I am not the Author of this Post

Sure, we do say that there's a lot that's opened to reader interpretation, and we acknowledge that the author's power is limited by his reader's understanding. Both parties are important, it's capitalism applied to art. The reader (the customer) has a say in what they purchase; what they don't purchase is less popular, and gets written or created less, so then the author or the artist becomes less popular themselves, and gets thrown out of business. Hmm wait, what piece of the lit. theory formula is missing? Right, the critic. The critic isn't that important. The critic is only as popular as the readers who follow him... and those readers also have to have the same tastes as him. So really, a critic is nothing more than a collective viewpoint, aka, a total sheep to the massive audience of each industry. The critics who don't share a view common with everyone can only become popular by being funny (like the Nostalgia Critic, who shares deep insight and makes logical sense when he criticizes the things most people enjoyed at some point in their life).

You may be asking yourself, "Hmm hey, where is he going with this? What does this have to do with the Death of the Author? Death of the Author? What's that?"

Okay, so basically, the Death of the Author is a short essay written by this guy named Rolland Barthes. Death of the Author is not written from a New Critcism point of view, and in fact, is written according to Post-Structuralism. There's a lot of history of literary theory between the two. What's the connection? New Criticism, specifically the concept of "The Intentional Fallacy," hints and points to ideas that get refined in Death of the Author. The main difference between the two theories is that New Criticism makes a much harder attempt to be "right" and claims all sorts of authority for itself and its interpretations.

So... on to the main point: Do video games have an author?

It could go either way, really. I would argue that almost all indie games have a very easily identifiable author. The real question should be: Do mainstream video games, developed by mainstream companies have an author? And more importantly: Who is it?

Let's start with the question of "Who is the Author?" Who created the first Spiderman game? You see the issue now? Spiderman wasn't originally from a video game. Spiderman was created by the genius of Stan Lee. So, I'd say he gets the credit for Spiderman. This makes the "author" of the game, which was of course based on something from another medium, a bit hazy. Just like we don't credit Christopher Nolan for making Batman.

I will argue that any game that is original, and can be traced down to a few creators who originally came up with the idea has an author. My best example: Will Wright and Sims, or Spore. Will Wright is very easily considered the visionary behind these two vastly successful game franchises, despite being produced and developed by a major game company: EA.

So, yes, video games can have an author. Yes, they are important. No, those authors are not the sole element in production.