Simulation and presentation for video games

I’ve been thinking lately about the idea of visual minimalism in video games. It’s still not a completely fleshed out thought, so I thought writing this down might help. I suspect these ideas apply to many types of games, but I’ll focus on platformers for the sake of simplicity. I noticed that a lot of platformers have minimal differences between them. Often the setting and art style are the major difference. Perhaps with a small mechanical change such as “spawn your own platforms” or “you can flip gravity for puzzle solving.” These changes don’t do anything for me. To me most platformers today are not too different to Mario games from the 80s. To attempt to push games out of this rut, I’ve been thinking about altering my perception of them during their creation. One lens I’m considering is stripping back the visual presentation. It would be interesting to try and create visualisation that only represents the internal model/processes/simulation, as much as this is possible anyway. I realise there is no perfect form here but rather it’s a platonic ideal. As an example, again with platformers, the character in platformers is usually a rectangle. The character’s visual form usually aligns with the rectangle (well hopefully it does. Fighting games can be very odd in this regard.) Applying this principle of visuals closely representing the simulation is not likely to produce something that’s more fun or engaging than other games, but this isn’t the goal here. I see this as a potential tool for creating new types of games.