 There is a subtle beauty to the design of Fumita Ueda's games that words hardly do justice to. We can talk about the haunting alienation of Eco's majestic castle, the tragic conversion of Wander's quest in Shadow of the Colossus, and the frustration and intimacy conveyed in equal measure by the Last Guardian. However, these words seem reductive, even misleading somehow. The emotional resonance of these games emerges from conventional mechanics and aesthetics, but to experience them is to be enraptured by a world that transcends the very rules that enable them. But we do have words, and the expression assigned to Oeda's design philosophy is supposedly called design by subtraction, a term Oeda himself used to describe his design sensibilities. Essentially, it involves removing elements of design that are not integral to the core emotions or theme of your game. Eco is a story about a persecuted little boy, cast aside for his horns, who tries to escape from the confines of a castle with the Princess Yorda. The creative design here led to removing interface elements, embedding mechanics sound and play into the world itself, hampering the controls ever so slightly to communicate disempowerment and tying our health bar to Yorda's to convey selflessness, empathy and love. Shadow of the Colossus does the same in how it removes the filler between boss fights and instead focuses the game on encounters with gargantuan beasts. These stunning battles are further punctuated by the serene sorens we embark on to find them, and tragic inversion is encoded by the languid collapse of these titans as we slay them to the sound of funereal music. The last guardian took these beasts and made us forge a relationship with one, which was inspired by people's attachment to the horse and shadow. Trico's petrification in the face of ornaments washes away when he realizes we are in jeopardy. Love has been programmed into AI. The words we use then lead us to assign value to Oeda's legacy and how his games have inspired designers like Hidetaka Miyazaki, how their thematic way to inform journey's design, or brothers a tale of two sons. These games are classics in the canon of video game history, legitimizing it as the art form of the coming century. And yet, the words we use to describe both Fumita Ueda and his games are not his, but ours. We need there to be a method, a process, a reason for why these games are so singular and transformative. Perhaps we ought to let Ueda speak for himself. The more one listens to what little there exists in Fumita Ueda, the more his games confound, because design, creativity, and expression cannot be distilled to a single statement, like design by subtraction. It contains its own multitudes. You would think there is a method, a set of philosophical beliefs that inform these games' design. But here is his answer to the question about whether Shadow of the Colossus has ecological motifs, or if The Last Guardian has Aristotelian ideas of love and friendship. This is my personal opinion, but I don't really get conceptions based on expression media like film and novels upon making a video game. This is because I feel that clinging onto a theme is far too inefficient when making a video game. My thoughts is that it's closer to looking for words to fit into the squares of a crossword puzzle, rather than crafting sentences with whatever words you like onto a fresh sheet of manuscript paper. And so, meaning was never imposed. It emerged organically from the process of creation. There was ambiguity then, not just in the games themselves, but the process that informed its creation. It wasn't just subtractive, it was emergent. Video games are different from other media. In order to move the player, we have to create a believable world and then let them imagine everything else. I don't want players to try and think what my ideas for the story were. I want them to direct the story themselves. I want my games to have believable stories, but narrative imposes a set plot, predetermined ideas. That would be an obstacle to interaction. The aesthetics of his games don't exist in a vacuum, though. There are influences from other mediums. The cover art of Ico was inspired by Giorgio de Curico, which also infuses the design of his worlds. De Curico's work can be seen not just in the arches, the materials and architecture, but in his invocation of the surreal, of dreams and of the magic of childhood, themes that pervade all of Oeda's games. Other architects include Gerard Triniac and Francesco Piranesi, artists who are similarly inspired by the fantastical, the majestic, the otherworldly. Oeda's worlds feel both familiar and otherworldly. They stand as their own monuments in the hazy space of her own subconscious, both connected to and severed from reality. And in this way, his games are ambiguous and surreal, but with intent, by design, inspired by others, but containing their own space for player participation. What are the sort of things that inspire you? Are there other games that you like to play, books, movies, you know, to go to the museum and look at paintings? I have no specific or explicit message in my games, but I want them to be unrealistic and entertaining instead. One can say that my intention is to give players the building steps, a small introduction, and then let them experience and develop their own personal stories. As much as the worlds of Oeda's games invoke the fantastical, the mystical, the transcendent, they are games that need to be engineered, and perhaps something surprising about Oeda's philosophy is that he seems very pragmatic, grounded by the constraints of the medium he's operating with. The beauty here, of course, is that artists need not be limited by constraints, but can be emboldened by it. For example, on the subject of level design, Oeda stated, The worlds I have created were generated out of restrictions. Although they, of course, contain some preference for me as the creator, they were generated out of the necessity for functionality rather than backstory or setting. By this way of creating, I think the world created can be expressed with consistency and harmony, which will increase the sense of existence of the world expressed like that. Similarly, he did the same for the core design of the mechanics and aesthetics of the game. For example, when we're doing level design and we need a character to crawl or climb or hang, you may think, well, in real life it would look like this, but you can't just dump that in. At the same time, you can't create something totally artificial. You have to find the right balance of clearly showing the player how to navigate, but also being able to express what we want to. We sometimes resort to the hazy visuals because we can't illustrate beyond a certain point. Within these constraints, though, Oeda