TL;DR: A post for people who like game theory. Consider thee fairly warned.
Defining Information Compression
A high resolution representation of the world is one that encompasses all the details, regardless of relevance or utility. You perceive many things with your 5 senses but video games concern only audiovisual experiences and I'll keep this posts concerns there. Visual systems are high bandwidth and people have no issues with audio compliments to that visual experience because we're hard wired to use those systems together.
Preface
This post comes from the perspective of a DND GM with some MMO experience. I've seen some Ashes of Creation content and it's piqued my interest. I won't concern data compression. I consider Information Filtration interchangable with Information Compression and unreasonably incomprehensively complex interchangable with infinitely complex. I make no disclaimers that these processes uncover good game design, they're purely academic feature exploration.
Discovering Linear Information Compression
Any time there is a lower complexity version of something else, some process has compressed information to arrive at the new state. Minimaps are very high, precise representations of a game world that is too much for people to take in all at once. The details that are of consequence are hidden among things that aren't of concern at every moment. The minimap strips away much of the information about the world and gives an uncomplicated view. It strips away the y axis, which is an exponential reduction in complexity. It strips away the parts of the world you're not at, which is useful because there's way more places you aren't than where you are. The last choice is what additional pieces of information should be brought from the high resolution representation to the foreground of the uncomplicated assistive view. Herbs in games that are nearby are often shown here because it tells you exactly where something you care about is on the x and z axis. Arriving may give you a hill climbing problem but that's where people stop looking at the minimap and bring their gaze back to the actual game world where all the details actually are.
This is a linear expression because you can map one thing in the ground truth to one thing in the lower resolution representation view of the ground truth. The compression is related to the fact that many things are removed and only that which remains builds the new view. The more things that aren't shown the more useful that minimap will be to find the things that are on it. The ground truth herb has features like it's 3d model & texture, its x, y, and z, tint, if it's being moused over, when it is, perceptability, etc. Some of those features are relevant based on how they relate to something else. For example, you only care about where the herb is because you care if it is close, and technically speaking it being close is the difference between where you are and where it is. You only care when the herb is because it's only a useful herb if it's there when you're there too. After broken down into its individual components, a compressed view of it on a minimap can be rebuilt in a way that is useful from the perspective of players and game designers alike. Building it back up might reveal some things that were already discovered, such as using a mask to crop out everywhere that's not immediately surrounding the player, because it's not useful to know about terrain half way around the world. Besides the obvious, there's some new features that can be built out into game mechanics. Knowing when a herb is is a nontraditional display of information. Knowing if a herb was recently picked or is almost ripe is two things that would be known by a ground truth and can be pushed to the players foreground with a small representation of that information. With this process of breaking feature down and then excluding many features in a new view, information can be usefully compressed in a way that helps players not only understand the ground truth better but also achieve goals while interacting with the game world.
Not all information that can be compressed should be. With any abstraction, you lose the clarity of the ground truth in exchange for utility. Searching out herbs is a Traveling Salesman Problem (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travelling_salesman_problem). Computers can do the work to find optimal solutions to the path that can be taken to get the most value out of shortest route between each node. That's a very useful collapse of all possible routes into a view of only the most efficient route. It's not obvious that such information should be filtered for players.
I won't repeat what's said about the interplay between filtration as a CPU optimization parameter on clients and servers, but I will link to Significance Buckets from Fortnite at GDC:
https://youtu.be/KHWquMYtji0?t=331Nonlinearity and Iconification
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The above is a house. Here's a sword: -|=>. But it's not. It's kind of weird that you can sort of play along that the 6 ASCII characters above is actually a house. The iconification of something is horrendously impossible to get computers to do, but this computationally heavy operation is done automatically and instantly by people. As game designers, taking advantage of this is typically done unconsciously because that efficiency is innate in themselves as well. The nonlinearity of this comes from the fact that not every feature of the ground truth is mappable to one feature of the icon.
This is a house too:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House`#/media/File:Bhutanese_Farmhouse_Soe_Yaksa.jpg
Here is a birdhouse, which is categorically also a house:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House#/media/File:Vogelhaus_Modell_Eduard_4.JPG
These are definitely houses. The icon of the house is a metaset of the above and all other houses. If anything, the icon is more real than any one of the items of the subset of houses despite that the houses used to create the icon are actually real. The abstraction being more real than the thing it represents is not a new idea but functions as if true so I take it as true as such.
There's already Icons in Ashes of Creation. Abilities with ability icons are a nonlinear representation of what pressing that button will do. That icon represents a set of consequences. You'll lose some resource and you'll gain some advantage. There's no necessary correlation between the arrangement of pixels and the resources lost and advantage gained. Item icons are similarly mainstays. In some games I've played, one icon doesn't necessarily only represent one thing. One sword icon can actually represent many swords models, and sword models might represent many sword items because it's easier to create numerical differences in a stat block than it is to create a graphics asset. There will tend to be an outpacing of one unless they are all equally time consuming to create while simultaneously being equally important. You can only rotate or tint an asset so many times because people dislike the reuse because the raw icon lost its unique impact.
Dangerous Emojilization
The race to the bottom of representational states is occurring in my estimation sadly right before our eyes. The prevelance of emoji's is increasing everywhere as they're in practice micro-icons in that they increase the understanding of a message even by those that are English-As-A-Second-Language and other incompetant or functionally illiterate readers. This lowering of the bar means that everyone above the new bar placement is able to understand, but is similarly a sacrifice of the precision of what the sentence could represent for an abstraction that is more accessible along one dimension of analysis.
Iconification of things in game design has similar consequences to the proliferation of iconified representations in the real world. Although there is a place for such processes, there are times when you shouldn't sacrifice the real for the abstract despite the allure of the utility thereof.
- Immortalmage
