CLYVE'S PROFILE

author=Snodgrass

author=slashphoenix
This is actually similar to a well-known literary technique that Hemingway coined "the Iceburg Theory". How it works: you have a fully fleshed-out plot, world, and storyline, but you only present the reader (or in this case, player) with 10% of it - similar to how you can only see the tip of an iceburg. What happens is that your story will naturally hint at but not directly tell the rest of the story for you. It avoids tedious or boring "plot dumps" and leaves a lot up to the player's imagination, which is often more interesting than what you would have written.

Example games that have embraced this: Canabalt, World of Goo, Super Meat Boy, The Binding of Isaac

Note that this works especially well in games, because the story subconsciously develops in the player's mind as he or she plays, saving you from the doldrums of boring and terrible exposition dumps.

Yep that's one general technique of upping the memorability of a game.

I sort of address that with the categories. There are legacies that are oft remembered. Say someone in movies will always bring up Citizen Kane.

Then there are superior legacies where memorability is mixed with details like how Dicaprio and Winslet fit together chemistry wise in Titanic. Inferior memorability but superior details to most of the people who consider the legacy of Titanic compared to Citizen Kane.

It's very sporadic though. For example one will have difficulty establishing the legacy of hate and controversy behind turning Titanic into Romeo and Juliet and then mix it with the positives of Titanic as a great disaster/romance story and still be able to show all aspects of how certain details up the film's legacy without favoring one preferred legacy over the other.

It's why extrapolating from external examples are problematic. Given enough interest, any book can be analyzed from smudge to smudge. You rarely get any headway in game design though other than filling a database with more and more things that amount to sets of general principles rather than getting a glimpse of the process behind the curated and well prepared intentions of the game designer..You rarely figure out if it's a gut instinct turned wrong. A lesser credited cheap marketing ploy. A theme tactic. An emotional link to the designer's current state of mind that actually turns out to be applicable to many general games but just happened to be sealed within the designer's head without even him realizing it...there's alot of these confounding mysteries.