This post responds, in part, to @Alvin Shi’s link to the video of Soulja Boy describing his experience playing Braid. I watched that video twice: the first time laughing and thinking that I'd love to chill with him, and the second time questioning pretty much everything about my own experience of Braid not just as entertainment, but as an integrated, stand-alone aesthetic product. The context in which I played the game compelled me to search for abstract, intellectual, or profound meaning. How does the mysterious disclosure of Tim’s history inform our relationship to him as a playable protagonist? Is the array of audiovisual anachronisms intended to dislocate the narrative chronologically, or are they merely arbitrary motifs? As Blow himself would have liked—reaffirmed in the interview linked in @Yiyang Ou's reply—I approached the game without an expectation of “fun.”
But Soulja Boy forced me to ask myself: Would I have enjoyed the game more if my project had been non-academic? Probably. Would I prefer a more entertainment-centric experience? I'm not sure. But I realized that Roland Barthe’s post-structuralist literary question of “the death of the author” is just as critical—if not more so, given the interactivity of the medium—in game analysis. To what degree should the designer's intent affect your interpretation of a game? Is it fair to consider a game's historical and cultural context and make suppositions? (E.g., "Oh, this game is X because it was made in the '80s," or "This symbol means Y because the creator was a fan of Z," etc.) My own playthrough left me variously confused, satisfied, bewildered, engaged, and disenchanted. Unsure of how to transform this range of feelings into an “objective” analysis, I was unable to resist the temptation scour online interviews, videos, and critical commentary to find some key that connected all the dots and told me how I was supposed to experience the game.
Ironically, though—among that sea of educated professional critique, player insight, and interviews with the creator himself—Soulja Boy’s “review” was, to me, the most influential. Such a delighted, superficial reading (e.g., "you’re just walking around jumping on shit”) legitimized broader experiential and interpretive possibilities. Design intentionality should be recognized as connected to—but distinct from—finished, playable products. I think this is something to seriously consider in future analyses.
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