There are many different ways of telling stories. Or showing, if you accept movies and games a storytelling media - which they are, for sure, as far as I'm concerned. Sure, movies take shortcuts and sometimes if you sit down and think about what you've seen it isn't really logical or sensible, but overall the story is what you're going to watch - even if it's all about explosions and sudden scares, there has to be a framework for everything to operate within and occur because of, and that's the story. Games are often viewed as an escapist way to not deal with serious things, but people expect games to have more than just a superficial reason to exist (mostly). Absolutely many people will say "well, you have to accept things as they are in games - they're not real", and to a point that's true - but more and more people don't just accept things as they are because they're not real in the media they engage with. There has to be sense and cohesion, even when something's utterly fabricated.
Some people like to tell a story by details (for the billionth time I mention J.R.R. Tolkien) that enrich the world but don't allow much reader speculation. I mentioned this in a "recent" post (because really, it's been a little bit of time since I last updated): Tolkien doesn't seem to like the reader to imagine anything he doesn't wish to expound upon. The opposite of Tolkien would be From Soft with their Dark Souls/Demon's Souls/Bloodborne games: the plot is given as a vague basis for the action, and the details of events that have occurred that provide other non-player characters with their motivations and justifications are left excessively blurry.
The juxtaposition between the two approaches is fairly stark.
One creates the impression of a fleshed-out world wherein the characters exist by way of extra detail that squares everything away as a locked-down definite. The characters exist as a product of that world because not only their immediate setting and how they interact with and influence (and are influenced by) it is clear, but also the delineated history of that setting and its reason for existence is given, as well as the ancestry of the character as a person is given. There can be no mistake: if one does not know who the mother of a character is or was, it's only because of what I deem to be a weird and archaic focus on patrilinear succession and descent - not because such a detail hasn't be thought of and decided upon by the author (in this case Tolkien, but really any of his general discipline). One certainly knows the father, the father's father, and the often the father's father's father by name or, at least, title.
This puts the reader in a position of omniscience. A huge number of people like this approach: it really does give the world in question a richness and depth, and I appreciate that as much as anyone else does. Most people out there in the world aren't historians, linguists or anthropologists, and yet an extraordinary number of us will spend hours reading the histories of made-up peoples and their cultures. It's just interesting. Stories are interesting, and the fuller the story, the more story is told.
The downside to this is that it also creates a certain detachment in the audience. We all read, feel invested, and support the goodies while decrying the baddies. But we have a false sense of understanding of the world presented: we're told things are a certain way, and we read them in the most objective way we can...but as the adage goes, history is written by the victor. The author is a stand-in for such a victor, because it is their vision that we see. We're told who the good guys are and who're the bad, and we just have to accept that (and we willingly do), and invest in the success of those we're told should succeed and the failure of those we're told should fail. In a way it's a very propagandistic way to view the world: we aren't given any conflicting information that demands we must consider multiple viewpoints at once. In fact, we're often given multiple plots to follow, but because we're told everything in such immense detail there's really nothing we have to process beyond the words on the page. We have our hands held so tightly that we're not allowed to imagine anything. Even items are described in such glorious detail that we're told what precise hue the metal has in seven different kinds of light, including sometimes no light at all, because it glows when there's evil a-lurkin'.
Being able to enjoy the full expanse of a world means one has what one considers a full understanding of its reaches and its reasons, but it's what could be called objective subjectivity: such a detailed and easily-seen example of Everything creates the impression of everything being out in the open, but it's still fed to us through the firm grip of a singular guiding hand whose design is anything but objective and nothing but subjective due to their own desires and motivations for communicating the story to begin with.
The opposite approach provides an equally fleshed-out world, but it does so through suggestion and implication. Perhaps this is more the approach of visual, experiential storytelling (as in, you discover as you explore, i.e., play a game) than it is the non-actively-participatory storytelling of books and movies, because as with life if one doesn't encounter a certain situation one cannot learn from it or understand it. It would depend on how linear or non-linear the experienced story is made to be, for certain - a character in Demon's Souls, for instance (and yeah, the name is spelt with a possessive apostrophe despite there being many beings one might describe as demons. It always has bothered me. The final boss isn't really made a big enough deal of in the game to warrant the assignment of all souls as belonging to it - but perhaps this is an instance of non-definite storytelling?), may never be encountered if one doesn't know to look and doesn't stumble upon them by accident, and yet the story remains the story. That character is still there, with whatever knowledge/perspective/skill they possess in isolation from you, the player, and their own story, or the suggestion of their own story, remains as well. Your story may involve encountering them, but if it doesn't it's still a complete story, insofar as your story can be described as complete(d). Life is exactly that - encounters happen or don't, but for all the opportunities taken or missed the life "story" of the person living it is still complete unto itself.
