Most of our lives involve reasoning from incomplete information. We’re rarely lucky enough to have all possible information at our disposal, so we need to make inferences. This is evident in reading, such as with the following sentences:
John got a cup of coffee. It was very hot. Now there is a stain on the rug.
Our brains connect the pronoun it at the start of the second sentence with the antecedent cup in the first sentence. We know it does not make sense for “John” to be an it and we know that the heat of the coffee will make its vessel increase in temperature, so it does not refer to “coffee.” We also know that gravity exists, that rugs are on the floor, and that coffee is dark in color, so John must have stained the rug by dropping his coffee.
As skilled readers, we do not stop to take in all of this information as deliberately as I’ve laid it out above. This inferential processing happens in the blink of an eye. I chose a simple example to illustrate this point, but it holds for more complex texts as well. What’s interesting is that because each of us has different lived experiences and have read different texts (broadly defined), our inferences about a given text will vary widely. Our inferences also vary when the text we’re given is degraded or incomplete in some way.
With all of that information in mind, imagine you are a young adolescent girl from Toronto in the early 1990s and you are playing a rented copy of the role-playing game (RPG) Dragon Warrior III on your NES. This is the kind of game that can take more than twenty or thirty hours to complete. You don’t have enough time to finish the game during the rental period and you will not be able to renew your rental because your family has set up a rule that says your pesky brothers get to have a turn at selecting rentals on alternating weeks. You cross your fingers each time you rent the game, hoping someone else hasn’t deleted your save so that you can continue the game’s story. But, even if your save has been deleted, there is also an unspoken trust that the first save slot on the cartridge is reserved for whoever it was who has been able to reach the end of the game with a fully powered up party. You can use this save to your advantage by learning how the game’s narrative concludes. Never mind that you don’t know the middle parts. You just know John once had a cup of coffee and that there is a stain on the rug. What happened in the time between is a complete mystery. That’s where our imaginations thrive by making inferences based on incomplete information and missing evidence. That’s how Nadia Oxford explains her interest in responding to video game narratives by writing fanfiction.
Though she does not include her first story, inspired by the fragmented playthrough of Dragon Warrior III, in this book, she does assure us that she still has a copy of it. It was exciting to read through how she filled in the narrative blanks as a young player, but I will take her word for it that we do not need to see the entire story. See, now you can make up your own fanfiction about how her Dragon Warrior III fanfiction went because we don’t have access to all of the information in it… The cycle continues!
We are much better served by her discussion of how she kept thinking about the implied narrative of the games she played through the intervening years. Even a game series such as Mega Man or Mega Man X that does not have a story as robust as a thirty-hour RPG can provide enough of a narrative for a player and writer like Oxford to create one of her own. For most of the book, she takes us through her evolution as a writer and how it relates to the games she played over the years. In many cases, she doesn’t have access to enough of the game to know how the full narrative resolves. That doesn’t matter! Make up plausible scenarios in your head! Share them with like-minded people on the nascent internet! Meet your spouse! Go nuts!
In a chapter dedicated to her experiences with Secret of Mana, Oxford explores how the game taught her that an author doesn’t owe their readers a neat and tidy ending; it can be satisfying and meaningful even if it is not happy. Even in a fairly traditional action RPG like Secret of Mana, there is room for the author to mess with the player’s expectations of how the narrative will turn out. I, too, remember feeling a mix of emotions upon seeing the sprite child sitting in a tree looking pensive at the end of the game. With the additional knowledge that this particular game bore the scars of corporate fallout during its development process, it’s no wonder that its disjointed and rough second half leads the player to wonder what is happening in the characters’ minds and worlds. Again, with more narrative information left unknown, the player has to do more work to discern what might be significant to the plot. If that is not possible within a high degree of certainty, then imaginations run wild and fanfiction can take root.
In cases where the author of a text or the scenario designers of a game have made events unequivocally clear, it still pays to be a close reader to get a fuller interpretation of the text. Oxford demonstrates the truth of this claim in her discussion of “Aria de Mezzo Carattere,” part of the famous opera scene in the RPG Final Fantasy VI. At this point in the game, you, the player, are aware that Celes Chere and Locke Cole might eventually become more than friends. You are also aware that each character has a masterful leitmotif that plays when they formally join your party. Oxford points out that a few measures of “Aria de Mezzo Carattere,” which Celes “sings” in the game’s opera scene are inserted into Locke’s theme at the end of the game during the credits. As she writes, “Locke and Celes never say ‘I love you’ to one another, but the marriage of RPG characters’ personal themes feels much more intimate” (p. 91). This statement is part of her larger argument that Final Fantasy VI successfully addresses topics such as love, the apocalypse, duty, and friendship in a mature manner. I’m biased because it is literally my favorite game of all time, but I also have a hard time disputing her case.
It’s also hard to take issue with the larger point that Oxford makes in her book. She invites you to participate in your favorite media by creating your own. I learned about the beauty and power of the do-it-yourself ethic from another subculture, but the lesson still holds true with video games. Do your part by making art in response to the conditions in the world that have moved your emotions. It feels good to build something from nothing, even if you never share it with anyone else. You may also use your artifact to create a physical or virtual space for an affinity group that can continue to create and socialize and turn ideas into physical matter. What are you waiting for? Do it!
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