Reading up on a bunch of history/theory/philosophy should help you understand some of the themes that go into games. A heavy handed example is all the Randian stuff that went into Bioshock, whether as a pastiche or just as aesthetics.

Sometimes understanding the context in which a game is made can be helpful as well. Jack Saint has a two-parter on The Last Of Us and how it was written by an Israeli specifically on their perspective on the apartheid situation there. They’re good videos that give insight into the making of those games, but will probably ruin them for you because it spells out what zionist dogshit they are.

Since others have already offered a lot of good advice, I’ll go in a bit of a different direction.

Game stories are often quite shallow, with fairly surface level themes, because they need to proritise the “game” part and often need to alter the “story” part in order for the game to still play well. Understanding game development and how it works can help a lot with understanding why a video game might be the way it is. Understanding the way a certain medium is used to create art can help you understand why that art is the way it is, due to the limitations and benefits of the medium.

You need to write down your thoughts. If you don’t like writing then you need to talk to others and discuss the themes together. You’ll never notice everything because you have your own lense through which you see the world, and that’s why talking to others is useful to reveal the lense that other use to understand the media they consume. You will hopefully each be able to scratch away part of the underlying themes and such that go beyond the surface level stuff.

I’m incredibly bad at it as well. I’m reading books along with shelved by genre (Austin Walker and ranged touch people) and I’m never able to match their analysis. It’s deeply frustrating sometimes because I really struggle sometimes to make the connections like they do, but they’re like professional media critics, and I’m just some dude who never really dipped my toes into this until the last decade or so. Just gotta keep trying and maybe accept we will never be able to decode all the bits in our media.

The skybox is blue

Not to cheapen any other post here (because I think they’re genuinely good) but don’t forget there’s nothing wrong with those two examples you gave. You don’t have to get deeper with it.

You could make an interesting videogame essay about the aesthetics of collapse on shadows of Chernobyl and how that’s based on the Soviet collapse. That’s insightful! You’re trying to take this expression of a concept and dig into why they used it, their reference points, why they thought it was important to make etc. That’s already interesting!

That /is/ being analytical and knowledgeable. Not just with games but with any art. If that’s something about the game you think is interesting or resonated with you: dig into it. Might end up being a shallow hole, sure, but not everything worth the time is buried deeply.

Do more drugs but not enough drugs that you hurt your brain

1. Ask questions (to yourself, but to other people works too). Why did the author make this decision? Why are things this way? If you ask “why” questions you’ll come up with your own interpretation of the game.

2. You just kinda have to spend a lot of time thinking about it. There are some pieces of media I’ve really liked for a long time and as a result I have fairly developed views on them just from the length of time I’ve been thinking about them.

Why is this here, this took some labor, who put this in and why did they do it? Everything is, in some shape, chekhov’s gun in invented worlds (aside from procedural generation, for obvious reason, although it also implies some things, be it in scope or nature of generation)

(Also, i would treat people who say they enjoyed every single chapter of ulysses with suspicion)

*like say lara croft, would first storyline work not in a forest, but in densely populated city? You can’t hunt there, you can’t murder your way through hordes of enemies etc, it would become uncharted basically. You can’t flashback to the dad when you are gunning down police forces, it’s a very silly “what if” but it shows limitations and possibilities by the chosen path of the game. Everything was a choice even if it looks like monolithic story. In that case, i suspect, they started from lara croft shivering in the woods and build the game from there, how they built it is another matter with some colonialism and orientalism sprinkled in, according to writers inclinations

Or take ftl, there is a choice made that the main opponents are exclusively humans, they just as well could be mix of aliens like you most likely are, or another species entirely. There is a lot of implied story there, even if the game doesn’t hit you with it.

Or something silly like skyrim shops decorations, there is a choice made in everything here, state of wares (broken/dirty/pristine), collection of them, state of the doors etc. some poor soul spend hours doing it and likely pondering, can they put this candle here if it’s named mage-guild-candle-final.3dasset

Also, as it’s my comfy watch lately, watch lord of the rings making, but not actors stuff, but set production/light grading/music or commentary of production/design. They talk quite a lot about selecting this precise decoration because it invokes blah blah, or selecting this color scheme because it looks like x, or selecting this musical instruments as implying y. Cause it was so heavily hand crafted movie (and entirely imaginary, so no real existing locations), there is a lot of behind the scenes expressed ideas, that you won’t notice or see talked about in movies made more digitally (at least interviews with cgi artists aren’t that thorough, even if the intent of artist is the same in scope, as they are drawing damn things, they typically trying to sell volume or whatever latest tech) or shot on real locations

*also, as a funny tidbit from lotr commentary watching during times - peter jackson mentions zulu (1964) movie as an inspiration for helm’s deep, so you can take from that what you will, the story line of that movie is something.

The joke in the meme is that the ogre does understand it he just can’t admit to himself that that he understands it. Actually getting the references through study doesnt carry with it a sense of accomplishment, we dont focus on the accomplishment of knowing more than we once did, we focus on the recognition of all that we dont know.

As for games, I really only got really into lore with Bloodborne. it took a huge amount of playing, watching videos, talking to people in group chats, looking up references, hunting down clues. I imagine if youre really into that kind of work, it starts to come easier the more you do it. But those creators are intentionally engaging with the game in a way beyond just the gameplay. If you play games to play games, then yeah you might miss that stuff. But if you play games and then do a bunch of meta study and research on them, then you’ll get more of that out of them.

Just find discord servers for games you like and talk to people about the story, stuff youre curious about, etc.

Just make shit up like I do.

Did you know that Astarion from Baldurs Gate 3 is actually a mataphor for British colonialism?

me when i try to read theory

So there’s some good advice in the thread. The other thing you should do is read widely, watch lots of movies, and play other games. You will be surprised at what artists use for inspiration. You look at Shadow of Chernobyl after having read/watched, for example, Roadside Picnic, or Ulysses, or even the Odyssey, and you’ll be surprised at how easy it is to dig down and connect into the undercurrent that flow along all of these works.

write, you need to write down your ideas about games and then edit them and re-think them and edit them more. Jacob Geller and Noah Gervais are very good, very experienced writers.

Don’t. Just play the games.

Unrelated to video games, strictly speaking, but one thing I’m trying to do is to set aside time for reflection (I like hand written in a pocket notebook). For instance, I’m applying that towards general navel-gazing (self-reflection to help with my audhd lol) and self-paced studying.

That way if there’s a specific topic I’m intrigued by, I can start looking at how that manifests (eg themes in literature, compulsive thoughts and actions in meatspace). And in the process keep my neurons tuned for that kind of lateral thought (the adage about neural pathways is that “if they fire together, they wire together” or something) - not that I need much assistance in the lateral thought department lmao.