Clarifying Interpretive Challenges

In 2018 I wrote an extended abstract where I tried to define what I called “interpretive challenges”. I started thinking about this topic after playing Her Story, which is about looking at videos and parsing together a timeline of what happens in the videos. The challenge in that game comes from understanding what is said on the videos and finding new videos by noticing topics and themes that might be meaningful based on what is said.

It is a bit like doing qualitative analysis in reverse: there is already a codebook, but you don’t know what it is, and to find the whole data set you have to reverse engineer the codes out of the sample of data you do have.

In 2018, I understood interpretive challenges as follows [sic]:

Interpretive challenges are challenges that are based on players succesfully interpreting some aspects of the game. This is different from logical challenges, which only require players to logically arrive to a conclusion. Interpretive challenges cannot be solved by simple logical deduction and instead require understanding the object of interpretation in a more comprehensive way.

Games with interpretive challenges require understanding other players or cultural contexts. They may draw upon large amounts of background knowledge that is not directly present in the game but necessary for understanding it. This knowledge cannot be simply picked up from the game while playing, and must instead be acquired outside it. Most, if not all, games have interpretation in them, but a game has interpretive challenges if you have to succesfully use contextual information from outside the game in order to proceed or win in it.

The definition I had is not great, but I haven’t been able to come up with a better one. I still think there is something to the idea I’m trying to get at, but the framing I gave in 2018 is probably the wrong one. At least it has some obvious problems, since we always draw upon “contextual information from outside the game” when playing games.

Inge van de Ven wrote a paper last year about full motion video games, like Her Story. I think their analysis about the lack of “rules of notice” gets at something similar than what I was trying to point out. Rules of notice are attention-guiding devices that are used to make sure that the player pays attention to the right things. Some things in games are important for playing it and some are less important background information. Rules of notice guide the player to pay attention to the right things at the right time.

Games like Her Story don’t do that and instead express so many things at the same time that to figure out what is meaningful the player has to do a lot of interpretive work. It might seem unimportant that the person being interviewed drinks coffee during an interview, but when they prefer tea in another interview, it suddenly becomes important. But Her Story doesn’t tell you that it’s important – you have to figure it out yourself.

I’m not sure whether rules of notice cover everything I tried to express with interpretive challenges – leaving them out might be one tool for creating interpretive challenges among others – but at least the analysis van de Ven gives is much more concrete than I managed.