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  • Showing only topics with the tag "interpretation". Back to normal view
    1. How do you read books that defy interpretation, logic, semantics or even language itself?

      After loving Waiting for Godot in the theater years ago, I recently tried to read the novel Molloy, by Samuel Beckett, in the Portuguese translation. It was a humbling experience. Most of the time...

      After loving Waiting for Godot in the theater years ago, I recently tried to read the novel Molloy, by Samuel Beckett, in the Portuguese translation. It was a humbling experience. Most of the time I did not know who was talking, where they were talking, to whom they were talking, or what they were trying to talk about. The words were definitely arranged in interesting ways that pleased me at times, but I can't really say if what I was doing could be qualified as reading.

      Half the book doesn't even have paragraphs, it is just one continuous block.

      Maybe that is the point? I don't know. Critics do seem to get a lot more from these than I do, to the point that I ask myself "are they just deluding themselves, creating meaning where there is none just to justify their very existence? Wouldn't a work with little to no meaning render critics useless anyway?".

      I don't know, I'm rambling. I'm looking at Molloy defeated, like one day I looked at Joyce's Ulysses.

      Maybe I should read these books without thinking, like listening to music with lyrics in a language I don't speak (I can kinda do that in a movie, but a movie is only 2 hours...).

      Maybe I'm not worthy.

      6 votes
    2. How do you fit a video game's interpretation with its source files?

      Given a movie with ambiguous story, you have multiple options to base your interpretation upon: you have the movie itself, the screenplay if available, what the author said in interviews or books,...

      Given a movie with ambiguous story, you have multiple options to base your interpretation upon: you have the movie itself, the screenplay if available, what the author said in interviews or books, etc... Now, if we take a video game, you also have additional tools: the source code, the installed file names, unused resources, etc. There are of course a few games that expect the player to check these files but that isn't what I want to focus on.

      Would you say that all these files have the same authority as the game itself when it comes to interpretations?

      I'd like to take an example with SPOILERS FOR LIFE IS STRANGE 1, as this is the game that sparked this topic for me:

      The blue butterfly has a special place in this game, it is what starts the whole journey when Max takes a picture of it and Chloe gets shot. It also shown again in the 'Sacrifice Chloe' ending during that same scene. And later during Chloe's burial that butterfly is shown to land on the coffin in front of Max and fly away. There are some scenes that imply that spirit animals are a thing in the in-game universe. After finishing the game my interpretation was that the blue butterfly was Chloe's spirit animal. Now what a surprise to see in the game wiki that the texture file for that butterfly is named 'Spirit_animal_Chloe' !

      Is there any room left for interpretation when the source makes it explicit text? Or can the source be reasonably be pushed aside?

      8 votes