Playing Games with Gadamer: Language for the Player and Protagonist’s Interpretive Journey

While Gadamer is already present in video game studies, this paper focuses on his language and mechanisms that can be used to communicate a video game specific, epistemic journey, rather than a broader ontology. This can be used to design and illuminate video game narrative in terms of the heuristic, experiential learning that we often mean when we talk about engaging with the themes and fiction of a designed world. These language tools also offer novel ways to discuss the entangling and distance between the player and text and player and player character. This paper explores this topic by analysing some of Gadamer’s most immediately useful terms before applying them directly to the selected reading, PlatinumGame’s NieR: Automata (2017)