Envisioning Information

In his second of three books on graphic design, Envisioning Information, Edward Tufte says, "Credibility vanishes in clouds of chartjunk; who would trust a chart that looks like a video game?" -- I can only guess he meant that videogames contain a lot of unnecessary visual artifacts. But what is an unnecessary visual artifact in a videogame?

I thought it was interesting that in Cartographic Cartwheels Ernest Adams recommends Tufte's works to game designers, and in another article, The Role of Architecture in Videogames, makes the point that visual presentation (of architecture in this case) requires not just function, but also decoration. While videogames are visualisations of gameplay, they do contain a lot of what Tufte would term "junk", but it does have a purpose: to engage the player and not just give them, to borrow Adams' architectural reference, "bare grey concrete".

As Will Wright said in A Conversation with Will Wright, "we start wrapping graphics, sounds, scenarios an events around those numbers, and we're increasing the quality of the experience you have. It has more meaning to you. In some sense it becomes more evocative. You can start wrapping a mental model around that, as opposed to this pile of numbers". So the visual junk of videogames is actually integral to providing players with what Wright terms as a "consistent level of abstraction" without which their "mental model will start breaking down".

I would suggest that the visualisation component of a videogame should be a combination of Tufte's minimalist "data-ink" approach to graphic design with Wright's philosophy of providing players with an "overt metaphor".