Death of the Author in Video Games

And this isn't a moan about difficulty in Alan Wake...

I recently read Roland Barthes’ essay The Death of the Author (http://www.tbook.constantvzw.org/wp-content/death_authorbarthes.pdf), and started thinking about the applicability of this to video games as a medium. I’m not the first to think about this, but it’s an important viewpoint.

Games have had the privilege for a long time of having anonymous creators- a publisher screen or a creator logo- and the nature of the medium has forced the player to interact with the game in their own way. Is this Bartes’ birth of the reader in action?

There’s a thrill that the reader (in this context, the gamer) can interact with the game without foreknowledge and create their own text (again, in this context, their own experience).

This is a privilege rarely experienced- the ability to interpret and interact without too much associating. Knowing, say, that Pikmin is based on Shigeru Miyamoto’s own garden doesn’t add anything to the experience- it channels the reader’s own thoughts and limits their potential experience. Even finding this out after playing and after creating your own experience about Pikmin limits your own experience- it’s an association that could reveal, but then makes assumptions about the meaning.

And, unfortunately, this ability to experience is being lost as those involved become higher profile, and commodities or brands themselves.