The Power of Imagination

Dungeons and Dragons. We had a really good DM who had been using his own custom world for campaigns for many years, and had a VERY developed history for his world. It was awesome to explore the world, and find out things about it when it was so unlike anything I had ever experienced in a video game. Video games end, but this world went on forever. It's cool to know that what our characters did is forever imprinted on the pages of that worlds history. What we did really happened, and I will never forget it.

This was a great read. Upon reading the title I had planned on writing a large question block asking if you believed there could be a place for this in modern gaming, but you seem to have covered that in subsequent paragraphs within. Personally I agree with you, video games could certainly gain more from allowing the player to bring their own experiences, be they from their everyday lives or from what they encounter within the game it self.

I think a good example of this in modern gaming would be Demon's Souls. Sure the game has a story that it tells you, but the atmosphere of that world really speaks to the player and imparts mood rarely seen in games today. Limbo manages to grasp the player completely without a word of written or spoken story save for the game description. Also Journey is coming down the pipe which is a game that relies completely on the world telling the narrative.

I do have a question I would like to ask though. Why do you think so many developers/designers shy away from vagueness? As you said most modern players see text based stories or large blocks of text in the game and assume that the budget was simply too low to afford voice actors and thus the rest of the game itself must be low budget (I realize that is a huge generalization). Conversely a game like Limbo contains minimal story that the player knows up front, and on several occasions the 4pp crew (particularly Nolan, I think) have expressed that even that was unnecessary.

So what do you believe that there is a place for a little leg room? Is it such a bad thing for players to draw their own opinions and use them to fill in the blanks? Is it fear of turning out a product that they may feel is incomplete? Or is it simply a feeling of if we follow the template we will get some sales?

I believe with the tools provided in Little Big Planet 1 and 2, there is limitless amounts of imagination being brought to life.

Good read! I'm pretty young so I didn't play MUDs back then, but I'm thinking of giving some a go.
I agree with Soulglove, the games which allow you to create such as Little Big Planet, Minecraft etc that depend upon our imagination are the best examples today.
There are games like The Elder Scrolls and Dragon Age series that give you codex which I think is really useful in rpg games like this where you really have to put yourself in that world, the story and those situations. Then again most people just skip reading it...
I think the 'leaving room for interpretation thing' is a great thing in games when used well. For example, *SPOILERS* in Silent Hill 3 when Vincent suggests that the monsters might not actually be monsters. That was CRAZY. In the Silent Hill fanbase there have been so many interpretations of what he could have possibly meant by: 'They look like monsters...to you?' This, in addition to personal interpretations of what the different monsters may represent to the characters, is such an interesting way of leaving the imagination to the player.
I would very much like to see more of this done in the future.

By far my favorite games have always been open world sandboxes like the Civilization or Sim City series (not including that Societies PoS). Sim City is in fact the reason I have known since about 7 years old that I wanted to (and did) grow up to be a civil engineer. Many games spark off years of entertainment or cultural study etc, but few games help establish a life calling.

I'm not in the mood to right a lengthy "I agree" comment.

so yeah...good article...

This is very true, sometimes I want to see the characters in a game do certain things, but they don't. I ponder what would they do if certain situation sprung, but that's where it ends. I feel that this is a reason why certain games like ICO, Shadow of the Colossus, and Demon's Souls, (yea all involved JAPANStudio, leave me alone.. I love them T_T) excel well. They have really vague and empty stories, which some of it's own designers stated that they never saw and still dont see those works as pieces of art. But we do, we like what they did because we imagine and create these stories surrounding certain characters that we see often and we think about why they are in the world they are.

The best way to achieve that I believe is having a minor cast of characters, they dont have to say too much, but our mind will try to crack what is their raison d'être. That's why I like the Silent Hill series, a lot of it is made up stuff by the fans of it, thinking why things are the way they are. Great article, really made me think Oplock :D

I remember Mario paint and how I loved the composer because I felt like I was making music even if it was a cover of a song.

With all this talk of imagination, I just thought up of something. Would horror games do better if they didn't ever let you see what the monster/person that was chasing you look like? I would think that if the monsters in games where just given a voice and just a very hard to distinguish shape that you still can only see a shadow of, would things become even scarier? I for one would think so... good read you have there Bob.

Only experience I've had with these was that one time in one of the Sam and Max episodes. Pretty cool, though.

I think horror games with good atmosphere, like Silent Hill, are your best chance at getting to use your imagination in the modern era. Even if you end up seeing all the enemies eventually, there are a lot of points that foreshadow what's to come, and just the overall feel of the game makes you wonder what's coming next. To me, that's always a sign of a good game. It makes your imagination go wild when you wonder what you're going to fight next, because it's drawn you in so much that you're almost afraid of whatever awaits you.

Other than that, though, I don't think games need to tax your imagination so much. Sometimes, it's more interesting to know what the developers' imaginations are able to conjure. I know that if I were to make a game, I'd like to be able to say I brought players into a realm of my own imagination that they've never seen before.

Imagination really is our mind's strongest tool, one that should be used more by games.

Man text based games are fun, I should try one again.

Being a youngster I seem to have missed out on a lot of these games but reading about this makes me hope to see games that make me use my imagination instead of doing it for me. I have absolutely loved your articles so far!

I've never really played a text based game and i'm not really attracted to play one fully, i guess because i've been spoiled by games with graphics and audio. The best example i have in my mind of a game that sparked some fun for my imagination was NieR. The text sequences were a really enjoyable aspect of the game and its something that i remember whenever i think about NieR.
Keep up the awesome work Sir Bobington :p

I used my imagination a lot when it came to the story behind Limbo. Partly because I wanted to make up a better story than the ones that I had been hearing on podcasts. In my version of Limbo, the children belonged to an organization called "The Parliament of Fear" and their mission was to destroy the mind of the limbo child. It made the game fun, but the ending needed like 3 more seconds to fully fit in with my made up story.