Very interesting ideas here. A similar one that has stuck with me is my notion of "personalisation" in a game. The idea is that your experience with the game is

Very interesting ideas here. A similar one that has stuck with me is my notion of "personalisation" in a game. The idea is that your experience with the game is a combination of two things: a) the game itself and what it chooses to show to you, and b) the imagination that you unconciously employ in order to fill in the blanks of the experience. This is more obvious when you think of older games with very coarse-grained levels of detail, that essentially require you to imagine what is actually going on. Conversely, it is destroyed in modern AAA games which are over-designed and developed by a team of hundreds to the N-th degree. How well the game surfs this edge between "just enough detail" is more an art than a science, and you often find it games that had some kind of developmental problem that prevented a coherent vision from being thoroughly implemented. Take Quake, for example, in comparison to Quake II. For this reason, the former will forever hold a special place in my heart. I can vividly imaging myself sitting beside the watery bridge in E1M1, or leaning up against the bricks in the START map. It's truly that ingrained on my psyche, partly because I spent so much time in that world due to the modding scene, and partly because the game never tried to "tell" me anything about the environment, or try to instruct me as to how I should and should not interpret it. It was left up to me, and that made it more special than any designer could have imagined, because ultimately I became that designer.