Why thank God for the apocalypse? Because it gives me something to write about that isn’t Aria. Not that I dislike writing about Aria, but it has a way of possessing me via dark, indefinable magics and forcing me to serve its needs. It’s an unforgiving master. And I haven’t even watched the second or third seasons yet.

On second thought, I suppose it’s inappropriate to muse on Aria in a post which is, to some degree, about Fallout 3. The Capital Wasteland is most assuredly no place for gondolas. Hell, it’s no place for human beings, and that’s part of what makes it such a compelling setting, at least for me. If, like me, you find a certain creepiness in isolation, in abandoned radio loops and vast, empty spaces, in “towns” populated by two or three or four people, Fallout 3 will do horrible things to your sanity. Horrible, awesome things. Which, coincidentally, brings us back to our good buddy Steve Gaynor. The three-way parallel he draws is simple:

Literature excels at exploring the internal (psychological, subjective) aspects of a character’s personal experiences and memories.

Film excels at conveying narrative via a precisely authored sequence of meaningful moments in time.

And video games excel at fostering the experience of being in a particular place via direct inhabitation of an autonomous agent.

Oversimplification this may be, but Gaynor raises an interesting question: how are we to account for the idea of setting in video games? As much as it’s “the place where they are,” as in, say, a novel, it can also become “the place where I am,” and few games have made that idea more evident to me than Fallout 3.

Before we get into Fallout 3 and setting specifically, though, I want to lay some groundwork — and by “some,” I mean a lot, and in the disorganized spirit of exploratory writing, so now would be a good time to pour yourself a glass of your favorite hard liquor.

Gaynor elaborates:

Video games are able to render a place and put the player into it. The meaning of the experience arises from what’s contained within the bounds of the gameworld, and the range of possible interactions the player may perform there– the nouns and the verbs. Just like in real life, where we are and what we can do dictates our present, and our possible futures. Video games provide an alternative to both the where and the what of existence, resulting in simulated alternate life experiences.

It’s a powerful thing, to be able to visit another place, to drive the drama onscreen yourself– not to receive a personal account of someone else’s experiences, or observe events as a detached spectator. A modern video game level is a navigable construction of three-dimensional geometry, populated with art and interactivity to convincingly lend it an identity as a believable, inhabitable, living place. At their best, video games transmit to the player the experience of actually being there.

…After which he goes into his “agents of chaos” spiel, which is still as relevant as ever, but this time we’re concerned with the functions of specific story elements, rather than how the actions of the player, in a general sense, construct the narrative or narratives which constitute the game experience. In order to discuss setting in games as I intend to, however, we need to take for granted that the aforementioned principle, the constructive function of player agency, is more or less true — and I think we can do that, at this point, but that doesn’t mean we’ll agree on what that entails.

One approach was put forth recently by Cuchlann. Of player agency, and the act of playing in general, he says:

If authorial consciousness is theoretically available in a game, does the gamer become dispossessed and filled in with the authorial consciousness? Yes, I would say so. The gamer takes up the skills offered by the game, learns them well enough to do without reminders, and then moves through the world of the game. It is less like being absorbed into a book and more like being caught up in a dance or a kata. The gamer is doing precisely what the author intends — and yes, that’s what happens, even with the idea of the gamer as an “agent of chaos.” The game world is constructed for the gamer to move through in the same way Poulet posits the world of the book is made to move into the reader. We’re simply dealing with activity rather than passivity.

This is predicated upon the assumption that entering into the world of the the author of a text, in the act of reading (or viewing, or playing, or what have you), results in the dispossession of the reader’s consciousness as it is inundated with the authorial consciousness into which it is immersed (if I’m understanding it correctly). In a comment on the quoted post, Cuchlann describes “authorial consciousness” as used here as “basically the ‘stuff’ readers, players, and critics get out of the text normally,” and that’s probably the best definition I can think of; it’s likely akin to what I’ve called “the surface level” of a text, the structural concerns of the author as opposed to the deep, limitless webs of potential meaning that people like me busy themselves with mapping.

The distinction made here between books and games seems to involve the location at which the reader’s movement into the authorial consciousness takes place. When reading a book, one brings the consciousness to oneself; the consciousness travels to the reader, at which point the reader inhabits it¹. The opposite may be true of video games; that is, they may require players to relocate themselves into the consciousnesses as they exist in the games themselves. To put it another way, when reading a novel, a reader, given both textual cues and informational absences, must personally conceptualize and construct story elements, whereas the same kinds of story elements — characters, setting, and such — exist in pre-constructed states in games, solidified into uncompromisable forms by the constraints imposed upon them by the computer language of which they are woven. The player is tasked primarily with determining the order and manner in which these elements are encountered, being free of the task of giving them form in the first place.

