While it is instructive and intellectually satisfying to see how such tactics as threats, commitments, and promises can be absorbed into an enlarged, abstract "supergame" (game in "normal form"), it should be emphasized that we cannot learn anything about those tactics by studying games that are already in normal form. The objects of our study, namely, these tactics together with the communication and enforcements structures that they depend on, and the timing of moves, have all disappeared by the time the game is in normal form. What we want is a theory that systematizes the study of the various universal ingredients that make up the move-structure of games; too abstract a model will miss them.

XREF: Echoes critiques that abstraction erases the very phenomena under study — comparable to how formalized models in other fields strip away processual detail.

Thomas C. Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict, loc. 356