The motivation of hiding: Control vs Trust

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My today's subject is not about gaming but is tightly related. I’ve just read about the Iceberg mode of narrative. It’s a writing technique that was introduced by Ernest Hemingway and emphasizes minimalism by only telling the surface-level actions, dialogue, and details, leaving readers to infer the deeper meaning themselves.

The main idea is to trust that the reader also knows the background that the writer does, and to allow the reader to develop their own perception and own feelings.


It is an interesting approach, and even though on the surface engineering works similarly, in an API we expose as minimum as required and hide the logic and wiring underneath, the motivation and the outcome are quite the opposite. In engineering, encapsulation is to control what information is exposed, and if the user understands the working logic differently, it is, in essence, a bug. Whereas in narrative, the evocation is there to entrust the reader with knowing the shared context, and a new insight or new meaning is actually a feature.


And that distinction makes the narrative iceberg a much more difficult task. Knowing what to hide and what to expose for the sake of control is rather straightforward; knowing how much is the bare minimum but enough to trigger a reader's or player's emotional response is, to my mind, a state of mastery. 

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