On Interpretation: Redux

Words: 2452 Approximate Reading Time: 15-20 minutes

When I started this blog, I kicked things off with a grouping of four essays I’d written. And one of those was on the topic of interpretation. As an academic, I was trained in all sorts of techniques for reading texts and drawing forth coherent interpretations of them. While the term “interpretation” has a lot of different meanings, the specific practice I was engaged in involved basically getting into the head of a creator: what did the author mean when they said such and such?

If I might describe the process a different way, my skill set was built around figuring out “canon.” Specifically, the canon of philosophers – what is the “canon” of this philosopher’s thought? What did this philosopher really think? It’s a weird way to use the term, as we tend to think of canon as something related to fiction. And yet, many of the techniques used for reading philosophy can be applied to other sorts of media, such as literature, movies, games, etc.

When I wrote that essay years ago, the basic idea I wanted to present was how to approach interpretation. That while interpretation is fun to do, it is easy to mess up. And so there are some rules that would be useful to keep in mind to avoid those pitfalls. These included things like stopping to think about a “default” interpretation, or remembering how issues like translation can create confusion.

In seeing numerous discussions about various video game properties and stories, the concept of canon continually seeps in and overtakes the conversation. On its own, that could be fine. But the problem is how canon is framed around creators. Namely, that everything must be explicitly stated in order to be “true.” A popular theory needs to be “confirmed.” Our first instinct if we’re wondering if something is canon is to just ask the developers.

And I wish to argue that this relationship to “reading” is bad. That it discourages people from actually exercising their analytical muscles, as well as creates an unhealthy relationship both to the concept of “canon” and to developers as authors.

To make that argument, I want to take us on a brief journey through the nature of canon itself and how interpretation works. When we’re focused on trying to figure out what the authorial intent is, how do we go about figuring it out? What do we do when we’re unsure?

The Author and the Text

Right now we’re assuming that we care about the author’s intent and canon. There’s plenty of reasons to not care about those things, but a lot of the ways in which these topics get discussed assume that those things are valuable. We wouldn’t bother with whether something is confirmed or be reading interviews with developers otherwise.

So when dealing with canon, our first focus needs to be on the text in question. Whether it’s a book, a song, a movie, a show, or a game, we need to ask what we can gather from the material presented to us. Of course sometimes that material can be more than one item. A sequel, an instruction manual, or a collector’s edition booklet might all be components of the text. The material outside of the game, movie, or book itself that might still impact our understanding of the core piece of media is called “paratext.”

Paratext can be tricky. Sometimes it can be part of a creator’s vision, as evidenced by the investment the creator put in. As an example, many of the works of French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau contain images meant to represent the material of the written text. Rousseau had numerous exchanges with his publisher about these images and the details in them, and thus we can surmise from his care that the images are worth investigating and reading into the text. Other times, though, those images might be the result of someone else’s vision. A book cover for a fantasy novel might contain art that was commissioned, perhaps by an artist unaffiliated with the original creation and largely unaware of the world.

Understanding how paratext is made can help us understand its relationship to canon. Who made it? Who approved it? Who had input? Some of these details may be lost or obscured – not every component is going to be laid bare for us to know. But having even a vague sense can help.

And in the absence of information, we need a starting point. There may not be a single starting point, but we need a null hypothesis, a base assumption that we can work from.

When it comes to video games, the starting point is going to be that any paratext issued through an official source – the game box, the instruction manual, material in a collector’s edition, text on an official website – are all part of the game’s canon. This is a rebuttable assumption. We can, with sufficient information, attempt to disprove that hypothesis. Even if we can’t disprove it completely, we can reach a point where we are confident that the assumption isn’t true. But until we have further information, we start with that.

But why would we start with that assumption? Well, because in the absence of information we need to presume that the work we have is a created work: it came from the hands of someone (or more accurately, a group of people). It is all a collaboration between writers and artists and other creators, and that paratext Is almost certainly part of it. A developer likely isn’t outsourcing the process of making an instruction manual to another company, and if they do they’re certainly not going to let that other company have free rein over the process – what happens if that other company messes up, after all? A developer isn’t going to just hand over box art and other materials to someone else and never care about the actual product. You want these materials to be coherent with the finished work that is the game.

Meanwhile, presuming that this paratext is not part of a coherent and finished work – that it isn’t canon – forces everyone to jump through a series of hoops to reach what would otherwise be an obvious conclusion. We need to put in the legwork to gather information that is either obscured or normally invisible. We need to find details about the creation of this paratext (who wrote/drew it? did the developer have input on what the end product would look like?) that aren’t revealed to us naturally. We may need to outright ask the developer, and that assumes we can get a hold of them and they are willing to answer the questions we have.

The Amalgamated Author

I bring up paratext because when we try to interpret the meaning of games we tend to fixate on the material of the game itself: narrative, dialogue, lore, environmental design, and so on. That fixation often requires us to forget that the work we have in front of us did not simply descend from the heavens. It is a manufactured thing. And being manufactured we need to think about the role of the manufacturing.

