Talking about Games: Interpretation and Meaning

Words: 3065 Approximate Reading Time: 20-25 minutes

When I started this blog, one of the first essays I wrote was about interpretation. This was a more technical essay, leaning into my background as an academic. I had spent years learning the tools and techniques of interpretation – delving into a book and deriving meaning from it. Not simply reading the words and understanding the thoughts directly presented, but looking into symbolism and wordplay and all sorts of other aspects of writing that demand attention and effort.

Now and then I found myself wanting to return to that subject because it’s something I care about. It’s a practice that people engage in, and yet there’s often a tendency to do it badly. To do violence to a text, if you will. To mistreat a work so thoroughly that it feels almost malicious. And when I see that violence occur, I feel a sense of disgust. My platform has been, is, and will almost certainly continue to remain small. But my hope was that by sharing something about these tools and techniques, someone might come away from the process willing to treat these works a bit better.

I have a few ideas that I wanted to share, but I decided to set them aside for this post because I felt a useful jumping-off point would be a recent essay from fellow blogger Meghan Plays Games. While I would recommend reading the post itself, I’ll try to summarize it as briefly as I can:

Meghan reacts to a post on Twitter dismissing the idea that the game Bloodborne is about motherhood. The post says that the game is simply about killing monsters, and that trying to read any ideas about motherhood or similar concepts is simply imposing an alien viewpoint upon the work. Meghan then proceeds to illustrate the ways in which motherhood – both literal and symbolic – permeates the game’s story and world. The game is, in fact, about motherhood.

And there was a line in her essay that I wanted to expand upon:

“He [the poster] also seems to be dying on that hill that, somehow motherhood and women aren’t the ‘only’ themes (or singular ‘theme’ according to him, I guess the game only has the one)…”

Meghan is pointing out something that feels obvious, and yet demands digging into: the idea that games are not about just a single thing. Indeed, the very meaning of “about” is ambiguous.

There are a lot of reasons to take up this topic. But perhaps the most relevant is the anti-intellectualism that lurks behind this idea that a game must be about one thing and one thing only, as though a game is always incredibly simple. And there is a similar anti-intellectualism behind the premise that what a game is “about” must correspond to what the player simply does. It is a denial of the possibility that games can be created works. It is a denial of the possibility that games are something made by people.

In fact, this particular person’s insistence that Bloodborne has no real themes and is simply about killing monsters practically flies in the face of the FromSoft fandom’s treatment of the games’ “author”.[1] Hidetaka Miyazaki – the president of FromSoftware and the director of the various games such as Bloodborne that are the focus of so many of these discussions – is a beloved figure within the gaming world. He is a beloved figure for fans of these games. Although not strictly infallible, he still possesses an almost mythical aura by virtue of his involvement in these games. Everything good in these games flows from his mind – and his absence spells doom.

And the denial of any deeper meaning to Bloodborne is a denial of Miyazaki – it is a claim that the director of the game does not know what he is doing. He has constructed (remembering, of course, that within the mythos of the FromSoft fan that Miyazaki is responsible for everything directly) this world…with no meaning.

And that feels off. If the story and world are merely haphazard bits of slop grafted on to give the game some sense of narrative cohesion, what do we make of its mechanics? Its art? These things that fans love are equally accidental. Either the design is good by chance, or there is no real design at all. There is nothing to love.

Dialogue and Closure

The thing I studied as an academic was political philosophy. As I mentioned, it involved a lot of interpretation. It wasn’t just “here’s a bunch of ideas, now let’s make them fight like action figures.” Instead it was about searching for nuance. Digging into these old texts and asking “what do they really mean?”

My favorite philosopher to read was Plato. Plato lived in Athens nearly 2,500 years ago. He’s considered a sort of original creator within the philosophical world – he was not the first, but the fact that his texts survived to a degree that others’ did not (because they did not write, or the texts they did write got destroyed) gave him a place of centrality.

There are a lot of ideas within Plato’s works that we’d balk at. I don’t really need to share them – you can probably guess just by knowing how long ago he lived. But what made Plato interesting to read – genuinely fun – was the way that he wrote.

When we think of a book of philosophy, we think of a treatise. It’s paragraph after paragraph after paragraph of dry analysis. It’s an essay that’s been stretched out to the point of breaking apart. It’s boring. While I still read and still enjoy many of these books, it’s hard not to deny that their very presentation leaves something to be desired. They aren’t written for everyday people. To be fair, philosophy as a whole isn’t written for everyday people. But treatises feel like they’re pushing you away.

