A Certain Level of Abstraction

Jesper Juul's paper "A Certain Level of Abstraction" examines how abstraction operates in video games, arguing that it is a central element of game design, a process players decode during play, and an optimization strategy developed over time. Juul begins with an illustrative case, Cooking Mama, which simulates cooking in a kitchen but deliberately omits many actions a real kitchen would allow, such as ordering take-out. He uses this to show that there is no natural level of detail for any action, and that the chosen level of abstraction defines a game and its genre, as contrasted with Diner Dash: Flo on the Go.

The paper's central framework draws on the distinction between rules and fiction, placing content along a spectrum from purely fictional to purely rule-based, with the most interesting territory lying where rules are motivated by the fiction. Juul discusses how experienced players recognize genres through conventions, while novices rely on the fiction to infer rules, using real-time strategy titles such as StarCraft and Age of Empires II as examples. He also addresses the critique, voiced by designer Frank Lantz and others, that a perfect, seamless simulation would eliminate the game altogether, and the related argument by Espen Aarseth that objects cannot be fully simulated because they have an unbounded number of functions.

Juul further argues that players often shift from attending to fiction toward treating a game purely as an abstract system for optimization, supported by research on skill acquisition and the processing of task-relevant information. He concludes that abstraction, the magic circle, and the rules of traditional sports share a common logic of delineating what is inside and outside a game. The paper is primarily theoretical and illustrated with game examples, with its empirical support drawn largely from cognitive psychology and a study of first-person shooter players.