When his teacher came in and asked him what he was doing, he replied “I’m writing a computer program that will use random numbers to determine the computer’s move in a tic-tac-toe game, so the computer won’t approach the game with any preconceived notions.”

The teacher then wisely replied “But the computer will have preconceived notions. You just won’t know what they are.”

In reality, the computer has neither preconceived notions or randomness. Randomness is only another construct of the human mind used to interpret events. Their meaning is equally worthless.

I have a bag of three marbles: red, green and blue. One person closes their eyes, reaches in, and, after feeling around for a bit, draws a green marble. His choice is ‘random’. A second person reaches in with his eyes open, and, seeing the green marble, takes it intentionally. His choice is ‘preconceived’. Does the significance of the green marble change because one person chose it without knowing its color? Could it not be said that the one who did not look still made a conscious ‘choice’ to pull that marble from the bag, but used a different standard to make that choice? In the end, the interpretation of randomness or preconception makes little difference. The only ‘reality’ is that two people have drawn green marbles. Both are therefore equal.

Author fiat or consensus… neither of these two factors can influence “truth”. The truth is the game. It exists, and we place meaning to it by virtue of our cultures and upbringings.

That being said… the Giygas-as-fetus theory resonates really strongly with me. I don’t actually see Giygas as a literal or metaphorical fetus. Rather, the imagery of something as fundamental as an unborn baby mixed with the imagery of chaotic faces becomes extremely jarring. It’s like a Dali painting where one brushstroke becomes part of two different but coexisting objects. One cannot see both objects at once, and I relate this to why “You cannot grasp the true form of Giygas’ attack”. Giygas’ visual form provides symbolism in both the positive and negative space, meaning that our minds cannot hold both forms simultaneously. Therefore, it conveys the essence of Giygas. We cannot grasp it because to see it in its entirety requires us to rid ourselves of the instinctive symbol recognition that our brains are wired for.

Following that train of thought, then, Giygas’ true nature is meaninglessness. It cannot be comprehended, because comprehension creates meaning. To see and understand Giygas, we must become like him: that is to say, devoid of preconceived notions.

Also, to say you think something’s confusing doesn’t refute it. The death of the author is necessary, or else we couldn’t read the text. It’s our interaction, not the author’s meaning, that’s important. Or else we couldn’t read anything that was written in another culture, or another time period, because it would be impossible for us to arrive at the mindset of the author. If you’re okay with only reading/playing/watching media from your ethnicity, country, language, and most probably, neighborhood, go ahead, attempt to find the author’s intention. I quite like reading books from three hundred years ago and watching television from other countries, so I find I’m forced to use the author’s death as a framework.

Beauty is subjective. That’s the deal with beauty. But that doesn’t obviate analysis. Without analysis, there’s no construction of a subjective viewpoint, as that’s how a viewpoint *is* constructed.

No, I shouldn’t be wary of reading my own biases into the text as intentional: because I’m not reading for intent (see above). You can’t attempt to claim a person is wrong for X, and then also Y, when Y destroys any possibility of X being true. I don’t read for author’s intent, so I’m free to use my own perspective and, as you put it, biases.

And actually, pretty much every novel with a self-reflective function is, in some way, about the medium in which it’s expressed. That’s why so many of Shakespeare’s plays are about acting and the stage.

Let’s also talk about the supposed non-existence of a One True Point. Sorry, but it does exist. Given that “point” is an inherently vague framework, simply take all the points and put them together into one whole. There you go. The One True Point since it encompasses all points. Now, whether that’s practically reachable is another matter entirely (which is why you are still right to be suspicious of anyone who lays claim to being the bearer of such a thing).

The very fact that we can only reach the sum total extant meaning of a work by considering all personal readings indicates to me that there can be no one true point — I don’t think that, when all meanings “come together” as such, or are pushed into a whole, they end up as something like what we might call a “point.” Instead what we’d get by pushing divergent meanings together is either some provisionally and artificially harmonious construct (which I don’t much care for) or absolute chaos (which I’m all for). The fact that we can’t really take all these different readings and make a coherent whole, or that the whole we get when we try is a complete mess — Earthbound means A, Not A, Sometimes A, Usually Not A, etc. — is something I particularly like about fiction. But I wouldn’t really call that a “point.”

In short what I’m saying is I agree with your methodology. Really what I’m arguing against when I say there is no one true point is the notion that one reader can offer an absolutely true reading that must apply to everyone.

I believe that Midge meant by “reading in” when he talked about “overanalysis”, as in you should be wary of reading in your own biases as intentional.

I pay absolutely no mind to what is intentional and what isn’t. I approach every analysis as a product of my own reading; I acknowledge that everything I write comes out of my own bias, to some degree. I don’t think I ever made any claim to the contrary. If I did, I didn’t mean to.

Vis a vis Earthbound, I believe that Itoi made the ending sexual not directly, but indirectly due to the fact that he was trying to make something disturbing and (as revealed in interviews) used one of his early experiences as a kid and accidentally walking into a porn theater for inspiration (why sex is disturbing to kids is a different matter). In other words, it’s like reading a book and saying “Aha! This is ink written on paper! The story must therefore be about ink and paper!”.

