We often infer more from a game experience than is actually on the screen. We have the capacity to use the game as an imaginative springboard, inferring personality traits, characters, behaviours and a sense of a larger game world beyond even what the developer intended. We make cognitive leaps, little observations and associations that contain the quality of empathy, and so it feels like there is more there than meets the eye.
These moments are called numina. Numina are the gateway to thauma because they inspire the art brain to see an intangible, even believable, world beyond the mechanical layer. Numina are what lead us to believe.
