Some Thoughts On Intertextuality in Games

 in·ter·tex·tu·al·i·ty

/ˌin(t)ərˌtek(st)SHəˈwalədē/

noun

the relationship between texts, especially literary ones.

"every text is a product of intertextuality"

Intertextuality was a word I first encountered in film studies. It's what gives humor to the Rawhide scene in The Blues Brothers (1980). It's the reason people love the Walt Disney Company [Traded as: DIS] film Guardians of the Galaxy (2014). It's why two of my favorite films (both directed by Wong Kar-wai) are named after love songs. It more or less forms the entire basis of Codename: Kids Next Door (2002-2008). It can be as simple as name dropping Romeo and Juliet or as complex as the extensive sea of audio, visual and historical references that make up Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019).

To put it simply intertextuality is the ability for text (re: stories) to reference other texts (re: other stories) to further enchant their audiences and enrich their narrative. It helps storytellers rhyme with other pre-established stories in the zeitgeist and lets audiences feel clever for connecting the pieces. At its simplest it usually looks like using licensed music to establish time or tone, and at its most complex it involves extensively deconstructing tokusatsu and mecha over the course of a 24 episode anime and 5 films. If you've ever dissected the lyrical works of David Bowie or picked apart cinematic references in a Hideo Kojima game you'll know this concept well.

Early TTRPG design is no stranger to this, to the point where I wouldn't be surprised if a fair few dungeon crawlers recognized the Vorpal Sword more from D&D than from Lewis Carroll's tales of a wayward child. In fact any time a fantasy-centric TTRPG evokes Arthurian myths, Miltonian demons, or pulls from the varied folklores of our world it's engaging in a healthy dose of intertextuality. Yet I find most games stop at a stat block and a name, and maybe an artifact if you're lucky. To this day I haven't seen a single GM's Tools section mention the concept, never mind give instruction on it. 

You can bet once Steel Hearts is done there'll be a healthy section on using intertextuality in your campaigns. But I wanted to start the conversation here.

Settings Grounded in Our Reality

Firstly I want to caveat by saying intertextuality is best used in settings at least adjacent to our reality and our Earth. This isn't to say you need to strictly adhere to history or our contemporary setting. The chilling Nazified remixes of classic 60s tunes paired with reworked historical events is Wolfenstein - The New Order (2014) serve to evoke the game's alt-history terror. Meanwhile the out-of-place out-of-time songs in Bioshock: Infinite (2013)'s 1910s sky-city Columbia help establish its own space-time shenanigans. However as fantastical as these settings are, they specifically use Earth and Earth texts as a touchstone for how far their respective settings have gone. Another great example that most CRPG gamers will be all too familiar with is the extensive use of licensed music within the Fallout series. These songs don't only help establish setting, but often establish tone and themes. (Many of the selected Fallout songs deal with loss and self-determination/self-affirmation, and I shouldn't have to explain how that connects to that game's post-apocalyptic world).

While it's certainly possible to pull songs into a fantasy world and have players connect the dots, I'm firmly of the belief that this intertextuality works the best when it's fully diegetic[*1] and thus fully immersive (As it's been for nearly every example I just brought up). It's also a huge reason I almost exclusively run campaigns whose settings allow for some degree of this.

Intertextuality isn't just about music. Another common example is evoking the Tarot, which I'm seeing more and more indie TTRPG works do. (It's also one of my favorite parts of the Persona series) Come to think of it Tarot (and various other forces of folkloric magics) are a great fit for GMs looking to add intertextuality into non-Earth based settings, as these concepts can be easily transposed onto a fantasy world. But then you wouldn't be able to get to the juiciest stuff.

The Juiciest Stuff

Fallout (Especially Fallout: New Vegas (2010)) may be one of the finest examples of intertextuality in a video game, and not just for its soundtrack. Each iteration pulls from a wide breadth of human history, culture and writing. Quests nod to various songs, events and concepts conveying tone and hidden meaning. Whole factions are modeled after historical ones, as though to say that humanity is doomed to continue to repeat its mistakes. Locations build off the Americana fantasy that was built up in the cold war, and historical landmarks lay desecrated as a cautionary tale of the empire they stood for. Familiar American propaganda echoes differently in the wasteland.

