I want to agree, and clearly the identification of collaborative space through lightly drawn settings is a real opportunity for the reasons above.
However, I first note that pretty much all of my current gaming focus is found in worlds that come in multi-book tomes: Warhammer Fantasy, Fading Suns, The One Ring, Traveller (Charted Space). Perchance, I have been seduced into the marketing and accepted norms of game line acquisition, stuffing myself with useless lore that stifles everyones' creativity and tramlines stories through heavy campaign tomes?
Nah.
There are always gaps: even with these intricately detailed settings there are endless spaces for creativity and new stories. They will just exist in a setting with a baseline of helpfully realised parameters, and areas that provide detailed exposition. (There are endless gaps even in the detailed places - particularly true). Localise, flavour and season from the setting spice rack, and add your own secret ingredients. Serve.
Liberation Detail: a created world with lore, and implicit setting details in game mechanics, provides a rich verrisimilitude from which creativity and story flourishes. If written well, and I submit that my current obsessions are, the detail provides an environment laden with conflict that translates into new stories and play experiences. Far from unwriting a story you can tell, the detail is a rich and prepared ground that harvests a burgeoning crop of consequential adventure.
Detail begets your own detail: for example, the story of a new cult (of your devising) becomes all the richer, as it emerges in the context of an existing and established religious hierarchy. Conflict and intrigue flow due to the friction, and story will emerge as to the success, failure and consequences of your newly created detail. Ripples happen in a pond, and your purchased setting provides the water to play out the disturbances that create resonances to impact the player characters.
Detail through an interpretive lense: YGMV, IMTU, WHCFO, this setting is yours now. A linked thout to reciprocating details that might wreck the world (economy). The seduction (not that I think anyone here has failed their Cool check) is to take everything provided as cast in stone. The detail provides maleable blocks to reconstruct and interpret. Perhaps the war didn't happen, or your wrath plague has broken aspects of what you have been given in print? Is the throne empty, who is vying for it now, which character is being thrust into the centre? You still have a starting richness to setting, it's just presented through your own creative layer.
Detail is fun before it gets to the table: Lore reading and play experience may well be two different things, but the enjoyment of one often leads to the other.
A wide open, bare bones setting, with a chosen game system that holds back on too many implicit assumptions, is also great fun. Reality forms collaboratively around the process of play, and introduced when a scene actually calls for it. I'd happily play in such a game, and perhaps I should try and live the gush of wise thread enthusiasm to actually run something as a thought experiment? I'm just wary of the converse notion that detailed settings hamper creativity. Perhaps instead they encourage consequential creativity from a set of conflict laden assumptions?
Note 1. I have an aversion to disagreeing with people who I admire - the folk on here - especially when I also kind of agree with the premise.
Note 2. These thoughts bubbled up and needed to be expressed.
Note 3. This is not a justification of my game shelves. No, absolutely not.