In the following paragraph of his post, Cuchlann delves into the implications of this.

My speculative idea here is that the activity of the game is what induces this state [of dispossession] in the gamer, not the story (if a story is present)… Little of the story is ever delivered, in [either Half-Life or Shadow of the Colossus], to a passive reader — how many cut-scenes are there in either game? True, they’re not absent, but more often than not the gamer is gaming, and not watching. Games dispossess the gamer through motion — the gamer’s own motion. Gamers are not immersed — logically, if we really did map ourselves onto the protagonists, then alarmists might actually have ground to stand on when they claim games make us more violent. But that’s not what we’re doing. We’re coming in contact with the authorial consciousness, “enacting a wondrous merging with the presence of someone wholly other and unique” (1319). A video game is the least immersive form of entertainment, because it requires complete, willed action on the part of the gamer…

“Readers act on themselves,” Cuchlann later adds; “gamers, on the other hand, act upon something external to themselves.” We must ask ourselves whether gamers being forced to leave themselves behind, in a sense, thwarts immersion in video games. Cuchlann seems to suggest that it does, and I think I see where he’s coming from — at least, I disagree with Gaynor’s characterization of the player’s interaction with the main character as “direct inhabitation of an autonomous agent” — but I’m not ready to conclude that games lack immersion just yet. In my estimation, our question here is not “Is it immersive?” so much as “In what area is it immersive?” What we’re dealing with here is, at the very least, an entirely different kind of immersion than that offered by books and film.

And now that I’ve opened that can of worms, let’s talk about Fallout 3, as my experience with that Oblivion-esque romp through post-apocalyptia made me start to wonder about the role and function of setting in video games to begin with.

To be blunt, the Capital Wasteland creeps me right the fuck out, and not just because of its inherent loneliness (which the few NPC companions in the game do little to alleviate). We live in a world in which the United States, staunch enemy of communism, owes a startling amount of money to China; a world in which practically anyone can get their hands on nuclear material, and no number of UN injunctions or invasions of the Middle East can change that. Fallout 3′s ruinous Washington, DC area, the end result of war with China, serves as an example of what might happen if everything that could possibly go wrong in our world suddenly did. It is, after all, a setting in which every other explosion results in a mushroom cloud.

In a recent post, Gaynor comments on Fallout 3 in particular.

I’ve gained unique perspective by engaging with the fictional people and places of recent games… Freely exploring the Capital Wasteland in Fallout 3 and choosing to complete unanchored quests like Agatha’s Song illustrated just how much our world, and humanity’s value systems, might change when faced with global catastrophe. The most memorable stories I recall…lay outside the narrative spine…

That more or less sums up my enthusiasm for the game, though I’d take it a step further. Agatha’s Song was an interesting side quest, I suppose, but my most memorable experiences with the game often did not occur in conjunction with quest objectives; my nerve-wracking six-hour odyssey through the ghoul-infested DC metro comes to mind, or my first encounter with a deathclaw, or my off-the-beaten-path adventures in Vault 106 and the Dunwich Building. Fallout 3 has great potential to provide experiences “outside the narrative spine,” which makes setting a more significant aspect of what I like to call its “authorial shell” than it would be if the game wasn’t a game. Perhaps another name for the authorial shell I’m referring to here is, as Cuchlann called it, “authorial consciousness,” but giving form to abstract concepts always helps my understanding, and the shell might be bigger than the consciousness anyway, encompassing or using it.

It seems, then, that to understand setting in games, we’ll need to understand that shell. But, video games being as new as they are, there’s little consensus on how something like an authorial shell or consciousness functions in the context of games, perhaps because of the vastly different approaches of those discussing the medium. In the previously-quoted post, Gaynor argues for an “immersion model of meaning:”

…does abdication of authorship have the potential to convey profundity or deep meaning?

