Hi everyone, hunters, scholars, and everyone in between.
I want to share a small origin story and an invitation.
In 2019, after a couple of years of playing Bloodborne, a colleague asked me to help build a project to promote reading among “young people who don’t read.” My reaction was immediate, and a bit rude: *what do you mean they don’t read?* ***We’re reading in Bloodborne!***
I had spent hundreds of hours piecing together item descriptions, cryptic dialogue, rune texts, NPC lines and half-sentences, comparing notes with strangers, and arguing about what a single line might mean. Nobody had told me that was reading, but it clearly was. That question became my research: what do we do, exactly, when we “read” a game like this?
Along the way I found I was far from the first person to ask versions of it. The community got there first, and with remarkable rigor. RedGrave’s *The Paleblood Hunt* is the one that stays with me. It began right here on r/bloodborne, grew into a monumental piece of lore analysis that carefully separates evidence from speculation, and later became an audiobook (which of course I also listened to). That piece! It reads like scholarship written by a player.
I also found a smaller but growing body of critical and academic work on the game. Three texts shaped my thinking the most:
**Damien Mecheri & Sylvain Romieu,** ***Dark Souls: Beyond the Grave*** ***Vol. 2*** (Third Éditions, 2018). It isn’t strictly academic, but it reads Bloodborne as an evolution of the Souls formula, shifting from medieval to Victorian Gothic under the influence of Lovecraftian cosmicism.
**Alfonso Freire-Sánchez** **(2024),** “***Sincronías narrativas y travesías filosóficas en la intertextualidad entre Berserk y la obra de Hidetaka Miyazaki***,” in Hipertext.net. It traces Camus’ absurd and Nietzsche’s eternal return through Berserk and Miyazaki’s games.
**Hiranya Mukherjee (2023), “Fear the Old Blood”: The Gothicism of Bloodborne, Games and Culture**. It looks at how the game builds “Gothic grammars” through narrative, aesthetics and mechanics.
There are others: Madelon Hoedt’s *Narrative Design and Authorship in Bloodborne, The Scholarly Hunter,* a thesis on how the game’s narrative and environment invite player involvement and critical debate, and, in various works in Spanish, *Concédenos ojos (Grant us Eyes). Bloodborne y el terror cósmico interactivo* (Universidad de Valladolid, 2020), Mateo Trapiello Izaguirre’s *Enciclopedia semiótica de Bloodborne*, and Matías Heredia Castillo’s work on the game’s visual setting (PUCP).
Each looks at the game through a different lens: Lovecraft, the Gothic, semiotics, game design, environmental storytelling. What I kept wondering was how all of us, academics and players alike, were reading together.
My own approach was to code the game’s texts (items, dialogue, runes, notes) using Genette’s transtextuality, to see how they connect to other works and to each other. I also surveyed gamers about their reading habits. Two things stood out. Many people clearly practice this kind of distributed, collective reading, yet don’t call it “reading.” And a good share of the text I analyzed, roughly one in six fragments, only exists for researchers because this community datamined it. The object of study depends on you.
Link here ->> https://www.javeriana.edu.co/pesquisa/bloodborne-leer-lectura-jovenes/
I’ve written about all this for Pesquisa Javeriana, the research magazine of the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Bogotá, Colombia. It’s in Spanish (sorry!), but browser translation should handle it reasonably well:
I’d love to hear your thoughts:
Do you consider what you do with Bloodborne’s lore to be reading? Why or why not?
Have you read academic work on the game that I missed?
What was the moment you realized you were “hunting for meaning” rather than just hunting beasts?
Thank you to *FromSoftware* and Miyazaki for a game that trusts its players to read between the lines. And thank you to this community, for the lore threads, the wikis, the datamining, the video essays, and the countless late-night theories. You are the hunters of meaning, and without you this research would not exist.
Good hunt.