Plato, however, wrote dialogues. Each book he wrote – some short (maybe eight to ten pages), some long (about 350 pages) – contains some little story. There are characters in these books, talking to each other. Sometimes someone comes in to interrupt the conversation and shift the topic. Sometimes they comment on the world around them. Sometimes they do something.

These aren’t novels…but they aren’t treatises either. They invite something more.

The reason that these dialogues are so fascinating is that they defy a straightforward derivation of meaning. The main character of these books is almost always a guy named Socrates – Plato’s former teacher. If these books have a hero, it’s Socrates…but Socrates as a whole doesn’t quite make sense. Sometimes he gives dumb arguments. He might say one thing in one book, and then the exact opposite in another. Sometimes he says things that directly oppose what the real Socrates would probably say.

Socrates is a character. A character made by Plato. And not only that, but he’s an inconsistent character. We can’t fully trust him.

So there’s a fundamental frustration about who Socrates is in these works. A frustration that prevents people from simply reading whatever he says as Plato’s ideas. Meanwhile, Plato himself – the man writing all of these books – is absent. And so we get left with this question of what Plato thinks about all of this. He made these books, after all.

All of that questioning and frustration means that the books are not simply conversations between a series of characters. They are conversations with the reader. You are meant to interject yourself into the conversation as best you can. To speak to the book. It demands a lot of care and effort, because to have a conversation with a book you need to pull the weight for the book. It’s just paper and glue – it can’t actually talk back. So you need to imagine what the book would say in response to your objections. You need to become Plato, creating a character of Socrates to talk to you.

That whole process leads us to a conclusion: the practice of reading does not and should not lead to “closure.” When we reach the end of the book, we are not done with it. We have to keep going. We need to continually interrogate what we’ve read and mull it over. Revisit it to see things in a new light. Question it, and then question our questions.

And that thing I love is something that I think a lot of people might find annoying. I can imagine a number of people finding that whole idea burdensome. They have all sorts of other things they want to spend their time on, and constantly thinking about complicated and abstract ideas might not be one of them. Why can’t they just read a book, understand what it’s about, and be done? Why can’t it just be that simple?

But while I understand the sentiment, the story doesn’t get to end there. We can close the book, but the book keeps on talking. It will talk whether we want to listen to it or not.

Layers of Meaning

Let’s shift to that core question: what is a given game “about”?

I said at the start that the very meaning of this word is complicated. “About,” even just trying to confine our inquiry to this particular context, still does a lot of different jobs. When we say “what is this book/game/story/movie/show about,” we can mean several things.

Let’s start with the outer layer. A game can be “about” it’s core gameplay, or its plain narrative. If we go back to that original idea that a game like Bloodborne is about slaying monsters, we are looking at what the game is about at its most surface level. Indeed, that claim doesn’t even match up with the actual story. There’s still a deeper sense of “aboutness” to the game, and that deeper level would still not be all that deep.

The outer layer is, of course, where we start with things. We first experience a game through its presentation. Controlling our character(s) and being told a story is the more basic form of interaction with the game. Much the same as observing scenes is our interaction with a show or reading text with a book. At the simplest level, there is a story, and the work is about that story.

But we can dig deeper. Because these works are put together with thought. They are created. And that creation usually comes from a place of wanting to say something. This is where we get into theming. Ideas and concepts and symbols repeat themselves. A certain word or phrase might pop up continually. A character might behave in a way that represents a real person or belief. There are so many ways in which we could describe the basic work of theming, but it all boils down to the same core point – there is a creator (or many creators) who put that stuff in for a reason.

Part of our task as an audience, then, is to dig into that theming. To put together those little clues and pull out from it all something meaningful. This is a story about revenge. This is a story about love. This is a story about violence. But really we can do more than that. This is a story about how living for revenge prevents us from forming bonds with others. This is a story about how love pushes us to do crazy and harmful things, and there is a beauty in that destructiveness. This is a story about how violence dehumanizes us and slowly turns us into monsters, and is a pitfall we cannot escape.

When we are talking about themes, we aren’t just looking for a bare concept, but a claim. A belief. A way to expand on that bare concept. Something for us to think about and perhaps allow us to look at that concept in a new light.