I quite enjoy stories that work based on this premise, as it reflects the uncertainty there always is in reality (which many people prefer to pretend doesn't exist, unfortunately. After all, their understanding is the fullest, most sensible and in all ways the best, and if war should be declared based upon that understanding then of course only a fool would fail to see the justice in such fighting). No person can ever hope to have anything more than a viewpoint of the world as seen through their own filters, and no person can ever hope to know another anywhere near as close as they know themselves. Backstories are related from subjectivity to subjectivity - and a story that is told in such a style creates a more realistic impression because of the sophistication in recognising and creating a subjective, limited and therefore limitless reality. Stories that take this approach encourage the audience to engage in speculation and become part of the storytelling process themselves, going from a passive absorbent sponge with reading (or viewing) ability to an active contributor to the shape of the story as they understand it - which again reflects the nature of the world and of experience, and also of being presented with a framework upon which to build understanding. There's room for uncertainty and that creates room for imagination and a feeling, potentially, of cracking a code when everything starts to slide into place.
The problem, though, is that if a story is to be told with the approach of "well, I don't know that because I'm just the storyteller, not the person living it", the idea of cohesion can become a bit weak. Details that don't match between events may be interpreted as different perspectives of connected situations, or misremembered hand-me-down tales; but they might also be accidental contradictions that weren't caught in the editing process because details are so nebulous as to be almost unhelpful. And maybe slightly more distressingly, it may afford the opportunity for the storyteller to not really bother to create a real version of the story that is the "true" account of events upon which the told story is draped. There are two types of "not knowing the details" - the kind wherein everything is set in stone but the story released to the audience is filtered and skewed, asking them to engage and piece the story together from what is shown or told to them, and the kind wherein not everything makes sense because it doesn't quite fit together due to bad planning on behalf of the storyteller.
Just as a fully-detailed world creates a kind of objective subjectivity, an "unexplained" world creates a sense of subjective objectivity: each person gleans what they will from the evidence presented, but is left unable to make absolute judgement calls because they're forced to recognise that there is a plurality of perspectives which are unknowable and unable to be experienced.
There's room for both approaches, for sure. People crave details and really enjoy gaining ever more full understanding of things they're invested in; but people also enjoy being able to help make sense of a story for themselves and the suggestion that there are things to be discovered that are by definition undiscoverable.
I do think, though, that the need to give details to flesh out a story is something that a lot of people fall trap to. I remember reading a draft of a story a few years ago and feeling really jarred by the sudden removal of myself from the flow of the story to be told that the event a character had just mentioned was known as _____, a situation that had lasted however-many-years and had been resolved by whatever. It was a first draft, of course, but my first feedback was that details like that are great to have as part of the story, but if they are to be included they have to have a natural place, or they can be added as a footnote or as part of an appendix section. I don't think the feedback was appreciated, and I felt bad for having stepped in to say anything at all - I hurt the feelings of the author and he stopped talking to me. I hadn't been rude but I had overstepped a boundary, I figured, and it bothered me that I'd had a negative impact in that way. As a reader, though, I didn't need to know the particulars of that piece of history at that time, and I felt really removed from the story by the sudden appearance of superfluous information placed to flesh the world out more. Unless the information is included to enrich the story itself it ends up creating a more expansive world at the expense of the story itself - and that shouldn't be something that happens. People love their details, but if they want to include them (which they should feel free and proud and empowered to do) then the way to do it best would be by following the example of Tolkien: finding ways to create a culture that involves reference to forebears, or history, as a natural part of its ways, so that details are found out as the culture is demonstrated.
And then there's exposition, another matter altogether. In my novella manuscript I use exposition a lot - because I'm telling a broader story as experienced by many characters whose thoughts and considerations the audience is privy to. I'm sure some people won't like having so much set out before them, and that's alright. The story I'm working on right now (still at 35,500 words because slow is the progress I make sometimes) takes are far less "I can read your thoughts" approach - because it's a lot stronger on telling the story as it happens as opposed to how each person is affected by it. However...this is probably best left for another post.
