RPG Abstractions (?) as Self-Referential Tools

One thing Mason talked about in class yesterday that I still have trouble understanding is the role of abstraction in RPGs. As Mason described, all games use abstraction to simulate/replicate an experience rather than actually provide it, and RPGs are unique in that the abstractions they present reflect the constraints and conditions of the game’s world. So while HP is a very general and easily understandable abstraction for example (HP references how close you are to dying/how much you’re winning a fight), something like eve in Bioshock takes more explanation and game-world knowledge to understand and is thus self-referential to the world of the game.

My biggest question leaving lecture was why abstraction is so important to RPGs, i.e. what are RPGs trying to get at by using abstraction? Abstractions are often a compromise to a limitation: they are ways of referencing real-world objects/situations within the confines of a programmed system. One might say they’re effective when they can easily and accurately convey the real-world thing they are referencing. For example, the combat mechanics and graphics in Mortal Combat employ abstractions successfully to convey the experience of two individuals fighting IRL.

However, with RPGs it’s not quite the same. When someone designs an RPG, are they necessarily taking experiences/objects from the real world and finding in-game abstractions to convey them? Or are they creating objects, characters, and experiences unique to the world of the game? My sense is that it’s more so the latter, which is I think what Mason was speaking to in class. Yet the RPG’s use of abstractions raises a more critical question: why are the abstractions in RPGs abstractions? Are they abstractions? Calling them abstractions suggests that they point to something else, i.e. “this is what [x abstraction] looks like in-game, but that’s not really what it is.”

But what else could abstractions in RPGs, which are highly self-referential, point to? To me, they seem much more like facts of the world than abstractions. If your character’s life (heart) in Undertale visibly pops out in front of their 2D body when they encounter an enemy, it’s literally because in this world characters’ hearts pop out in front of their 2D bodies when they encounter an enemy. This system in Undertale seems like a very concrete part of the world to me, especially since many characters in the game make meta comments about the system.