It’s entirely irrelevant to me how the sexual element got there, or even if it exists for anyone other than me. If it’s there for me, it’s there for me. If it’s there for you, it’s there for you. If it’s there for any one reader, it’s there for that reader. That’s all any one person can claim. So, yes, if a reader would like to interpret every novel they read as being “about” ink and paper — and, believe me, such readers are out there — there exists no good reason why they shouldn’t.

The means that Itoi disturbs you is immaterial to the fact that it is disturbing (though the means are important if you, for instance, want to replicate it).

Oh man, I absolutely disagree with you here. The means are what disturbs — there isn’t something beyond the means that disturbs. I’m pretty poststructural about it. Without the means — the story elements that actually do the work — it wouldn’t be disturbing at all. Of course a story element may be a mutable thing — maybe the signifiers employed by the Giygas fight are sexual for one person and not for another, and that’s okay. The whole point here is to analyze my own experience. Maybe I’m misunderstanding what you’re saying here, though.

If you can’t take into account the author’s intentions, than the work of art is now about what you can read-in to the work yourself. That’s fine, except that that means that any criticism of the work is not of the author’s ability to effectively communicate his meaning, but in your own ability to create meaning.

Yes, I believe that this is precisely the case. Art is something one does. This is not to say that the author’s provision of signifiers isn’t the essential catalyst that gets art going, that the artist has nothing at all to do with the aesthetic experience — the author’s rhetoric manipulates us into aesthetic experience in the first place.

You might as well critique a random number generator since you’ve reduced the author to a noise generator that you then impress your own meaning on (which incidentally, gives me an idea for a program: genetic algorithm poems).

Random/not-random isn’t very important at all, as long as the thing in question prompts the aesthetic experience (and has its origins in something human-made, even if it’s a random number generator; if it’s naturally-occurring, it’s just nature) — that’s the very basis for critique. It’s not art we critique so much as ourselves “doing” art. That’s about as much as we can critique — in translating text into something our mind can work with, reading irrevocably changes text. Surely there are some commonalities between my conception of a text and yours — otherwise we’d never be able to discuss art of any kind. But the two will never be precisely the same, and they will never amount to precisely what’s written in the book or video game or what have you. The author’s intentions aren’t really important because the author’s work, the author’s intended text, isn’t what we’re working with when we work with fiction. And even if you aren’t buying my strict semiotic/reader-response approach to things, I don’t see the point in restricting the potential of a text to what the author might’ve intended for it to mean — something that, in many cases, we can never know for sure anyway. What’s the point of art at all if everyone’s bound to the same reading? I just value the author’s opinions as highly as those of any reader — I don’t write the author off entirely, which wouldn’t be fair, but I don’t privilege the author, either. That’s the essence of death of the author/intentional fallacy/etc. (there are some critics who say the author gets no opinion at all, and I wouldn’t go that far).

Let’s talk a second about that last one: beauty. To paraphrase Terry Pratchett, if we put an Earthbound cartridge through a fine mesh, you won’t find one particle of beauty. Therefore, it’s subjective. And therefore, whether one views it as beautiful or not depends on oneself. Obviously, then, there exists such a person that rigorous analysis would decrease that beauty. While you may find beauty in analysis, to dismiss other’s feelings simply because they don’t follow the path that your feelings developed is immature to say the least.

Let’s also talk about the supposed non-existence of a One True Point. Sorry, but it does exist. Given that “point” is an inherently vague framework, simply take all the points and put them together into one whole. There you go. The One True Point since it encompasses all points. Now, whether that’s practically reachable is another matter entirely (which is why you are still right to be suspicious of anyone who lays claim to being the bearer of such a thing).

And now, in a roundabout way, we get to my point. I believe that Midge meant by “reading in” when he talked about “overanalysis”, as in you should be wary of reading in your own biases as intentional. Vis a vis Earthbound, I believe that Itoi made the ending sexual not directly, but indirectly due to the fact that he was trying to make something disturbing and (as revealed in interviews) used one of his early experiences as a kid and accidentally walking into a porn theater for inspiration (why sex is disturbing to kids is a different matter). In other words, it’s like reading a book and saying “Aha! This is ink written on paper! The story must therefore be about ink and paper!”. The means that Itoi disturbs you is immaterial to the fact that it is disturbing (though the means are important if you, for instance, want to replicate it).

Also, while you seem to be a fan of the whole “Death of the Author”-mindset, I must confess that I’ve always found it rather confusing. If you can’t take into account the author’s intentions, than the work of art is now about what you can read-in to the work yourself. That’s fine, except that that means that any criticism of the work is not of the author’s ability to effectively communicate his meaning, but in your own ability to create meaning. You might as well critique a random number generator since you’ve reduced the author to a noise generator that you then impress your own meaning on (which incidentally, gives me an idea for a program: genetic algorithm poems).

This is especially true of the Mother games, I think. Without analysis, they’re exactly the same as Final Fantasy or the other generic ilk. It’s only in paying attention to the details that we can notice anything out of the ordinary.

Still:

To over-analyze it is to miss the point.

There is no such thing as overanalysis. Why settle for only one point (“the” point, as it were — another phrase I don’t like, since there can be no One True Point) when you can create many?