a deeper misunderstanding and artistic illiteracy. Many of the line-item criticisms in the article were things like "all towns are only hundreds of feet apart," and "your hometown only has four buildings and they all point the same direction." Like... surely the author knows why this is the case, right? They can't expect a GameBoy or NES or SNES game to fully, photo-realistically model an entire settlement with thousands of inhabitants, right? I then turned to the comments and saw, to my horror, redditors gleefully agreeing with these criticisms. "Yeah, why DO all the towns only have four buildings? Do they think we're stupid?" someone says with hundreds of upvotes. It is then that I realize: people genuinely don't get it.



The architects of Pallet Town must have been smoking DRUGS when they came up with this!

Thinking Abstractly

In literally any medium ever, there is a concept called Abstraction. This is the process by which a large, complex, or multifaceted subject is represented by a simpler, much more easily-digested concept. The GameBoy is not capable of creating a fully-lifelike representation of an entire settlement. Even if it was, the developers would not be able to feasibly recreate such a thing, nor is there any point in doing so. Thus, the developers chose to represent its idyllic environs with a small handful of tiles.

Thus, the mental image of Pallet Town is abstracted into this pixel art square. It is not meant to be a literal representation of the exact topography and appearance of the town, merely a shorthand to invoke the feeling that the developers wish to convey.

Games do this a ton, not just visually, but with the systems and mechanics players use to navigate their worlds and stories. Hit Points do not literally represent the number of times you can safely be stabbed with a sword before dying, instead being an abstract representation of a character's stamina, luck, heroic spirit, etc.

Use Your Imagination

At some point in our lives, many of us stopped using our imagination. As a kid, we are constantly coming up with imaginary friends, imaginary situations in which our favorite fictional characters find themselves in, and imaginary boogeymen and monsters under the bed. When you read a book, you picture the events described in your head, taking liberties in the spaces between the author's words and the details needed for a complete picture. Imagine someone reading a book and saying "Nuh uh, that didn't happen. I don't see it literally taking place in front of me."

These days, with the ubiquity of television, social media, and photorealistic gaming and the rise of misinformation and anti-intellectualism people have had to rely on their imagination and critical thought less and less when consuming media. That's not to say that people are dumb nowadays and we had it so much better back in my day, merely an observation that imagination is a skill that we need to constantly exercise and hone if we wish to keep using it to its fullest capacity.

This isn't just a skill to be used while reading books, though you should be reading books more and doing so is a great way to train your imagination. While playing games, watching shows or movies, viewing artwork online, listening to podcasts, or whatever your media of choice is, you should take time to think about it. When your party spends the night at an inn in a game, instead of just continuing on with the adventure right away, take a moment to think about what your characters might talk about as they're eating dinner. What conflicts might they have with one another? What anxieties do you think they have about the world and their place in it? Between episodes of a show, take a moment to think about what might be going on with a side character at the current moment. Take time to imagine what the life of the rugged hero might have been like before Episode 1.

My point is that since no storyteller can account for every single second or detail of a story, it is incumbent upon the audience to fill in the gaps for themselves with their own imagination. To shirk this responsibility is to merely consume the media without actually understanding it. It's like eating a meal without tasting it.

In Conclusion

Abstraction is the process by which unnecessary details are stripped away in media to be replaced by a simpler concept that conveys the feeling of its original subject without needing to be literal about it. It is used everywhere in media. Please try to use your imagination more when engaging with games, books, shows, whatever. And the next time you find yourself thinking "this doesn't exactly represent reality," remember that it's likely an abstraction made to convey a feeling and make things easier, not a literal fact.