…

I would argue that abdication of authorship, when paired with certain existing game forms, points toward such an alternative: a mode that trades painstakingly-paced plot points or densely symbolic mechanics for a matrix of unstructured potential personal revelations; one that trades grand, orchestrated received meaning for the encompassing sensation of visiting someplace outside the player’s prior experience, with the potential to return deeply changed. The immersion model of meaning, as it might be called, takes the act of travel as its primary touchstone, instead of relying on traditional media such as film, the novel, or even sculpture, music or painting to inform the author’s role.

“Abdication of authorship” …to whom? Every text has an author, I think, whether it’s a lone writer, a video game design team, a set of social and cultural conditions, some combination thereof, or something else entirely. The player of a game, despite being an agent of momentum, still seems to be more a reader than anything; players determine the order in which the events of a game occur, but they do not determine the array of possible events to which they are bound. Even assuming that we could place such concerns entirely in the hands of a computer, could truly randomly determine which of an infinite number of events the player could experience in a particular playthrough, the computer would then become the author, and the player would remain the reader. The bottom line is that there is always a limit to what the player can do, and this limit is determined by an author. I cannot, for example, leave Fallout 3′s Capital Wasteland because none of the land beyond is virtually mapped, and I cannot brandish a broadsword because there is no such weapon in the game. I would rather it be this way; I maintain that a structured narrative experience can “mean” practically anything, but lack of structure seems to preclude meaning. If you can come up with a truly random way of scattering words on a page, and if you can subsequently achieve a sublime experience with your jumble of words, let me know.

That’s not to mention my disagreement with Gaynor’s characterization² of the “traditional media” of novels and film as employing a strict “message model of meaning,” in which “the genius author cooks up deeply meaningful thought in his head and hands down his superior understanding to the waiting masses.” Call me a tool of the poststructuralist critical establishment, but I’m one of those who feels that the author doesn’t have much to do with the reading experience, beyond contributing to that structured shell in the first place. Further, I don’t think there’s much meaning inherent in any text, that meaning will always be based primarily on the experiences of the reader; even if the “genius author” (and I think it’s erroneous to assume that the effective “author” of a text can be characterized as an individual human being anyway) did intend to convey some message, whatever message or messages would really be taken away from the text would depend on what the readers saw in it. To quote the ever-useful TV Tropes, I’m one of those who “[considers] the uncertainty and ambiguity of canon to be a good thing and [decries] the Word Of God as shackling the imagination and interpretations of the fans.” To take it even further, I don’t believe writers can have any more authority over the meanings of their texts than their readers; once the text is written, the writer is just another reader³.

Essentially, I’m saying that Gaynor is worrying too much, that “traditional” narrative media already give readers and viewers enough agency that the gap between such media and video games isn’t that big to begin with. But if Gaynor’s approach to the subject isn’t that useful to me, to whom shall I turn? How about Roger Ebert, who Gaynor seems to identify as a foe? It’s hard to blame Gaynor, actually.

…I did indeed consider video games inherently inferior to film and literature. There is a structural reason for that: Video games by their nature require player choices, which is the opposite of the strategy of serious film and literature, which requires authorial control.

Et tu, Ebert!? “Serious” film and literature requires authorial control of what, exactly? If he’s talking about meaning, I’ll reiterate that I don’t think authors have control over that anyway. If he means our authorial shell, though, we’re in the process of establishing that games have that, too. It may not look quite the same as it does in the film Ebert’s used to, but it’s there all the same. And anyway, who is Roger Ebert to determine what narrative art is “serious?” By my reckoning, the only artistic experience Ebert can truly, deeply understand is Ebert’s. The same goes for all of us, no matter how many degrees we have or volumes we’ve written.

Ebert’s not done, though.

I am prepared to believe that video games can be elegant, subtle, sophisticated, challenging and visually wonderful.

Thanks for that, Big E. I feel so validated.

But I believe the nature of the medium prevents it from moving beyond craftsmanship to the stature of art. To my knowledge, no one in or out of the field has ever been able to cite a game worthy of comparison with the great dramatists, poets, filmmakers, novelists and composers. That a game can aspire to artistic importance as a visual experience, I accept. But for most gamers, video games represent a loss of those precious hours we have available to make ourselves more cultured, civilized and empathetic.

