I'm looking for more video games that explore ambiguity in their realities

and representation. This may seem like a counter-intuitive ambition in a

medium in which artists frequently strive for photorealism. Yet beyond
recreation, I want more games that challenge and thus grow my
imagination. Let me explain.

The greatest worth of video games -- as a human endeavor -- may be their

potential to nurture our imaginations. This is a familiar argument but
different proponents seem to assert different things. Let's first examine a
popular version of the argument, and then unpack a second version that
may be more interesting.

It seems most often that the argument for games' potential to nurture our
imaginations refers to games that provide a “mostly complete”
experience. This experience starts in the creator's mind, and then a player
accesses it through interaction with the game. A player mostly uses their
imagination to emotionally connect with the experience, not to define it. If
the game is a box of cake mix, the player just adds water. The essential
substance of such a game is the vividness of the direct impressions
delivered by the game, from the creator's imagination to the player's
imagination.

We might say that a player gets to experience the creator's waking dream.
In this frame and in order to leverage greater potential, a game needs
more vivid direct impressions, especially more directness and realism in
representation and simulation (e.g., in fabric, in hair, in dogs). This is the
goal that most AAA game development seems to pursue, and it's the
tantalizing promise of the soon-to-be launched virtual reality headsets
(e.g., the Oculus Rift).

A sterling example of this pursuit of vividness is the excellent game The

Last of Us. It delivers a transporting experience through realistic graphics
and sound, including engrossing action set pieces and richly emotive voice
acting. Yet, one of the greatest strengths of such games is also one of their
weaknesses. As a player in this kind of game, the journey that my
imagination can take is mostly confined to the creator's vision.
For example, if you and I each play The Last of Us, then we both experience
essentially the same sequence with the giraffes. On the one hand, our
imaginative experiences vary somewhat, including how we move Joel or
the camera and what we each bring from our personal lives to bear on
what we're engaged with in this sequence. For example, the sequence
reminds me of visiting Hogle Zoo as a child (from whence the giraffes
probably escaped), while you may never have been to Salt Lake City in real
life. On the other hand, we both see things that are clearly giraffes moving
in a distinctly giraffe-like way. With this box of cake mix, there's only one
cake to make.

I love games such as The Last of Us and the exciting rides on which they
take my imagination. But there's another way that games can nurture our
imaginations and this way may be more interesting. The second version of
the argument for games' potential is how they can leave a substantial part
of the experience incomplete. In other words, there are various ways to
ways to scaffold more creative behavior from a player.

Sandbox games are a popular example, especially Minecraft and the many

games that it's inspired. What we might call "toolbox" games are another
example, such as the Little Big Planet series and Super Mario Maker.
However, most sandbox and toolbox games still tend to confine at least
the sensory experience to the creators' vision. In Minecraft, you can build a
model of the White House and I can build a model of the Enterprise, but
we're still using the same voxel blocks.

I could also argue that building things in a sandbox or toolbox game is

actually less like playing a game and more like design and crafting. We
move even farther from "play" when users create mods and total
conversions, since then players become game creators themselves.

Rather, what I'm looking for are video games that focus on the play activity
while leaving a substantial part of the sensory experience incomplete, or
that provide a sensory experience that invites different interpretations.
Even better, I'd like games that are more ambiguous in their realities
altogether. I believe this should be possible, based on examples in other
media.

In other media, there can be considerable room for creative imagining by

a viewer or reader. Horror provides many good examples. One of my
favorites is a lovely scene in the uneven movie, 1999's The Haunting.
During the first act, the characters explore a haunted house in the
daytime. The layout of the rooms and hallways in the house is revealed.
Two of the film's characters, Nell and Theo, for instance, have individual
bedrooms off the same hallway, and they discover that their rooms are
also connected through a shared bathroom.

Once night falls, unsettling things happen. Nell and Theo are in Theo's
bedroom. The door to the hallway is closed and locked, while the door
from the bathroom to Nell's room is closed but unlocked. Something in
the hallway tries to batter its way into Theo's room but fails. The camera
pans towards Nell's room. Nell walks silently through the bathroom to the
door to her room. She observes the door handle turning and promptly
locks the door. The Something tries to batter its way through that door
instead, but, again, fails.

