Some Statements Related To Video Gaming That I Take Issue With, Part Two

You know that I can't pass up the opportunity to comment on a story about video games featuring a huge picture of Oscar Wilde, right?

"Congratulations! You have destroyed the vile Red Falcon and saved the universe!"

Obviously, "The game author is dead" is just a headline designed to make people angry, since that's sort of what Kill Screen does...but...IT FUCKING WORKED BECAUSE NOW I'M ANGRY.

I spent a good chunk of my dissertation chapter on Minecraft describing how gameworlds are co-constructed between the player and the developer, so obviously my opinion runs a bit counter to this piece...but, specifically, I have a problem with the conflation of video games as an expressive medium with older media (in this case, literature) that's implied here.

Now, I've spent an ungodly amount of time in English departments in the last decade and nearly-a-half, so I'm pretty familiar with the turn in literary criticism from the author-as-text-and-meaning-maker to the author-as-text-maker/audience-as-meaning-maker. To me, they're both true to an extent: an author creates something with a certain intent (why the hell would you write an entire book otherwise?) which the audience interprets any number of ways, projecting themselves and their experiences onto the text and maybe coming close to understanding the author's original intent, and maybe not.

"I'm pretty sure it's about, like, construction workers, and, like...uhngugnkgalsgdlsa"

Ultimately, it doesn't really matter how close you get to the creator's interpretation (though it might matter how close you get to your professor's interpretation, depending on how vindictive he/she is): they create a static work, put it out into the cultural stream (that sounds gross) and then you consume it (okay, that sounds grosser). The relationship is pretty one-way.

With games, though, things are a bit different. The creators (coders, developers, whatever you want to call them...the people who make the game) only do part of the work of creating the gameworld (I won't say "story" here because that would then open a different and much larger can of worms). There's a very fundamental difference between literature and games, which is that in the course of playing the game, you help create it. Sure, if not a single person reads a book when it is released (like my dissertation, for example), it doesn't perhaps reach its fullest potential as an expressive work, but it still fundamentally exists. Gameworlds really only, truly exist when there is someone moving through them (via an avatar or what-have-you), and, like some extra-dorky version of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, once you've begun observing the gameworld, your input becomes a part of its output.

Thought it might sound like I'm arguing that games are even less dependent on the author than literature here, the reality is that the creation of a gameworld is necessarily symbiotic (player + "author"). The only situation in which the game author can be dead is the hypothetical one in which we make our own game and play it ourselves and never let anyone else play it, and even that is still a sort of "player + author" situation.

Sure, arguing that the game author is dead is nice and provocative, but it's fundamentally impossible. The book author's intent might not matter once you start reading and latch on to your own particular interpretation. However, the game author creates the very system of rules from within which you form your opinion of his/her work, and thus seems, to me, to be pretty indispensible to the process of interpretation.