Narrative Theory Series

Designing Games & Interactive Stories

Meaning

The meaning of ‘meaning’ is perhaps too philosophical a question to pursue for in this book, thankfully! Theorists often settle on judgment as the main feature of meaning in narrative. While general ideas in our head that we experience through a narrative can be a bit more freeform and associative, judgements are a bit more definitive and involve closure at an intellectual and moral level. Was Thanos justified in eliminating half of all life in the universe, to prevent cosmic ecological destruction? (that’s an Avengers villain, if you don’t know who Thanos is : ) That question and its judgment is what gives meaning to the Infinity Stones, his snapping fingers, Iron Man’s sacrifice, etc.

Meaning in this sense also means something like ‘profundity’ or overall importance, gravitas, weight. Life is called meaningless if it doesn’t make sense, or feels like it has no point, so those are other definitions of meaning — that we need a goal, or we need narrative coherence to things. So, one can include all sorts of things under the term ‘meaning.’

The meaning of a narrative can also be depriving the audience of a final judgment, or a clear meaning. Things can be left hanging, unfinished, which will frustrate the desire for closure. But, as an aesthetic choice, that is also a judgment of sorts, since the narrative creators have decided not to provide closure, and that is a definitive decision.

Interpretation

All Narratives are open to multiple interpretations, so even though we all see the same characters, events and actions, our individual take away can be quite different. We also often interpret narratives in light of some authoritative interpretation, e.g. Aristotle’s, Freud’s, Propp’s, our religious or political leaders’, etc.

There are three general ways of interpreting narrative: intentional, symptomatic, and adaptive. Intentional interpretation is the idea that we can somehow get at the “real meaning” of a narrative through interpreting the intent of the creators — we usually pretend we can do this, though there is usually nothing in the narrative itself that allows this to happen. Related to the complexity of interpretation is the question of how much of a ‘whole’ a narrative can be said to be. Concepts like intertextuality complicate the identity of any particular narrative by relating it to many other narratives from which it borrows key constituent features.

Intentional interpretation assumes there is some easy-to-access unified sensibility behind a narrative. A good example of intentional interpretation would be a witness’s testimony in a trial. Witnesses take an oath to tell the truth, but they can still lie and perjure themselves. Theoretically, though, if we believe a witness’s account, we believe they intend what they say. Perhaps with nonfiction, e.g. autobiographical narratives, we might feel we have direct access to an author’s intentions, but an autobiography involves a high degree of construction or fabrication and it is easy to lie as soon as we start wanting to tell the truth, because we shape the audience’s perspective on events to suit our storytelling goals.

Symptomatic readings analyze narratives as the result of some kind of underlying condition, such as racism, patriarchy, capitalism, and psychoanalysis. There is usually some kind of general conceptual framework or theory which one interprets a narrative against. You might have some socioeconomic or psychological theories you are expert in, and then use those theories to analyze a narrative and argue that the narrative is explainable in terms of the (psycho-societal) forces you have identified in your analysis. In a symptomatic interpretation, the narrative meanings are unlocked through reference to some other theoretical framework you are employing which you believe has conceptual tools that can help to explain it better compared to just experiencing the narrative as a form of general entertainment and generating a personal under/over-reading of it (discussed below).

Adaptive readings are really transformative of the narrative, since this kind of reading is really pushing the narrative to become another narrative. We start to shift from the idea of interpreting a narrative to creating a new one. This is done all the time with Shakespeare plays, for example, or any ancient or classical narratives that undergo more modern productions. Just to give an example, the Satyricon, Satyricon liber or Satyrica was written in the late 1st Century AD by Gaius Petronius. When there are a couple thousand years between a narrative and its Fellini film version, probably there is going to be a lot of adaptive interpretation happening!

