(Note: I bought The Beginner’s Guide, but then it said my computer can’t run 32-bit games… really tragic stuff. So I played the 20-minute game. Damn.)
The birth of the reader must be ransomed by the death of the Author. Roland Barthes
In Dr. Langeskov, The Tiger, and the Terribly Cursed Emerald, there is no Dr. Langeskov, no emerald, and barely a tiger. In the world of this game, the player is not in fact playing the game: the game is a theatrical production with physical special effects, which the player must run around and operate in the absence of everyone who is really supposed to be running the show.
This is a pretty literal take on Roland Barthes’ classic 1967 argument: the author(s) are dead (on strike), the reader is now king (doing the behind the scenes). But there’s something eerie about this proposition, because even though Barthes’ attempt to dethrone the author is meant to be a revolutionary move at destroying that right-wing myth of genius, it also undermines the labor that the author(s) put into the piece.
At first, I had a hard time getting over the theater analogy. The whole conceit is that the game is like a show. However, how I conceived of a theatre show is — needing labor to help it run smoothly — was very different from how I conceived of a video game is — an autonomous experience. Of course, that is precisely its argument: that making a video game is not autonomous at all, that there is lots of disrespected labor that goes into making it.
I imagine this is because turning the player into a “stagehand” necessitates the theatrical metaphor. In order for the player to facilitate the video game, it had to be in the form of theatre, a physical game. This also dramatizes the stakes of making video games, which we’d normally think isn’t that bloody or difficult at all: you’re just sitting behind a screen! You’re just making something fun and frivolous! But in the game, being part of “High Concept Miscellaneous Interactions” is a death sentence. Just because you’re experiencing something fun and frivolous doesn’t mean that the work is fun or frivolous. It’s the same argument that the Hollywood screenwriters made on their strike, I think: creative work is as legitimate as any other kind of work.
Maybe what Barthes needed to acknowledge — as a caveat for literature — is the difference between how these art forms are produced and disseminated. I don’t disagree with his intention: to free art from the authoritarian grasp of the Critic, to proceed with an authorial conception of truth. But when we present Barthes with a multi-authorial work, maybe his argument isn’t as applicable. The genius, mythical Author is not one author, but many authors — stage designers, writers, etc. etc.
He writes, “Literature is precisely the invention of this voice, to which we cannot assign a specific origin: 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.” Sure: identity is lost in the process of creating art. But I do wonder what happens when we erase identity altogether; outside of criticism, this isn’t a very good way to engage with art.
Of course, this also deserves further discussion on the separation between “creative” author and “noncreative” work that goes into a show — the disembodied voice probably is actually meant to represent the author, of some sort, telling the noncreative worker, the player, what to do. Maybe, actually, the game supports Barthes’ killing of the author — the dethroning of that one disembodied voice — and acknowledging the fallacies that result when we only think of art as a single player game.
Maybe Dr. Langeskov does kill the author: its beautiful illusion of total control — by forcing the player to acknowledge the labor that goes into making a game (a show, any art). The disembodied voice is decidedly not in control when there are buttons to press and people to call. When the laborers abandon post, the author is actually the one left empty-handed — the author needs the laborers, not the other way around. Maybe, in the end, if we don’t kill the author, we refuse the physical fact of labor. Though a video game can be read as a text — as an autonomous puppet — it is made like a theater production — with blood, sweat, and tears.