Ebert’s basic stance seems to be that, because video games don’t do what plays, novels, symphonies, et al. do, they aren’t art, or they’re at least not worthy of comparison with the greatest works of human history. The medium is young, I’ll grant him that — game designers haven’t had much time to produce yet — but his approach doesn’t make much sense to me. Novels don’t do what musical compositions do; given that novels are the newer of the two, shouldn’t it follow that, by Ebert’s standards, novels aren’t art because they don’t adhere to a form and purpose established earlier? On that note, people didn’t know what to make of Oroonoko at first, but eventually English novels reached their current prominence; if the novel as a basic form wasn’t capable of artistic power to begin with, the shape of literature today would probably be quite different. Video games constituting a very young medium may mean they haven’t realized their full potential yet, but we can’t write the medium off for that reason alone.

Ah well; disregarding that Ebert’s argument makes little sense, and that the last sentence of the above quote is a rather galling and pretentious generalization (I hope you can see here that I’m trying to use video games precisely to make myself “more cultured, civilized and empathetic,” though I doubt my definitions of those three words are the same as Ebert’s), he’s not really a staunch enemy of fan-kind. He liked Princess Mononoke, if I remember correctly (not that it would really bother me if he didn’t). But now that we’ve used Ebert up like a Grand Theft Auto whore, let’s kick him out of the car and punch him to death so we can get our hard-earned blood money back.

We can say, now, what the authorial shell of a game isn’t. It isn’t nonexistent, nor is it likely to be much more subject to the will of the player than the authorial shell of a novel is to the will of the reader, given the limits imposed on player action. But that’s inconclusive. A definition of isn’ts and maybes isn’t a very good definition. In particular, we still don’t know what setting has to do with anything.

It seems, then, that three questions beg for answers. How does a player enter the authorial shell of a game? How does the player then function within it? And what the hell is the authorial shell in the first place?

The answer to the first seems initially to be that the player enters the shell through the act of experiencing the story of the game, which requires play, as play constitutes the forward movement of the story. But then, those actions available to the player, in being predetermined by the game, are also a part of the shell, in a sense. The player cannot act beyond the shell — at that point, the player is playing a different game altogether. We might say that play doesn’t get the player into the shell; the player makes the decision to enter the shell, and play keeps the player inside, just as forward reading keeps readers inside the shell of a novel, and forward viewing keeps viewers inside the shell of a film. The difference here is that play need not necessarily be “forward,” in the traditional sense. Cuchlann says:

A gamer can still be actively engaging in that trade-off of consciousness — that is, still playing — even if they aren’t advancing the story at all. Think of modern sandbox games, such as Grand Theft Auto 3, where the gamer is still playing if they steal an ice cream truck and ride around a farm but refusing to do any storyline quests. The gamer could even stop and watch the sun set over Vvardenfell — that’s still playing. Doing these things, or their analogues, in the act of reading a book or watching a movie, effectively stops the act of reading or watching. Going back and checking out a cool scene in Star Wars isn’t absorbing the author’s consciousness — that consciousness is delivered to the watcher through forward motion through the story. Pausing in reading Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell to reflect on the beauty of Clarke’s prose isn’t absorbing the consciousness either, it’s aesthetic appreciation of craft. So even in the most linear of games, the fact of how gamers dispossess themselves to take in, rather than receive, the authorial consciousness turns the story into something that results from the gamer’s actions.

I would argue that each act of play constitutes forward movement on the part of the game’s story as it exists within the play experience, even if it does not advance the game’s central plot. It can even go against the advancement of the central plot; isn’t this what happens when a player loses and must return to a previously-completed section of the game? Whereas the plot of a novel or film is, even in its most abstract and absurd moments, structured, its events predetermined and forever unchanging, and conducive to intense scrutiny in its relatively rigid form, the plot of a game is highly dependent on the methodology of the player. We might say that, where the plot of a novel or film is interpretable in its implications, the plot of a game is interpretable in the order of its events — but perhaps less so in implications, for how much weight has a sequence of events that could have gone differently? I don’t have a good answer — it has more emotional weight, probably, to the individual player, but it’s hard to compare one playthrough to the body of human fiction; for that, we’d probably need an array of all possible plots. A game has no “one true plot.”

