This week, from the 18th to the 22nd of March, it’s the Game Developer’s Conference. This is an event in which Game Developers from across the industry give talks and presentations on what they do and how they do it to their peer group. In honour of this, I’m presenting articles this week that seek to summarise and explain some academic concepts from my own readings to a general audience. In deference to my supervisor, I am also trying to avoid writing with italics in these articles outside of titles and cites.
Have you ever heard of this Foucault guy?
Michel Foucault is one of those academic characters who has successfully escaped from the landscape of purely academic consideration into the spaces where people just also talk about things like videogames and shopping lists and yoghurt flavours. Foucault is the guy people are talking about when they make jokes about something being like a prison. Foucault was a French philosopher, born in 1926 and died in 1984, so very much a person whose work as much as it could, shaped the world into which I was born.
Foucault’s area of interest is a bit hard to describe because doing so tends to make it sound like ten things, when it’s much more that he looked at a lot of things with a common perspective. If you want the simplest version of what Foucault’s work tends to be about, when I look at it, it’s about how knowledge is power. This isn’t just a GI Joe slogan though – it digs into questions of what we consider knowledge to be, and who we consider to be allowed to have knowledge. What separates information from knowledge, and what this distinction serves.
If you listen to Foucault on it, you’ll find that very often, it’s that systems of power exist to serve the system of power. It is control for control’s sake, permissions for permission’s sake.
Foucault is influential! Really influential, to the point where you can basically be considered ‘a Foucaultian thinker’ in fields that reach from communication studies, anthropology and – you know what I’m just quoting the list from wikipedia here. Foucault is influential on a level where some of the things he established in the sixties are entire fields of study on their own. I brought him up when I talked about the idea of a ‘heterotopia,‘ in my video about Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, which is a vision of places that were meant to be lived in but not for long. This breadth of material means that you can often find in any given discipline, if you dig just a little, there’s probably someone who has written about the way that the work you’re talking about relates to the work of Michel Foucault.
To this end, in my study, Foucault hovers at the very edges with the idea of what Foucault calls the ‘author-function.’ Foucault describes this idea to consider the question of what an author is, and where an author came from. And you might think ‘surely anyone who writes something is an author,’ but are they? You write messages to your friends on discord, does that make you an author? An author is something else, an author is a socially designated role that has degrees of legitimacy and public responsibility.
Foucault forwards in this idea of the author-function that the author is not defined by writing something, but by another party reading something you wrote. It is the audience’s reaction to the written work that transforms the person who wrote those words into an author.
Now I am no expert in Foucault, but this seems to bear out for my understanding of Foucaultian ideas: people interact with people, and objects are just intermediaries for that. I may catch a bus at a particular time, but I am only able to do so because people made the bus and made the timetable. The bus has no awareness of its timetable. The whole arrangement is a way to structure things so that the bus driver can take me someplace we’ve agreed upon.
How this applies to my work is the question of whether games have authors. Currently, there’s a push to ensure games are credited to their designers in the same way that movies are credited to their directors, which is not in my mind a bad thing. It is a step before that where his idea of the author-function catches my attention, though. Foucault’s idea of the author-function, the idea that it is not the writer but the reader who creates an Author, looks to me like it lives alongside my own conception that the game is an inert thing until it is played by a player.
I posit that examining a game without play experience is to examine a text that is in a way inert. An individual can tell their story of how they played the game, but to do so in a way as if it is objective is to try and conceal their participation in the experience. This means that almost all game writing, all writing of game experiences, either needs to aggregate the experiences of a wide variety of people to elide any individual experience, or, to be more authentic, to recognise that it is the experience of one person, creating part of the text within the confines of the game.
You might have heard me talk about this in the past. I describe the idea that ‘play is paratextual,’ where the game gives you boundaries to create in, and then you create a text of your own experience of it. I like this way to consider games because it centers players and doesn’t try to present the idea that mistakes in play, or ‘bad’ play is not itself, a form of play. If a game is something you struggle with and cannot defeat, that does not mean the game is bad, or that you cannot comment on the experience of playing that game. You are a player, and in playing, you are animating the game. Without you, regardless of what the outcome of the game, the game is an inert, incomplete thing.
Now, this is not to say that all of these experiences are equal! After all, a player who cannot finish a game may struggle to put the story of that game’s complete narrative into a meaningful context! But it also means that one is not beholden to perfectly complete a game to be able to have an opinion on it. How many great games praised for their excellence are only ever being spoken about by the invested, by the successful, by champions who are driven to promote it? Whose opinions are being gatekept by an insistence on the necessity of supremacy?
What I’m saying here is that game commentary is like a prison.