Finding Videogame's True Voice
My suggestion for this "magical essence", which I will outline in this article, are empty spaces. The bits that require the audience's participation and imagination. Basically, the part of art that require us to be human.
The power of imagination
First of all let us take a look at literature. For this "player-avatar-symbiosis that have been discussed in an earlier post on this blog. I also do not believe that this takes away anything from the experience, but only adds to it, just like the same line of thinking does to other media.
End notes
This is far from a full theory at this point, and "environmental storytelling" and "imagined motivation" are most likely not the only imaginative gaps that can be used in games. Because of this I would be very interested in getting feedback and to hear your response on this work.
I would also like to point out that all of this awfully untested. It would be really interesting to see some Kuleshov-like experiments on the concept and see what kind of results can be made. It might be the case that this hypothesis does not work at all, or it might that it lead to wonderful and totally unexpected insights.
I also want to add that not all kind of experiences can be created like this. The same goes for literature and movies too, where leaving too much up to the audience simply does not work. Non-fictional books is one thing that comes to mind. Still, that is not a reason to not try this out. Before we try out all options that the video game medium provide, we will have no idea what can be accomplished with it.
Additional Notes: In Scott McCloud's book "Understanding comics" two similar "imaginary gaps" are explored in the medium of comics. One is the literal gaps between panels, that forces the audience to complete the missing information implied to be between. This is very much like what is found in books and movies, as it forces the reader to use external knowledge and also comes with a retrospective aspect. The second gap is one of cartoon symbolism, where simply drawn characters often can be more expressive than detailed ones. Again this requires quite a bit of interpretation from the audience.
I think this shows that the features discussed in film and book, apply to other media as well, making me more confident that they ought to play a big role in video games too.
Acknowledgments: This essay has been greatly inspired this post by Michael of Tale of Tales. If not for him I would probably have never started thinking in this direction and none of the above would have been written.
