How can designers use collage effectively when designing games? The strength of collage draws from its associative power. Images and concepts, when used in conjunction, can give meaning to an other-wise difficult idea. It's kind of a "Why create a new word when another word already exists with the same meaning?" thing. The problem with creating collage in video games is that games are generally big budget productions. (Granted there's a whole world of low budget homebrew games, but we're gonna put that aside for the time being.) Collage generally is done in lower budget "indie" situations. Though it's possible, there aren't all that many Hollywood Blockbuster collage films. There are many issues associated with copyright and appropriation and these larger budget productions are out to make money. It's easier for smaller projects that are "not-for-profit" or "for-only-a-little-profit" to get away with flagrant appropriation. Companies like SquareEnix (formally and most famously Squaresoft) and Nintendo have large libraries of game they produced from which to take material for other games, but would have difficulty obtaining material copyrighted by other companies. The game Chrono Trigger bases a trio of characters on three non-playing-characters from the Final Fantasy games: Biggs, Wedge, Piette. Final Fantasy originally took these characters' names from Star Wars and then Chrono Trigger took both of the references into its script. Squaresoft was able to do this because it owned the rights to both series of games. It's unlikely that we'll see a character like Cloud from Final Fantasy VII appear in non-Squaresoft collage. (Though he does appear in the highly collaged Squaresoft game Disney's Kingdom Heart's).
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