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Strong agree on all of this, however I will add: I think Advance Wars found a very good middle ground between the artifice of Chess and homogenized realism, in that the units you command have various different movement types (infantry, tires, treads, etc.) that interact differently with terrain.

The game's level design makes strong and prolific use of these terrain differences too. Vehicles with tires go far on roads but not as far anywhere else and you'd better not be trying to drive them in forests, vehicles with treads treat most terrain the same, only infantry can traverse mountains...

i bring this up because a part of my distaste for realism in games is how it has this homogenizing effect on the game’s design. as soon as your world starts to look real, you’re sort of making this promise that it will also behave more real. and so we drift away from grids and turn-based even

one of the reasons i really like pixel art is its abject refusal to go too far down that path. it always requires that you put your imagination forward, and leaves room for metaphors and mechanics that would feel entirely wrong in a less abstract environment

when you don’t give away all the details, it allows the imagination to fill in. the story here is “you adventure across a vast land with your allies, it takes days, maybe weeks” but in actual gameplay it takes like 1 minute but not when your game is realistic, and promises a realistic experience

I think a part of that might be a matter of complexity. In chess movement IS the game, with "battles" resolved simply by giving the moving player advantage in any encounter. RPG strategy games like Fire Emblem have a lot of other factors to take into account such as unit statistics, terrain, etc.

Ultimately I think it's less about the abstraction being removed, and more about other gameplay styles being introduced that make movement rules-based strategy less of the focus.

hm also i think one thing that makes simple graphics feel really good is they feel, complete? like, they’re consistent, a tile is just the unit the world is built with. something about that feels more solid in some ways, bc you won’t run into a big blurry stone texture and think oh it’s set dressing

(these all very unrelated thoughts

paradoxical maybe,, i feel like it’s easier to make something /feel/ real by being obvious about the limitations, bc then your fidelity only needs to hit a certain threshold, and anything that hits that level is fully real within the world you’ve created, idk

i think sometimes going more towards “realism” can give you some neat emergent mechanics that feel less designed (eg. just due to interacting simulations. physics + npc behaviour or whatever) but it’s def a difference space. and it’s not necessarily coupled to graphics fidelity.. (eg dwarf fortress