The final layer is much like the second, but is something that occurs unconsciously. It is all of those elements that pop up in the work which reveal something about the creator. The way they view the world, or view other people, or view social structures. It is those things where the creator is not trying to say something. Rather, their choices say something about them.

What kinds of relationships or statuses get treated as normal? Are there any commonalities about how heroes and villains are represented? What kinds of behaviors are allowed, and what kinds are prohibited? Because we grow up being handed all of these ideas that we often accept uncritically, we take those ideas with us and infuse them into our creations. We have the opportunity to step back and examine those ideas – some we may throw out, some we may keep. But often the things we genuinely and truly believe may feel so natural as to be obvious. To not need investigation or elaboration. They just are. And those beliefs will trickle into our creations. And it is through the indentations that those ideas leave behind that we learn about the creator as a person.

It might seem like a case that the game isn’t really about these unconscious themes. That these beliefs may exist, but were never intended by the author, so they don’t count. After all, the creator isn’t trying to say something about those unconscious themes.

But the problem here is that we can still derive meaning from it all. It gives us something to think about, just like the conscious themes do. It requires us to dig into the work and pull out clues, just like the conscious themes do. It is, in many ways, much the same process.

And at the end of the day, the work is still saying something. Just as a work can still speak when we refuse to listen, it can also speak when its creator wishes it to be silent.

Accepting this, the obvious task would be to return to that original reading from Bloodborne that Meghan provided. Sure, Bloodborne is about motherhood. But is that a conscious theme, or an unconscious theme? Is this a case of us deciphering clues left behind by the author to determine what they want to say about motherhood? Or are we digging into the psyche of the creator to peek at what they believe, without their knowledge?

It’s tempting to ask this question. It might be fun to dig into. But it’s not really relevant.

To raise that question within the context of this discussion would be to assign a sense of worth to those two layers of meaning. To say that one – almost certainly the “intended” meaning – is superior to the other. That we should be focused on one over the other. That the job of the audience is to never dig into what the creator would prefer to be left undisturbed.

But the creator’s will isn’t the real arbiter in this. The work has to be able to stand on its own. The audience can do with it what they will. Which is why some people can ignore that will entirely and only engage with the game on a surface level. To ignore any depth to the game and only bother with what is directly presented to them. So too can we dig into those unconscious themes that the creator might not want us to think about.

The process of interpretation is a search for meaning within a work. The meaning doesn’t have to be something placed there consciously by the creator. Indeed, it doesn’t necessarily have to be something that is properly there at all. In this essay I have ignored the possibility that we can create meaning from mere shadows on a wall. Even if a certain character’s journey, a certain line of dialogue, a certain design speaks to us in a way that neither reflects the author’s hidden intent nor their hidden understanding of the world – that is still real. It can still have an impact on us. It can still be, in a way, what the work is about to us.

So all of these things are what we can mean by “about.” And all of these things are what a work is about. We can, if we wish, debate the relative merits of any given layer. But to outright deny the existence of these meanings is to misunderstand the word, and indeed creation itself, entirely.

Concluding Remarks

I brought up Platonic philosophy earlier because I find it a useful entry into thinking about closure in interpretation. As a work, Plato’s dialogues prevent a sense of finality that we might seek out. The books want us to start over again.

Part of why I think Platonic philosophy is useful here is that our framing device is a FromSoft game. Games that are built around very bare-bones narratives, with worlds that are constructed out of bits and pieces of lore. These games have so much beautiful detail, and so many details – both of which tell these tiny stories that add up to bigger ideas.

Games like Dark Souls or Bloodborne are actually useful here because they offer that same kind of frustration. They don’t offer clean and clear narratives that we can just accept at face value and then be done. They demand restarting. They ask us to dig deeper, to put things together. They are games that are ripe for interpretation. Whether they are the best way to introduce someone to the process is a separate question entirely. But the games provide so many opportunities for us to search for and find meaning. To come up with so many answers for what these games are about.

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[1] I use quotes here because while these games – like many others – are often treated as the product of a single mind, FromSoft is a pretty significantly-sized studio with many people having a hand in the creative process. Even insofar as there are creative leads, it is unlikely that every single aspect of the game is going to be carefully curated by one single person. Even when the team as a whole shares a common vision, the end product should still reflect small differences, as each person will likely have a slightly different perception of that vision. Thus, the whole team is the author, not a single person. Nevertheless, we often resort to treating the creative lead as the singular author for these works.