I suppose that means that, unless we’re comparing playthroughs, we can get farther by discussing characters and setting (though, on the other hand, is discoursing critically ever anything more than comparing notes?). As I said, I agree with Cuchlann in that we do not “map ourselves onto the protagonists,” even when we directly control the protagonist’s actions — remember, the range of possible actions available to the characters under our control are for us to discover, but not decide. Assuming that the authorial shell, composed of characters as much as plot and setting, must exist within the player before the player can fill it with meaning, it may be more apt to say that the protagonist maps itself onto us — or from us. But it’s easier to make that claim in the case of a novel, which prompts us to compose the shell internally with its language cues. Many seventh-generation games seem to hand us a shell at least partially pre-constructed of elements with determinate visual and aural form and personality. In sandbox games such as Fallout 3, the game allows us some determination of these factors where the protagonist is concerned, but the game also limits our options out of necessity. Do we take the partially-whole shell the game gives us and draw it into ourselves? Do we leave ourselves, in a sense, and enter into the shell within the game? Or is there some sort of midway point at which the transaction takes place?

The second option, that of leaving the self and moving elsewhere, seems difficult to substantiate, even if we rephrase it as the player acting upon something external. To what degree can the shell even be external? The shell, once constructed, is the array of signifiers that point to the signifieds that fill the void within, and, as de Saussure notes, the semiotic sign is a “psychological entity,” connecting “not a thing and a name, but a concept and a sound-image⁴.” It’s all, by necessity, in our heads. We can’t work with the shell if we don’t conceptualize it.

We might be inclined to say, then, that we draw the shell into ourselves and go from there. But wait! A new challenger appears, and his name is Wolfgang Iser.

…[T]he literary work has two poles, which we might call the artistic and the aesthetic: the artistic pole is the author’s text, and the aesthetic is the realization accomplished by the reader. In view of this polarity, it is clear that the work itself cannot be identical with the text or with its actualization but must be situated somewhere between the two. It must inevitably be virtual in character, as it cannot be reduced to the reality of the text or to the subjectivity of the reader…⁵

Iser postulates a middle ground between text and reader that constitutes the work of literature — this middle ground is, I think, analogous to our as-yet-poorly-defined authorial shell. Now, this may sound odd; if we take de Saussure for granted, which I’ve done, how could anything exist between reader and text, when the text exists beyond the reader’s mind, and semiotic processes are “psychological entities?” The answer is simple: the text, or at least that version of the text that participates in the reading experience, that combines its powers with the reader to give birth to middle ground, doesn’t exist beyond the reader’s mind. What the reader is working with isn’t a physical text, but the mental impression of a physical text; the mind is a kind of white screen upon which a projection of the physical text is cast when the luminous reading process passes through it. That may seem obvious, but consider this: perhaps the act of play, being a reading process, a means by which the player experiences the story of a game, not only keeps the player engaged within the shell, but acts as a means of constructing the shell in the first place — a means that sometimes places enough determinative power in the hands of the player that the player is tasked with determining what they’ll get out of the story’s end result up front, as is the case in Fallout 3.

Iser (who apparently had kind of a thing for pinstripe suits) continues:

If the virtual position of the work is between text and reader, its actualization is clearly the result of an interaction between the two, and so exclusive concentration on either the author’s techniques or the reader’s psychology will tell us little about the reading process itself. …[S]eparate analysis would only be conclusive if the relationship were that of transmitter and receiver… In literary works, however, the message is transmitted in two ways, in that the reader “receives” it by composing it.⁶

From this, we can glean that Iser’s middle ground amounts to an outright interaction between reader and text. Insofar as both the reader’s consciousness and the mental text-image coexist in the reader’s mind, we can likely characterize this interaction as “discourse with oneself,” which seems in line with both Poulet’s phenomenology and the Foucauldian ideas discussed (among other things) here. Given that “the reader ‘receives’” the “message” of a text “by composing it,” we can also substantiate the text as text-image approach.

It is only now, after much tl;dr — that is, after much scholarly toil that the authorial shell begins to take shape. Consider the reader’s mind and the physical text in relation to one another.

The reader brings accumulated knowledge and experience to the table, but can’t simply toss it at the text; the text, through reading, must be brought inside. Now I’ll apply the process to which Poulet, de Saussure, and Iser have led me: the physical text, through the process of reading, casts a text-image upon the reader’s mind, and the reader’s knowledge and experience combine with the text-image to complete the authorial shell, which can then be filled.

This is a very simple representation, and not drawn to scale, if there even exists a scale to which it might be drawn. That is, don’t take the relative sizes of the reader’s knowledge and experience and the text-image to mean anything; the nature of the shell’s composition most likely differs from one reading experience to another. A graphic that depicted an authorial shell composed of bits of text-image scattered throughout the reader’s knowledge and experience would probably be more accurate, and it’s possible that the text-image and knowledge/experience simply become one in the construction of the shell, so bear those variations in mind.