(The Haunting  is currently available on Netflix streaming. The floorplan being

revealed can be found at 19:30, and the scene with the Something starts at
38:00.).

The brilliance of the scene is the tension that builds as Nell approaches
the bathroom door. When I watch, I mentally yell, "MOVE FASTER!
HURRY!... but stay quiet..." I don't know what the Something is, yet, in my
mind's eye, I can see it moving down the hallway, through Nell's room,
into the bathroom, turning the handle, and then POUNDING on the door.
All this plays out in my own imagination via the floorplan revealed in the
characters' earlier exploration. (Perhaps due to countless hours of playing
first-person shooter video games, I'm pretty good at holding floorplans in
my head and remembering when a door is left unlocked.).
Notably, we never learn what the Something is. Brilliant. In my mind's eye,
it's some mix of my chief childhood terrors: the xenomorph from Alien,
G'mork the wolf from The Neverending Story, and a man in a trenchcoat
(e.g., Mimic). You might imagine something different. Vivid, visceral
depictions of horrors have their place in movies and in video games. But
in my experience, the monster on the screen will rarely be more scary
than what I can imagine.

How might video games play more with incompleteness or ambiguity?

One fruitful direction may be dual- or multi-representation. In the motley
game studies book, Rules of Play, Frank Lantz offers an original boardgame
called Ironclad. Two players both simultaneously play two sub-games on a
single checkerboard. "Ironclad is a game of arena combat between
opposing teams of massive, armored robots.

It's also a game about two logicians attempting to resolve a philosophical

disagreement" (Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman, Rules of Play: Game
Design Fundamentals, MIT Press, p. 286). In one subgame, a token on an
intersection is a logical statement, while in the other, it's defensive terrain
in the arena. I'd like to play a video game in which I'm apparently playing
one such sub-game but notice clues that suggest something else is
happening, instead or in addition to the other action of the game.

Some caveats are in order. I want ambiguity, not laziness. Ambiguity

should be a design choice, not a compromise. Of course, horror movies
have long used relatively inexpensive sound effects to avoid the cost of
on-screen effects. In video games, models and animation can be costly to
create, so creators may need to make similar compromises. Regardless of
financial constraints, I want the ambiguity to feel like the artistically
correct choice, not the barely sufficient choice. Similarly, ambiguity is
different from abstraction.

For example, Thomas Was Alone makes great use of abstraction, but this

box of cake mix is definitely about artificial intelligences emerging and
escaping. I love Thomas and similar abstract video games, but they don't
exercise my imagination in the way that I'm craving.
I want more games that challenge and thus grow my imagination because
I deeply believe in the vast, inestimable worth of imagination. I say this as
a gamer and as a game designer, as well as a psychologist, parent, and
educator. A strong imagination powerfully supports creativity, and
creativity is invaluable in our lives, from solving household problems to
streamlining processes at work to inventing new technologies.
Imagination and creativity depend on having a certain care-free attitude
(or disposition) -- a freedom from judgment. Goofing off can help foster
this attitude. Video games have tremendous, still unrealized power to
exercise our imaginations while goofing off and, thus, to strengthen our
imagination and creativity.

Games that exercise our imagination more will better actualize video
games' greatest potential. At least in my experience, only a subset of
players commit to substantial creation using sandboxes and toolboxes. I
want more games that capture our attention and effort like The Last of Us,
while purposefully leaving more to the imagination.

Perfect verisimilitude -- exactness and precision in representation -- may

be the ultimate goal of educational illustrations, technical documents, and
simulations of real-world places, eras, and phenomena. I look forward to
more video games that are blazing the trail in that direction. But I also see
other interesting territory to explore that exists in between playable
movies and voxel LEGO block sets -- in the digital fog of the ambiguous.

Kym Buchanan is the Associate Dean of the School of Education at the

University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point. He studies and teaches psychology
and human development, including the intersection of adolescent
development and modern media. His ideal game would be a mashup of
Kohan, System Shock, and dwarves. His professional website
is KymBuchanan.org and he tweets @reach2grow.