I disagree with "no-rules design." As a kid, the one rule was that after seeing the box art, you would be thoroughly disappointed the first time the game loaded and you saw the actual graphics.
I played "Odyssey: The Compleat Apventure" as a grade school kid. Looking back on it, I think the guy at the Pittsburgh computer store was thinking "sucker!" when my dad was checking out with it. It was done using Apple "shape tables" instead of proper sprites, so getting caught in a whirlpool would cause you to "spin" with the very flashy animation consisting of 8 frames. And the ones at 45 degrees were ~sqrt(2) times too large because of how shape table "rotation" worked. (Or didn't work)
I've taken up painting in the past few months - digging into art history some and aesthetics, as I try to understand the nature of the thing I have undertaken. It really causes me to reflect on the intertwingling of art and culture; the mentalities that produce an imaginative image and the image giving seeds to the mind.
Perhaps, these are simply images that reflect on the artist's view of what the buying society would appreciate; and thus we can infer a variety of things about the buying society.