When you give the audience anchors of intertextuality to ground themselves in, you give them license to further plumb the depths of your story beyond even what you've written. You allow your work to be a direct critique and analysis of other works and historical happenings.

In TTRPGs this can be especially powerful, especially as players begin to pick up on these queues and loop in intertextuality to help establish their own characters (something I try to encourage). Maybe their teen monster hunter idolizes what they see in Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003), a show which itself is rife with intertextuality.  Maybe their post-apocalyptic traveler carries a copy of Oryx and Crake (2003) and reflects on its themes. Perhaps their sci-fi ship captain has read Dune (1965) and has delusions of grandeur. Or perhaps their super-powered misfit sees themself in the X-Men, and longs for that same sense of belonging in unbelonging.

Some Example From TTRPGs I've Run

In my own works I usually use intertextuality to help establish villains or various factions' ideologies, especially in Steel Hearts (which takes place in a post-apocalyptic earth where giant monsters have terraformed the planet and angsty teens pilot mechanized behemoths).

One of my players' favorite villains in that setting was Rasputin Giorgio, a megalomaniac arms dealer and minor antagonist. When players finally met the enigmatic mastermind face-to-face it was in his extensive media library filled with VHS, vinyl, cartridge video games, you name it. (This not only established him as a wealthy private collector, but also a total nerd.) At the centerpiece of his library was a figure of Optimus Prime fighting a similarly sized figure of the 1954 Godzilla. This singular scene was not only meant to cheekily reflect the meta roots of the setting the players find themselves in, but Rasputin's own distorted philosophy. He uses Optimus Prime (and by extension Transformers) as an example of the art that can be created in times of peace and prosperity, as well as a product of American victory and capitalism. Meanwhile he values Godzilla and its cultural impact far higher, and attributes the monster's existence to the extensive suffering caused by the dropping of the atomic bomb. Thus, he surmises, that it is catastrophic suffering that creates great art, and it is his duty as a patron of the arts to cause similar levels of suffering to provoke such art.

Another villain, Alexander Bernays, often hums "Do You Hear the People Sing?" from Les Miserables (1980). The character himself is an anarcho-capitalist who overthrew a fascist Martian colony in a revolution only to replace their era of oppression and slavery with *checks notes* propaganda and wage slavery. The song serves both as a nod to his revolutionary origins and to exaggerate the irony of an idolized revolutionary leader whose new nation caused equally horrific suffering to the people he liberated.

The list of uses goes on from curating a cryptic playlist for a Player character who lost his memories, to naming every location on a Martian colony after a different cultural underworld / torment zone to evoke the colony's hellish living conditions under unfettered capitalism, to playing 3 very different covers of Moon River in the same one-shot to set the tone of 3 very different moments, to constant referencing of the Tarot in I Got Hit By A Meteor (2021)'s rulebook. Every time I use intertextuality my games are always better for it, and whenever I encourage it in my Players it's a true joy to watch the creativity blossom in new ways.

OK But Here's The Rub

So one tricky thing about intertextuality, and a reason I find it's increasingly rare is simple: Intellectual Property. The idea that referencing someone else's work, reusing an idea, or playing a song incurs a fee. Good news is that you don't have to deal with IP law in your home games! And I'm pretty sure nothing is stopping writers from name dropping other texts or suggesting music in their modules.

Bad news: If you're looking to stream your exploits the whole licensed music thing is probably going to be nearly impossible. Frankly, it's the biggest reason I'll probably never stream a campaign I run unless it's deeply fantastical and apart from our reality.

Another word to wise; Simply referencing a thing isn't quite the same as intertextuality. If you're going to be using licensed music or name dropping other works, do your research and give some thought about why you're making that reference and the greater thematic presence it might have in your game. Otherwise such a reference can feel cheap or immersion breaking.

Anyways I didn't really think of an outro to this, but the next time you hear a song that makes you think of a character, consider how you'd weave that song diegetically into a scene with them. Your job as GM is to set the atmosphere, tone and build the world. And nothing quite achieves those goals the way intertextuality does.

[[*1: For those not familiar - Diegetic refers to things that are directly in the scene or diegesis. For example: If a song in a film is playing on a radio during a scene, that song is fully diegetic. Similarly, all of the licensed music in Fallout, save for the intro, is totally diegetic.]]