Leaving More to the Imagination in Our Media

I tend to enjoy Sigur Ròs the most on the weekends, when delivering papers in the middle of the night. It's dark, no one else is awake, and the sounds immerse me in a completely different world. The cold, night air combined with the vast, stark simplicity of the music, calms me and takes me to another world. For those unfamiliar with Sigur Ròs, think of the words sweeping, epic, beautiful, and joyous, and you're off to a good start. You certainly don't put them on at a party.

When thinking about this, my mind lead me to the worlds within the Team Ico games. Ico was all held in a castle, but what you could see of the outside world was a vast, open, beautiful landscape. When Shadow of the Colossus came along, you could fully explore that world (assuming it is indeed the same world), and while you were led into epic battles with gigantic colossi, the world itself was an open expanse of beauty and simplicity.

Neither game cluttered their world with busyness, and what that conveyed was a sense of grandeur that few other games have ever been able to convey. On that same note, Sigur Ròs is able to give you that same idea through their music, like few other bands can. Compare and contrast for yourself:





Plenty of people could learn from these two examples. If you leave more up to the imagination of your player/listener, then the experience will ultimately be more rewarding. I loved punk music when I was a teenager. But a lot of it has failed to grow and mature along with me. One band that I have left far behind as an adult is Anti-Flag. With lyrics like this;

I've seen a lot of rip-offs in my life.
The rip-offs of the old and of the young, the weak, the sick, the never known.
Stabbed repeatedly in the back by the Wall Street suit.
The Washington hack. Lining up their pockets with the people’s cash and
Laughing all the way to the bank.

Can you really blame me? They have absolutely no sense of creativity. Rather then a subtle metaphor, we get smacked across the face with the most obvious lyrics possible. There is no challenge there. We don't get to analyze what they mean in the song, we're just told outright.

A band that actually puts some effort into their song lyrics, and has grown to be my favorite punk band ever, by continuing to get better instead of worse like all the rest, is Propagandhi. They take the time to write extremely clever and insightful metaphors to what they are feeling. Rather then a blatant "Religion sucks!", we get this:

All the sucked thumbs and held skirts and blankets
so secure they block out the sweep of the floodlights
that could free them from the darkness that surrounds them.
From the demons that keep hounding them and gouge their eyes
until all they can see are rigid dichotomies of the sacred and the profane.
Of salvation or shame with fuck all in between.

Now that is something you can sit down and think about. It takes you a little while to imagine what that means. Sure, the last line kind of gives it away, but then you're still intrigued to go back and analyze the rest of it with the overall theme in mind.

This is the kind of music I enjoy. The kind that makes you think. But I've realized that this crosses over into all my choices for all forms of media. Until recently, I couldn't explain what made me declare Shadow of the Colossus as my favorite game ever. When put under this lens, though, it only makes sense.

As gamers, we are constantly beat over the head with the point. SotC, and Ico before it, dared to give us very little information about the story we were playing. The world is left almost entirely up to our imaginations.

It's unclear as to why all of these huge temples and vast structures were built, and subsequently abandoned. Any information you might think you know about this deserted land and all of it's buildings, you have to analyze and draw your own conclusions about. No explanation is shoved in your face.

If only all games could be this way.

I loved the God of War games, but maybe if they had let you discover the mythology and legends, rather then showing you a cutscene that blatantly explains them, it would have been even better.

A lot of games recently, have been trying new and creative ways to get their story across. Audiologs spread around the world were used in inFamous, Dead Space, and Fallout 3, among others. Even notes, or scribblings, left for you to find and read if you are curious such as wall grafitti in Left 4 Dead, or news panels in the elevators in Mirror's Edge.

Examples like these help your imagination kick in when playing. It really adds to the ominous feel when you read something scrawled by a survivor on the wall during a zombie apocalypse. It sets your imagination into motion, and that can create an experience a thousand times more real then a cutscene would.

Learning to utilize the imagination of the person consuming the media is a valuable skill. I love the way that video games are going, but I wish that more of them would be willing to take the risks that Team Ico has. Still, they haven't even taken the full plunge. I want a game where I wake up into a vast, and open world that I don't know at all. The only information I learn, I gather on my own.

One day, a developer will have the balls to do that. And I can't wait.