Friday, September 14, 2012

The Rise of the Reader/Gamer: Is the Author Becoming Extinct?


Roland Barthes is a French literary theorist and in his text “The Death of an Author,” he questions authorship. He states that “literature is that neuter, that composite, that oblique into which every subject escapes, the trap where all identity is lost, beginning with the very identity of the body that writes” (2) and uses this idea to posit the rest of argument that the importance of the author has died and with it comes the rise of the reader. In Barthes piece he surmises that the importance of a text is no longer dependent on the author’s intent but rather the experience of the reader. It is the reader who interjects their own connotation to a text and uses their own experiences to connect with the work, therefore the author’s life, intent, or purpose means nothing within the confines of the text and it is the reader who breathes life into a text. The same can be said about the literature of gaming as games are literately nothing without the “reader” or gamer participation. However, this does not mean there is no authorship in games. For example, immersive games like Skyrim or Fallout or Final Fantasy, the game creator has created another world and within that world creates the laws, history, races, etc. in conjunction with game play itself. It is this authorship in games of these factors that contradicts and at the same time coincides with Barthes idea that the author is dead. The author is very much alive in the sense that it is he/she who envisions their game, conceptualize it, and then put it out there for human consumption. However, it is the “reader” or gamer who actually brings life into game. It is through the “reader’s” game play that the text created by the game creator becomes alive and action/reaction starts to take place in response to that text. As Barthes declares, “. . . [The reader] is only that someone who holds gathered into a single field all the paths of which the text is constituted” (6) clearly stating how significant the “reader” is to a text and without them a text is just a group of words on a page. In world of gaming this is also true because without a player to interpret, responds, react, etc. to the game, the game has little to no purpose, no matter the author’s intent. 

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