I thought that Dr Langeskov, The Tiger and the Terribly Cursed Emerald was an interesting game to think about in the context/after reading “The Death Of An Author”. I would argue that the experience of playing this game, and the inconsistent narration, destabilizes the idea that the author is a controlling source of meaning, supporting Barthe’s take that “it is language which speaks, not the author”.
Immediately, upon opening the game, we are faced with a feeling of instability, in that we expect to be playing a game but learn that we are, in fact, helping orchestrate it instead. We hear a narrator tell us what to do, which doors to open, and when to act. In the beginning, the narrator imitates authorship due to his authoritative tone of voice, but we see this slowly start to decay as the game goes on. The narrator starts to become frantic in some moments, his voice modulating in response to the environment. For example, in the pyrotechnic room, I found myself unsure of what I was supposed to do. Awkward pauses from the narrator felt confusing, as up to that point I had been so directed by those pauses; moments of silence were deeply unsettling, and I started fiddling with the different tools on the walls and on the table. When the narrator did come back (and we were up the stairs in what looks like a control room), the narration didn’t feel like an author guiding the experience but rather one struggling to keep the “experience” together.
(sorry I’m not sure why the photos are blurry, I took some on my phone as well because the screenshots weren’t working)
I feel like in literature, as Barthe noted, we are often taught to look for and question authorial intent. As long as I can remember, that is the lens through which I have been trained to view literature and any form of media. In this game, however, it felt incredibly difficult to try to piece together what the author wanted from me as a player. I was looking for meaning in the details around me, as the directions felt too straightforward (I thought there was some catch that I was missing; turns out, I was right… maybe?). There was a book on the table titled “The Devil in the Details,” and I thought it should carry significance, as though it was a deliberate choice or cue from the author (creator), but then I wasn’t able to pick it up. I felt similarly about the different sheets of paper strewn around — I kept picking them up thinking they were going to mean something, but either 1) I couldn’t decipher the meaning or 2) they didn’t have any meaning. This brings me back to Barthe, that maybe the point is that I need to stop thinking about authorial intent or why the author would make these decisions, but rather just take this game/journey at face value. He writes that “to give an Author to a text is to impose upon that text a stop clause.. to close the writing”. I kept looking for ways to “close the writing” as a way of almost fixing my cognitive dissonance with this game, but I struggled.
(again, confused about the picture quality)
I would also like to note that maybe I wasn’t the target audience of this game, or was missing something, because I simply couldn’t crack it. For the life of me, I couldn’t pick up the red phone — I even restarted the game and tried again (pressed a bunch of different keys, the shift button, as some online forums said to do on the second run of playing this game), but it just kept ringing. I wonder if the resolution I was looking for was going to come at some point later in the game, and I just couldn’t reach that point.
But also, maybe these struggles/frustrations I felt were part of the point, that there is no point at which the author will step in and explain his choices. Barthe also says that the modern writer is “born simultaneously with his text”…” there is no other time than that of the utterance and every text is eternally written here and now”, which goes against the idea that there is some meaning that exists before/pre-determined, waiting to be uncovered. In this game, there isn’t a layer of intention that we can’t see beyond the player experience, where the author explains themselves.
Overall, subscribing to the “death of the author” might let the player interact with the game without having to constantly question why certain things are the way they are. Maybe if I had thought that way from the beginning, I would have figured out this game.