Also note that this model is by no means specific to video games. I suggested earlier that games might deliver their authorial shells in “pre-constructed” or at least partially-constructed states, and I think that we can now more or less rule that out. Games might provide specific visual and aural data that novels present only in abstract, but even these amount to cues, raw data that must be “read” into a text-image as surely as language. The authorial shell model is, I think, general enough to apply to most narrative media.

How does setting in games fit into all this? How is it “the place where I am” in addition to “the place where they are?” To answer these and other questions, we need to scrutinize the composition of the text-image⁷.

As a general rule, what setting we see in literature and film is attached to the characters and their actions. That is, while both media have their share of epic pans over the countryside (I’m looking at you, Tolkien), readers and viewers will only tolerate so much of nothing eventful happening. This is not the case in games; as I said, a player need not be advancing any of the game’s scripted plots to advance the all-encompassing plot of the play experience. Though the same set of events would bore most readers and moviegoers, many Koreans players can and will gladly endure a two-hour game of Starcraft that consists mostly of building things and repairing or replacing them when they’re damaged. How many viewers would leave the theater or ceremonially burn the DVD (in a fire, not a DVD-RW) when faced with a film that made them watch the first twenty minutes of a Starcraft game? Not that I haven’t watched gameplay videos of very good players, but I certainly didn’t do so for the story, and I found myself skipping around.

The difference, of course, is play, which keeps the player engaged through what in other media would be very uneventful stretches, stretches during which countless minutiae of setting can be conveyed. Given engaging play, games stand to convey a higher volume of setting information than novels and film, which means setting is more strongly represented in the text-image, which means it plays a more significant role in composing the authorial shell — while “the place where I am” may not be the best way to describe setting in games, it’s a feeling I’m more likely to have while playing a game than when reading most novels, and, to me, that feeling is one of the markers of a good game.

Perhaps more importantly, I consider that sense of identification with setting a requirement in sandbox games such as Fallout 3, which often very purposefully don’t contain plots of epic proportions. As Fallout 3 made me feel as if my explorations of its setting meant something, even without quest objectives, far more than did, say, Oblivion or most of the Grand Theft Auto games, I can confidently recommend it over most games I played last year.

But the point here is that I don’t think it’s “direct inhabitation of an autonomous agent,” as Gaynor suggests, that sets games apart as a medium, nor do I think games are necessarily less immersive than novels or film. They’re simply different in that they’re played; we get more of some things and less of others to work with in our authorial shells, and setting seems rather well-represented therein.

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Endnotes

¹The consciousness inhabits the reader, in a sense, insofar as we can call the reader’s conceptualization of the text inhabiting on the part of the consciousness, and then the reader inhabits the consciousness, which causes the consciousness to inhabit the reader — it seems paradoxical when termed thus. But think of it this way: concepts such as inhabitation and inside/outside aren’t really adequate, and just serve as convenient descriptors in explanation. “The extraordinary fact in the case of a book,” says Poulet, “is the falling away of the barriers between you and it. You are inside it; it is inside you; there is no longer either outside or inside” (Poulet, Georges. “Phenomenology of Reading.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 2001: 1321).

²To be precise, Gaynor is running with some ideas first presented by Jonathan Blow.

³That is to say, the writer is just another reader in theory; effectively, the writer does have some authority, given the tendency of some fans to accept the testimony of a writer as irrefutable fact. We might say that the literary value of all readings is equal (in that there aren’t “levels” of literary value at all), while social/political values of readings vary widely. See also “Over 9000 meaningless words.”

⁴De Saussure, Ferdinand. “From Course in General Linguistics.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 2001: 963.

⁵Iser, Wolfgang. “Interaction between Text and Reader.” The [you guessed it] Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 2001: 1674.

⁶Ibid.

⁷I’m inclined at this point to think that the text-image specifically is analogous to Poulet’s authorial consciousness, while the authorial shell as a whole is analogous to Iser’s middle ground, but I could be wrong; maybe it’s all the same thing.

Tags: de saussure, fallout 3, iser, methodology, phenomenology, poulet, reader-response, setting, theory

Thus spake Pontifus on Friday, 9 January 2009 at 11:41 pm, and Art and Culture, Video Games expanded tenfold. Become privy to further discussion on the matter via RSS 2.0. You might grace us with a brilliant comment, or trackback from a distant podium.