Meaning Through Performance: Transgressing Boundaries in Shadow of the Colossus

This paper examines Shadow of the Colossus (2005) through the lens of Essential Boundaries Transgression, a recurring Japanese theme in which characters journey into the land of the dead, physically or metaphorically. Its central claim is that the videogame medium can generate meaning through its design, mechanics, and interactivity in ways that other media cannot, particularly in engaging with questions of life, death, trauma, and guilt. The analysis draws on theories of affective design and attention, the performativity of games, aesthetic theory, and the construction of agency in narratives of loss, using the abstract figure of the "implied reader" to describe a generalized player while acknowledging that alternative readings remain possible.

The author argues that the game's structure, alternating between the long, empty "lonely rides" and the violent encounters with the colossi, produces ambiguity and reflective space. The lonely rides give players time to relax, wait, and think, prompting them to recognize themselves as aggressors and trespassers, while the morality of the quest remains unresolved. Through memory and the player's imaginative investment, the protagonist's psychological burden gradually becomes the player's own, with guilt and trauma becoming central. The paper stresses that the meaning of the experience extends beyond the gameplay session itself, as players carry these engagements into their lives after play ends.

The analysis situates the game within an intertextual conversation about life, death, and moral interrogation, presenting it as a work that both participates in and interrogates the capacities and limits of the videoludic medium as a socially and culturally embedded form.