Underreading and Overreading — we cannot escape these dynamics. Narratives do not come with rule books telling us how to interpret them. Thus, when we experience a narrative, we are likely constantly shifting between over- and under-reading it, i.e. not finding the meanings we are supposed to find, or finding more meanings than were designed for us to grasp. Very experienced creators of narratives know, of course, that audiences will not ‘get’ everything, which is why you often find key points repeated in some way, in case the audience didn’t ‘get it’ the first time through underreading. As for overreading, that connects to semiotic concepts related to connotations, because all meanings involve close connectivity to many other meanings.

All narratives involve meanings rich in connotations beyond the creators’ control. Each of us brings our own interpretive skills, cultural backgrounds and media experiences to any narrative. No one can predict in advance what any person might interpret at any moment of a narrative.

It may be that many audience members underread, mainly for the reason that they are not skilled or experienced in deep interpretations. After all, not everyone has an English degree : ) English majors (also sometimes called Literature Majors) are highly trained in narrative interpretation, just like Film Studies or Game Studies majors are. But since most people do not have deep academic training in interpretation itself, we can assume that audiences will relate narratives more on the level of everyday life and will not be able to bring deep knowledge of the historical canon of the medium to any interpretation.

Over time we develop the capacity to revise our narrative-normative assumptions. The current media discourse around the new James Bond film, No Time To Die, is interesting in this regard. Currently, my news feeds are full of articles describing earlier incarnations of James Bond as a rapist (because of his actions vis-a-vis all the various ‘Bond girls’ in previous films). The latest James Bond is being praised by critics for being the most emotionally complex and even ‘woke’ version of the character to date.

You’ve heard the word ‘crux’ many times perhaps, e.g. ‘the crux of the matter’ and so on. In narrative, ‘crux’ has a particular meaning. It refers to how the interpretation of some particular element in a narrative affects our overall interpretation of the whole. Can you think of any narratives where, depending on how you interpret a particular scene, it totally changes the way you think about the whole narrative?

Readers also falsify narratives by underreading and overreading them. And, they have no choice but to do so, because we all under- or over-read to some extent, because narratives don’t come with instruction manuals telling us what the right interpretation is. If the audience underreads, they miss out on complexities that they would have gotten if they were more sophisticated perhaps (e.g. the creators might have assumed an audience familiar with classic narratives) but also, they might overread by finding too many associations that weren’t really intended by the narrative creators. There’s no right way to read (and “read” is used generally here so that it also includes other media and senses, like viewing a film or playing a game). There’s always a continuous flux of reading, involving oscillating between underwriting and overreading, in the audience’s reception of meaning.

While all narratives involve gaps, and therefore require the audience’s gap-filling interpretive work, some media work directly with gaps, such as comics, where gaps are literal spatial zones between the panels. In film, gaps are everything that is cut out between the edits. Marie-Laure Ryan’s concept of ‘the principle of minimal departure’ helps to explain how much of the gap filling activity we perform as the audience is based on our experience of ‘reality’ and plugging that into the gaps to fill them. Generally we will expect that the storyworld has many similar features as our own unless there is something in the text overruling it (e.g. there are aliens or faeries, anti-gravity or magic, etc.).

In fiction, the author intentionally creates gaps because they cannot show everything and so they strategically choose what to show. The same happens with nonfiction narrative, but with nonfiction there are other kinds of gaps which could conceivably be filled by others later. For example, if years after the nonfiction narrative is created, new evidence or data is discovered — that’s referential gap filling, rather than interpretive gap filling, because it’s based on filling gaps in the real world.

Shklovsky’s ‘defamiliarization’ is based on the general idea of ‘reader resistance.’ The idea here is that narrative has to be sufficiently different from everyday life in order to engage us. If it was the same as life, it wouldn’t be art, and we wouldn’t have our ‘automated’ or ‘habitual’ perceptions of the world challenged. Art that imitates life through too much familiarity we would call ‘cliche’ or boring etc.

