Example that just came up in a discord I’m in: Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days. I havent played this game but someone who had said the game’s story of “Roxas hates his day job but tolerates it because afterwards he can hang out with his friends” is enhanced by the gameplay being “player hates the mission structure but they tolerate it because the story cutscenes are amazing”
Someone else said they doubt that was intentional, and I agree. But I asked the question of whether Death of the Author applies to game mechanics.
I say yes. But its something I hadnt considered before for sure.
I think that’s valid. Stories are a collaboration between the creator and the audience. Creators don’t always know what it is they have actually created, and aren’t always aware of all their biases and inspirations. Your experience is as real as their intention.
Definitely this, ultimately a point that I feel gets painfully lost in current game discourse is that the story of a game is the entirety of the game as you play it, the only way to experience “just the story” is to experience the game secondhand.
well said.
The whole “death of the author” thing is one school of media criticism / interpretation. No instance of its invocation is any more or less applicable. It’s just a framework a critic can use when discussing the work.
If you think that’s a cool detail that arose either without or completely against the artist’s intentions, there’s no reason to avoid discussing it as such.
When Capcom was developing Street Fighter II they discovered an interesting bug. Originally they designed it so you could block after every attack, but apparently with perfect timing and execution you could actually link multiple attacks together and even cancel animations into guaranteed special moves on hit if you landed it just right. They decided it wouldn’t be super useful because it required such extremely tight timing and executionand decided to just leave it as a hidden easter egg. Multiple hits in a row…moves chained together in some sort of…combination or something? Can you imagine?
Yeah the fact that combos were originally a bug is so fun.
In the Morrowind retrospectives, we actually have an example of the “undeath” of the author where they actively realised some mechanics weren’t fun and actively kept them in because it fit the deep lore.
Which mechanics do you mean?
A number of internal playtesters found the interior of the daedric ruins disorienting and painful to play. So they made that the point of the daedric religions and the velothi path.
Neat! Can confirm they were painful disorienting. With reeeeally good loot occasionally.
Spec Ops the Line, cliche and unimaginative shooting mechanics feel both like a commentary of the genre, and also like they weren’t very good at making the mechanic interesting. And then it hits you over the head with the white phosphorus mission and goes “look at what you’ve done!”
Yeah that was on purpose though I think.
Yes. Games as Narratives (as opposed to abstract Games as Play) can absolutely be subject of DotA- author’s don’t have to intend things for them to become part of the text.
The effect you’re describing is ludonarrative harmony, which is the opposite of ludonarrative dissonance.
Interesting, I haven’t considered it in context of narrative/mechanics, but I know of some games where the devs intentionally left a bug unpatched after the speedrunning community discovered it. Most recent one I can think of is The Messenger’s teleport glitch.