and his team try to ensure that the universe they devise feel like consistent, believable worlds, framed by limitations, but hidden by design ingenuity. The sword that the main character holds is like the divining rod that, you know, depending on where the light shines brightest, that leads you to the colossus. And this extends to the AI companions you have in each game. They are designed to communicate emotions beyond their pixels. On the subject of designing Yorda, he states, The main character never understands what Yorda says. The reason why we set up the language barrier is that we would not be able to express 16-year-old Yorda's AI naturally, even if we use the maximum power of the PS2. If she speaks eloquently with so much ready text, the player cannot help but feel it sounds cheap. Also, we wanted to fill the gap between the cinematic scenes and the gameplay and characters. So we concluded that subtle expressions such as holding hands and calling names are more natural ways of communication, and it somehow added philosophical meanings. For instance, outside of the gameplay, Yorda often makes strange movements. She strolls around, follows birds and points to things. And what this does is grant his world and his character's life, not by explicit rendition, but by the subtlety of restraint and working within limitations. I think Yorda is the same as Yorda in the game. I think AI is the only thing that can only be done on a computer. I want to make a game using that. In order to express something that can't communicate with words, we need to be able to read the words. That's the biggest thing. However, what I'm saying is that I'm thinking about the meaning of the words and I'm making them. So when it comes to the Japanese version of the game, if we play the two names, they're all translated. Yorda's games have a vitality that transcends reduction to words. In a talk he had with Hidataka Miyazaki, comparing their design philosophies, Yorda said this about bringing his worlds to life through animation. There is a sort of naturalness or beauty to life. Whenever animating multiple frames together, I first try to create that feeling and then in each of those animation frames, painstakingly look over and over again and try to correct those things that occur. It's very much like a craftsman that constantly goes over the same art over and over again to try and find the perfection. Additionally, when I create in fashion game worlds, I want to have the freedom to make anything. The second you tie to reality too much, then there's a bunch of rulesets you have to be wary of. So from my perspective, I want to have as much freedom as possible and really craft my own game world. It's important to have a static graphic expression that's not enough to be completed. There are still a lot of parts that are not enough to move. I think we need to make it more and more powerful. I think it's important to have a more dynamic expression that can be used in other games. I think it's important to have a more dynamic expression that can be used in other games. So these are some of Ueda's words, small snippets of what he values, how he designs and what he aims to communicate with his games. There is not just subtraction, but ambiguity, emergence, pragmatism, constraints, and well, life. There is a blending of form and function, aiming explicitly to express, but through vague symbolism that betrays explicit interpretation. But again, we are left with a gap between what Ueda professes to believe and the significance we assign his works. Designers are not always privy to what inspires their own work, and sometimes it is up to the critic to unearth this. In this way, although the obsessive length people go to to interpret and understand the world of eco and shadow the colossus, surprised Ueda. His very design invites this obsession. It invites people to imagine beyond what's expressed on the screen, to peer into the numinous that might be right in front of us. Ueda played with this divide between authorship and player-directed meaning, and a question he was asked about eco's ending. So eco doesn't die, but he dreams he sees Ueda when he wakes up. Nice. This assignment of meaning, not just to his games, but to Ueda himself, exists in the gaps, in the gap between the brilliance of his works and what little we have and how someone can design something so revolutionary. Many have assigned Taoist or Shinto ideals about ecological stewardship and imposed that onto the meaning of Shadow of the Colossus. It is a parable that talks about how human greed and ambition degrades the land as our selfish impulses consume the world around us. Shintoism did after a while inspire Miyamoto when he conceived of the Legend of Zelda, and so it makes sense for Ueda as well. Also, some assign the weight of tragic inversion to the game. It is Heart of Darkness or Moby Dick in interactive form. But as Ueda himself states, through the production of Shadow of the Colossus, I started having doubts about simply feeling good by beating monsters and getting a sense of accomplishment. I tried thinking if there were any choices for different kinds of expression. Rather than try to deliberately create some sort of antithesis, I focused more on the consistency of the design as a product. Another lens people come out of Ueda from is comparing his aesthetic sensibilities to other traditions in Japan, most notably the concept of Ma. Ma is about negative space, about the moments of quiet that exist between action that's serene sense of eternity captured by lingering on serendipity. Hayao Miyazaki calls it the moments between the sounds in a clap, and in his films, it expresses itself in how he keeps the camera suspended on a moment, reveling in the quiet meanderings of every day. We see this in the prolonged sequences of solitude and eco, as you traipse through empty halls and hear the patterns of being expressed by the diegetic sounds, and the voyages through empty space and shadow, giving us time to contemplate on what has passed and what is to come. We can deign to infer the origins of subtractive design itself. However, this assignment of value, of aesthetic weight and of significance, can never be confirmed. The truth of what inspires design remains elusive, open for many to interpret, compare and categorize. Perhaps this is a warning about the liabilities of such a discourse, of assigning meaning where it might not be. But then again, maybe the way in which we ascribe significance to both Ueda and his works is simply a testament to what he has stated about stories all along, that it belongs to the player to do it as they see fit. Like stated, words don't do justice to the subtle beauty of Fumita Ueda's work. They exist as their own discourse, open for interpretation, aesthetic evaluation, and play.