This is an important topic so I'm going to start it off by stating the obvious: Graphics don't make a game fun. Many people would agree to that, but I need to make a correction to this blanket statement. While graphics may not make a game fun, they sure can add to the emotional responses they evoke. A football game with a brown ball and licensed players, if done right, would be fun. Now imagine that same football game, but the ball is see-through, and the field is made of an animated texture that flashed some random sentence like “Basketball is like golf, but golf is fun!”. You would not have the same gaming experience to say the least. With the “Graphics don't make a game any funner” theory out of the way, lets move to the actual process of stripping the excess off of a game.

Stripping a game down to it's bare essentials is mostly done in your head but you can grab a piece of paper and a pen to help you through this tutorial. Let's use an example game so we have something to work with. That game we all know about where a plumber jumps across gaps and defeats a boss at the end of every world is a good medium for teaching this concept. Remove the images and animations and replace them with identifiable shapes. The protagonist is a red block, the baddies in the first level are brown rectangles, the ground is plain green and the bricks are maroon. The castle is nothing but a set of gray columns, and the princess is a rectangle of pink. You now have a very dull looking game if you were just staring at an illustration of it. Now take away the music and sound effects.  Take any source of story like text or game manuals and put them aside. You now have a game where you have shapes that are moving, disappearing, and reappearing. In your mind, play your imaginary modification of a game. What emotions do you feel and when. Look deeply into your thoughts and write down what you feel when you miss that moving platform, or barely doge that triangular thing, or disappear when the red and yellow circle (Was once a fireball coming out of a lava pit) hits you.

If you've written that down, you now have the information that the programmers needed to know in order to write 75% of the game. Now find out how sound would make the game fun. How would sound make it funny? How would it intensify a battle, or add anticipation to a level that is yet to be explored? Now add in a story that gives these shapes and colors the reasons they need to behave the way they do. And finally, replace the art work. Or not if your going for a simplistic look. You've just recreated a game but in your own style and personality. The numbers may be off so the jumps are higher, or the platforms slipperier, but at least now you have a mild understanding of how to analyze a game that you would like to use as a skeleton for your own take on the genre.