death of the author

review link

 The subject of todays blog is… death of the author! Everybody’s favorite buzz-subject! When it comes to the question of originality and inspiration in art, it’s interesting to talk about my own work here, considering secret game club is deliberately made to be derivative, as it centers around video games, even when it comes to the concept I was pretty clear with my inspirations in other games related media like magazines and websites, in particular stuff like Hardcore Gaming 101, who do all these writeups on just about every game you can imagine, and the writings of games writer Tim Rogers (the whole pretentious pontificating is pretty much a dead giveaway) whose Action Button site and channel were, itself, deliberately made as an homage to older game magazines, his YouTube series has made fake magazine art for specific episodes. Style wise I’m largely influenced by [adult swim], the late-night style with the monochromatic style is a pretty adult swim influenced. The alternate reality characters and story aren’t as specific but are mostly inspired by Gorillaz, the virtual band from Blur frontman Damon Albarn and comics artist Jamie Hewlett, which all have real songs and stories, but are fronted by a bunch of fictional lore and characters, they also had a much more elaborate website that helped give details to the story that has since been lost to time. In any case, while these inspirations may not be obvious to everyone if they haven’t engaged in the original material, I hope that most people are at least able to identify the intent, the idea isn’t to original, but it’s also not about ripping stuff off, so much as it is th inspiration is the point, even not knowing it is supposed to give a similar feeling, more than literal comparisons it is important to carry over the same emotional weight. In the case of secret game club it’s a piece of media that also exists to be secondary to another piece of media, that’s the point.
Games themselves are weird however, aside from many of the biggest games, a lot of older, particularly Japanese games lack a certain amount of preservation of their development history, for many of the more obscure titles we will never know of the true development history of them, I bring this up in my review of Raw Danger! Where I pontificate about this point. However, while their development may be lost we can still find a through-line between the inspirations present in a game like Raw Danger! and we can still make assumptions about how things came to be. On some level there’s also an argument that it’s pointless to try and preserve all history, on some level we’ll just have to make do, and use our imaginations. you can also make a point using the secret articles and videos, on how the game industry itself seems intent on burying it's own history and putting all their eggs into a digital basket that won't last executives more than anyone want to kill the author whenever possible and turn it into a company affair.

“The removal of the Author (one could talk here with Brecht of a veritable 'distancing', the author diminishing like a figurine at the far end of the literary stage) is not merely an historical fact or an act of writing; it utterly transforms the modern text” 

“once the author is removed, the claim to decipher a text becomes quite futile. To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing.”

-Roland Barthes