I would make the case that defining terms on first use is not necessary for narratives to work. Narratives very often make allusions or references that are not immediately clear. The second line of Final Fantasy VII is “Wow! You used to be in SOLDIER all right! …Not everyday ya find one in a group like AVALANCHE.” There is a little bit of setup, but not anything like a definition. From the short conversation, all one knows is that they’re groups, Cloud was once one, and he quit. We don’t need to go into a lore book or a footnote to roll with what’s going on.
I can imagine players having a different level of tolerance for the suspension of unknowing. When I teach the first lines of Paradise Lost, we spend a fair amount of time parsing the first sentence and talking about what we get and don’t get, both on a syntactic level and on the level of references. Even a casual reader can understand that, hey, this is about Adam and Eve. They may miss all the stuff with the Heavenly Muse, Oreb, Sinai, that kind of stuff. They may miss what the main verb of the sentence is:
OF Mans First Disobedience, and the Fruit
Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal tast
Brought Death into the World, and all our woe,
With loss of Eden, till one greater Man
Restore us, and regain the blissful Seat,
Sing Heav’nly Muse, that on the secret top
Of Oreb, or of Sinai, didst inspire
That Shepherd, who first taught the chosen Seed,
In the Beginning how the Heav’ns and Earth
Rose out of Chaos: or if Sion Hill
Delight thee more, and *Siloa’*s brook that flow’d
Fast by the Oracle of God; I thence
Invoke thy aid to my adventrous Song,
That with no middle flight intends to soar
Above th’ Aonian Mount, while it pursues
Things unattempted yet in Prose or Rhime.
And chiefly Thou, O Spirit, that dost prefer
Before all Temples th’ upright heart and pure,
Instruct me, for Thou know’st; Thou from the first
Wast present, and with mighty wings outspread
Dove-like satst brooding on the vast Abyss
And mad’st it pregnant: What in me is dark
Illumin, what is low raise and support;
That to the highth of this great Argument
I may assert Eternal Providence,
And justifie the wayes of God to men.
For some readers, getting the gist and going with the flow of the narrative is great fun. For others, they would find that an agonizing experience. “Why doesn’t the poet just say what he wants to say?”
I’m not arguing that Final Fantasy XIII (or any FF) is like Paradise Lost. I’m just drawing an analogy to how people can read and enjoy something without having definitional clarity of what’s being mentioned.
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