Playgrounds of the Mind

I admit to being something of a veteran of OKCupid. One thing I've noticed about online dating, one of the biggest pitfalls, is that the profile you see is necessarily not an accurate representation of the person behind it. I'm not talking here about people deliberately misrepresenting themselves: Even people who strive to be as true as they can in their profile will end up with little more than a sketch. There is a temptation for the online dater to see a profile, which always leaves something to the imagination, and fill in the blanks with their own ideals. That can lead to unwarranted feelings and overattachment, which can very easily lead to hurt, and certainly lead to a lot of the creepy behaviours we all have a car-crash fascination with when they're shared by the recipients on Twitter.

But what is a danger of online dating can be a benefit to video games. I often feel like this same phenomenon is precisely what makes Final Fantasy VII so dear to so many people's hearts. We have characters with double-digit polygons, who have no voices and communicate entirely in (poorly translated) text. These highly abstract characters are, by virtue of their technical limitations, necessarily playgrounds of the mind, where the player's imagination has a lot of freedom to fill in the blanks as they'd like, enriching their attachment to and involvement with the characters. In Mass Effect, my Shepherd is probably different to your Shepherd because of the way I customised her appearance and the choices I made in the course of the game, but Final Fantasy VII - whether intentionally or not - leveraged the most powerful customisation engine that exists: the human imagination.

Incidentally, this is a large part of the reason I didn't like Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children. Here we had a film that made Final Fantasy VII's characters suddenly startlingly realistic. The film told me what these characters looked like, how they sounded, and what their mannerisms were. It not only didn't allow me to use my imagination to fill in the blanks; it trampled roughshod over all the investment I'd put into engaging with the characters in the game. This is also why I never want to see a remake of Final Fantasy VII. I can't help but feel a remake would take a game beloved precisely for its abstraction and fill in the blanks for you, denying you the power of your imagination. Even Cloud's appearance in Kingdom Hearts - itself hardly a paragon of detail - felt like it diminished the opportunity for engagement.

In recent years, another game used abstraction to allow the player to fill in the blanks with their imagination, and its characters were beloved, if not by so many, at least as much as were Final Fantasy VII's. I speak, of course, of Thomas Was Alone, where, forget double-digit polygons, each character was one polygon. And although the game was fully voiced, it was narrated by King of Lovely himself Danny Wallace, rather than acted by an ensemble cast, which again took a step back from the level of direct representation. Mike Bithell has done (I assume) intentionally what Squaresoft did (I assume) accidentally, and created characters who invite the player to engage with them by using their imaginations to fill in the blanks, thereby creating involvement and personal meaningfulness.

This may also go some way to explaining the appeal of anime-influenced visual styles. Granted, that particular art style is not to everyone's taste, but to those who like it, it appeals not just because it has more kawaiis per desu than any other style, but also because anime is abstraction-in-a-box. It is a style that - at first through necessity, and then through design - has been honed to encourage viewers to get personally involved by filling in the blanks with their imagination.

All of this is not to say that abstraction is all you need. There is an art to abstraction. In Christine Love's Analogue: A Hate Story, for example, it is important that Hyun-ae and Mute are abstract enough such that you can engage with them using your imagination, but not so abstract that they can be whoever you want them to be. This was writ large in the sequel, Hate Plus. Mute died, which evoked similar feelings in fans as Aeris' death in Final Fantasy VII, but whereas in Final Fantasy VII, Aeris was taken from you by the big bad, Mute's death was a suicide. An act of her own agency transgressed the mental image of the character players had themselves built up. This was used to great effect, but it could just as easily (and was, by some quarters) be seen as a betrayal. "What has Sephiroth done to my Aeris?" became "What has Christine done to my Mute?" The dynamic of attachment and loss is incredibly powerful - too powerful for some players to deal with - but would have been a damp squib without the abstraction that allowed that attachment to form in the first place.

There is a storytelling principle called "show, don't tell", but I feel it's mis-worded, particularly for such a visual medium as video games. It's very easy for a video game developer to say, "Well, we are showing, and with tens of thousands of polygons in HD no less!" Yes, that's true, but the spirit of "show, don't tell" might better be explained as "imply, don't make explicit". Janet Murray, in her seminal book on interactive storytelling, Hamlet on the Holodeck, partially rejects Samuel Coleridge's notion of "willing suspension of disbelief", preferring instead the term "active creation of belief", and this is, I think, where I'm coming from. Creation of belief that does not engage the imagination is inherently less active.

If you're telling a story, and especially if you're making a video game, the onus is on you to give your audience something to do. And that goes beyond pressing buttons to control the action - your game's interaction with the player doesn't begin and end at their fingertips. It is, and must be, interacting with the player's imagination.