[Note: This is actually a continuation of a thread that disappeared during the "Great Forum Hack of '05".]
When designing games that simulate "real world" events, we must choose how far to abstract our mechanics from reality. For example, in Tikal, you restore ruins by placing workers on the site. The more workers you place, the more you can restore. This is a fairly "realistic" (i.e., concrete) simulation. As another example, consider Settlers, in which you generate resources by a pure die role. This is fairly abstract.
My question to the community is this: when do you choose to abstract a mechanic as opposed to going "purely concrete"? I'm not so much looking for "always do it when condition 'a' occurs" as I am for anecdotes: "I was making game 'x' and encountered problem 'y', which I eliminated with abstraction 'z'.
I'll go first in my next post.
K.
Recently, Challengers and I discussed a board version of a computerized space-conquest game in which you ordered fleets to conquer distant worlds. We tossed around ways to record the destination of fleets and the number of turns they traveled. Most of the ideas involved straight-up record keeping:
1) Record the size of a fleet.
2) Record its destination.
3) Compute the number of turns to reach the destination.
4) Write all this down.
5) When the fleet arrives, reveal the information.
When a fleet arrived at a planet, it would fight any existing fleets and the winner would occupy the world.
This was a very concrete simulation.
I liked the easy-to-understand rules, but I wanted to seriously streamline the record keeping process. I also wanted to showcase the game's central mechanic: a dicing system that would allow multiple fleets at a single location to simultaneously fight each other.
I struggled for weeks with these constraints. Finally, this week, a light bulb went on: since simultaneous combat is the star of the show, my orders-and-flight mechanics should encourage such encounters. I thought of a way to abstract the space travel into a fuel bidding" system that would allow players to arrive at most locations within 1 or two turns. This would tend to result in more simultaneous arrivals. It also eliminated the need for complex record keeping.
So, in my case, the question "When should you abstract a game system," has two answers:
1) When the concrete system introduces undesirable complexity,
and
2) When the concrete system has undesirable side-effects (in my case, discourages use of an interesting mechanic).
K.