Conversation

minecraft is a great example here; everything looks beautiful and you can interact with all of it. the structure of an ocean temple or whatever is not just pretty art, it represents a collection of blocks you can mine and repurpose. your field of view is full of game-relevance

compare to, to pick a random example, bravely default. my main peeve with this game is that when i’m walking in a town i can look at either the top or the bottom screen, and while the top screen has pretty town art the bottom screen is a million times easier to navigate by

imo this was just bad game design straight up. the pretty town art in bravely default is ultimately meaningless; i can’t actually interact with any of those buildings except by entering them, and the bottom map lets me see the entrances more easily

another example of gameplay and art integration that people usually get right so it’s usually not worth talking about: cooler-looking items should be stronger. even here there are wacky things like ensembles of armor that look dumb but have strong bonuses; imo bad design again

the simpler your art is the less you have to worry about this sort of thing. if you never visually represent items at all then you don’t need to worry about whether their visuals match their behavior. if your landscape is bare and minimal less of it can be irrelevant to gameplay