One of our issues in understanding manufacturing is that we often know very little about the creation process of a game. This is true both in the large and small pictures. Although there is a wealth of information available, most people don’t really know how games get made; even when we do, we may not know which specific person or group of people were responsible for a specific line or graphical design.

This in turn creates a sort of fetishization of the auteur creator – that a game is the brainchild of its director who micromanages every aspect and must approve every tiny detail to make sure it meets their vision. And thus you have a clear author and a clear canon.

But canon doesn’t work that cleanly when you have so many hands in the pot. The bigger the team, the more there is to work on, and the harder it is for a single person to keep a tight rein on everything. Which is why the role in these cases is not to look over every detail, but to provide a creative vision that everyone can comprehend and then take back with them as they accomplish their tasks within the process. Some of these tasks will then be checked by that lead, but not everything may be. And the consequence is that each individual programmer and artist and writer will have slightly different understandings of that creative vision. Even where the heart of the work remains the same, things will start become fuzzier around the edges, and it is there that small differences will come up.

It is from these differences that we find our inconsistencies. Even when every major detail and the game’s narrative line up and make sense, you are likely to find some minor piece of dialogue that says something that appears to be contradicted by another piece of dialogue. These are the kinds of things that keep lorecrafters up at night as they wonder how you could have these stories that completely disagree with one another.

Which of course is much easier when you think about the way that these works come into being. When they are not the product of a single direct mind trying to hold every piece of information in their brain like a bank vault. Canon is not necessarily going to be as firm as we might wish precisely because the further out you get from that core of the story and world, the more you are relying on how a particular person views the story. Canon is going to be loose at these points, and consequently we would do well to take it less seriously. To acknowledge that we cannot take everything given to us literally, because sometimes a piece of dialogue or an item description is not throwing a massive wrench into our understanding of the world: it’s just a typo, or a mistranslation, or the personal understanding of a particular creator seeping into a larger work.

Canon as Subtext

The thrust of what we have covered so far relates to how we navigate the topic of canon through the lens of outside material. But when discussing canon it is also easy to get caught up on inside material.

What I mean here is that in-game story material exists on two levels. There is the explicit material, the elements on dialogue or narrative or visual design which are clear and literal and immediately apparent. A character says such-and-such happened, and thus we know by that line that it happened.

And there’s also implicit material. Events and motivations and the like which exist, but are unspoken. This subtext is material from which we can pull together explanations for the story. Perhaps an event occurred in the story’s past that is referenced without being clearly explained. Maybe two characters are supposed to be connected or related, but that relationship is never stated.

Pulling canon from subtext is possible, though sometimes difficult. The clues within a work can be more or less opaque depending on the work or the author or any number of other factors. Sometimes we need to look for details, sometimes we need to think about how things fit together in a more thematic way. There is not necessarily a single method for determining how to read subtext and determine how that subtext fits within our understanding of what is canonical.

But the reason this idea is important is that a common hangup that people can have is confusing “canon” with “confirmed.” As I noted at the top, for something to be true, it must be explicitly stated within the work or by the author. But this refusal to accept subtext as part of canon misses how works are created.

Put a different way, to ignore subtext is to ignore the fact that the work is made. That the various details and clues do not grow organically. A character’s line that indicates they may be related to another character without stating as such is not just a throwaway. That line was created by someone. It carries an intentionality. And we are able to observe that intentionality and draw meaning from it. To presume that this implicit connection must be explicitly confirmed presumes that the line in question simply came forth from nothing. It is the product of the character, not the author.

The insistence upon explicit confirmation leaves us with no real tool for engaging with a work except at the most surface level.

One source of this insistence could be a fear of being wrong. If we claim that something is part of canon and then that claim is disproved, then we made a mistake. And making a mistake feels bad. Yet we can learn a great deal from that experience which transcends any negative feeling. We should be willing to take those risks to learn more about both how we think and the work itself. If the mistake comes from us reading something incorrectly, we can learn to be better readers. If the mistake comes from us reaching a logical or natural conclusion that gets upended, perhaps we can reflect on the quality of the underlying work. In either case, there is a chance for us to grow in how we assess works.

But if we only ever consider that which is explicitly confirmed, then we just remain stuck forever.

Concluding Remarks

My focus here has been on canon. And in focusing on canon, we should not think that canon is all that matters. Sometimes there’s an explanation or event or motivation that appeals to us as an audience member that doesn’t fit with the canon. Sometimes we want to exercise our creative muscles. Whatever the case may be, we can both acknowledge and care about canon while recognizing that canon is not all that a work is about.

So insofar as we care about canon, we need to be careful not to fall into the confirmation trap. We need to be able to read a work not as a mere collection of words, but as something constructed. These works are stories with meaning.

The tools of interpretation are relevant for reading a work canonically as they are for reading a work thematically – both in terms of intended themes and unintended themes. Stretching our minds to think about works as crafted helps us to see and create connections that would otherwise be obscured to us. And this obscuration would be a choice – we have decided to remain blind to possibilities because we wish only to see that which is obvious.