The Games I Have Yet to Play

I bought a bunch of new games earlier (I think I blabbed about all of them below so I don't need to say which), yet the games am I thinking about the most right now are the ones I don't have, especially if they're not yet released.
 
Why is that? 
 
I think when a game isn't in our hands, if not at least tried or seen in action in its final form, it is a bunch of potentialities. It could be anything right up until release, we think. Maybe this is why companies are so worried about appealing to people with those silly buzz words some of us have come to loathe. When we hear that a game we thought would be one thing turns out to be another, we might be so disappointed that we'll stop paying attention, even if, in the end, we might really love the game.
 
Right now, my imagination suggests to me all the fun I might have in Skyrim. These visions are balanced against possible problems, but it's easier for me to ignore potential flaws than to imagine romping through the fields looking to spot a moose.  I wonder if open-world games do that for me because I like running through them and making my own interesting accidents and discovering things on my own; others love games for their plots or their mechanisms, but just about everyone imagines what it'll be like before they play.
 
And I wonder if this is a cousin to the thought process that makes things feel slightly less interesting once we learn the story behind them. As we drove up a winding road in Canada, we saw a huge swath of trees that had been largely burned into towers of ash. Knowing the reason behind the fire beforehand (I think I learned later that it was naturally caused) would have made me file it into one or more categories in my brain, and I might have more easily moved on to the other sights. But because it was still a mystery I was fascinated, looking at the details, trying to guess if it was lightning, or carelessness, or deliberate. There were stories there yet to be discovered.
 
The stories we get when we play a game are different (sometimes better, sometimes worse) than the ones we make up in our heads about it before we ever get our hands on it. They're definitely final, though, transferred from the realm of imagination to experience.
 
I've heard it said about movies and board games before, and I wonder if you think it might fit with video games, too:
 
The best game is the one I have yet to play, since it has all the potential in the world.
 
Anyone else imagine a game to be way more than what it actually turned out to be? Or were some of you surprised by how much better a game was than you imagined?