OK, I found the word I was looking for: “interpretation”.

Last night, our NYE celebrations involved sitting around in pajamas (well, I was in my Iron Age Scandinavian clothes, but they’re comfy as pajamas, so I fit right in) and watching a show that I’m currently quite enjoying, Lark Rise to Candleford. It’s a show about a very small world, the hamlet of Lark Rise and the village of Candleford, in Oxfordshire, in the early 1890s. We kept talking over it, because small subtle things would be said that would carry meaning between these characters we knew well, and we wanted to interpret them, together and aloud.

But that act of interpretation, which is so satisfying and wonderful, is for the audience. And interpreting by talking over is definitely not a viable behavior in an RPG.

I took a class once on literary translation, in which was said one of those things that sticks with you for a lifetime: it is the translator’s job to translate the ambiguities of the text, so that the reader can experience approximately the same acts of interpretation in the original and in the translation.

(This all reminds me of how many larps, especially chamber larps, have a debrief wherein you get to exchange your interpretations with each other, and get stories about the parts you weren’t present for, etc. It seems that this is useful not just as a way to emotionally decompress, but also as a way to keep people from engaging in that interpretation in the moment. Huh.)