Related Articles

Bibliography & Further Reading

• A Game Design Vocabulary: Exploring the Foundational Principles Behind Good Game Design by Anna Anthropy and Naomi Clark
• A Theory of Fun for Game Design by Raph Koster
• Advanced Game Design: A Systems Approach by Michael Sellers
• An Introduction to Game Studies by Frans Mayra
• Basics of Game Design by Michael Moore
• Blood, Sweat, and Pixels: The Triumphant, Turbulent Stories Behind How Video Games Are Made Blood, Sweat, and Pixels: The Triumphant, Turbulent Stories Behind How Video Games Are Made by Jason Schreier
• Board Game Design Advice: From the Best in the World vol 1 by Gabe Barrett
• Building Blocks of Tabletop Game Design: an Encyclopedia Of Mechanisms by Geoffrey Engelstein and Isaac Shalev
• Character Development and Storytelling for Games by Lee Sheldon
• Chris Crawford on Game Design by Chris Crawford
• Clockwork Game Design by Keith Burgun
• Elements of Game Design by Robert Zubek
• Film Art by David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson
• Fundamentals of Game Design by Ernest Adams
• Fundamentals of Puzzle and Casual Game Design by Ernest Adams
• Game Design Foundations by Brenda Romero
• Game Design Workshop by Tracy Fullerton
• Game Mechanics: Advanced Game Design by Ernest Adams and Joris Dormans
• Game Writing: Narrative Skills for Videogames edited by Chris Bateman
• Games, Design and Play: A detailed approach to iterative game design by Colleen Macklin and John Sharp
• Interactive Narratives and Transmedia Storytelling, by Kelly McErlean
• Introduction to Game Systems Design by Dax Gazaway
• Kobold Guide to Board Game Design by Mike Selinker, David Howell, et al
• Kobold’s Guide to Worldbuilding edited by Janna Silverstein
• Level Up! The Guide to Great Video Game Design, 2nd Edition by Scott Rogers
• Narrating Space / Spatializing Narrative: Where Narrative Theory and Geography Meet by Marie-Laure Ryan, Kenneth Foote, et al.
• Narrative Theory: A Critical Introduction by Kent Puckett
• Narrative Theory: Core Concepts and Critical Debates by David Herman, James Phelan, et al.
• Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative, Fourth Edition by Mieke Bal
• Practical Game Design by Adam Kramarzewski and Ennio De Nucci
• Procedural Storytelling in Game Design by Tanya X. Short and Tarn Adams
• Professional Techniques for Video Game Writing by Wendy Despain
• Rules of Play by Salen and Zimmerman
• Storyworlds Across Media: Toward a Media-Conscious Narratology (Frontiers of Narrative) by Marie-Laure Ryan, Jan-Noël Thon, et al
• Tabletop Game Design for Video Game Designers by Ethan Ham
• The Art of Game Design, 3rd Edition by Jesse Schell
• The Board Game Designer’s Guide: The Easy 4 Step Process to Create Amazing Games That People Can’t Stop Playing by Joe Slack
• The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative by H. Porter Abbott
• The Grasshopper, by Bernard Suits
• The Johns Hopkins Guide to Digital Media, by by Marie-Laure Ryan, Lori Emerson and Benjamin J. Robertson
• The Routledge Companion to Video Game Studies by Bernard Perron and Mark J.P. Wolf
• The Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory by David Herman
• The Ultimate Guide to Video Game Writing and Design by Flint Dille & John Zuur Platten
• Unboxed: Board Game Experience and Design by Gordon Calleja
• Video Game Storytelling: What Every Developer Needs to Know about Narrative Techniques by Evan Skolnick
• Writing for Video Game Genres: From FPS to RPG edited by Wendy Despain
• Writing for Video Games by Steve Ince
• 100 Principles of Game Design by DESPAIN

Acknowledgement

This online courseware was co-authored with OpenAI technology in order to produce a clear, succinct writing style that will be accessible to the widest range of readers from a variety of backgrounds.

Meaning & Interpretation was originally published in Sound & Design on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.