I thought that the different perspectives on all the different games was very interesting. If you look at PhoneStory, most of the actions you take as a player are as the villain. You are the one controlling the soldiers who enslave children, you are the one throwing phones as people, and you are the one catching people as they attempt to commit suicide. The perspective is incredibly important for the game’s procedural rhetoric. Because we are the consumers of these phones, the game is forcing us to take the positions of those who are helping us get those phones, and it creates an uneasy dissonance inside me as a consumer and as a player. Part of the procedure is making me do something horrible, similar to the torture version of Tetris. The perspective makes me the bad guy.

As for Darfur is Dying and games like it (Ayiti: the Cost of Life is another), the game forces me to take the perspective of an impoverished person or family and try to figure out a way to survive. Spent is another game that accomplishes something similar. It makes you thing about things in a way you normally wouldn’t just based on how the game is build and what it makes you do as a player. What the interesting about Unmanned and September 12th is that both of those games are from the standpoint of the American military, not from the Taliban or Osama bin Laden. It’s like how in most games the bad guys are Nazi or zombies. I can’t think of a single game where you try to help Hitler exterminate the Jews or help Stalin build a better Russia. People like to be the “good” guys, the protagonists of their games, but most of these really call into question not the natural protagonists of these games, but who we as players should feel about it. Killing someone with a drone feels weird when in most games you play with a variety of weapons in the field. Being powerless without any weapons to fight with other than searching for water feels weird. One of the strengths of games in that it gives their players a feeling of agency, but the way these games are build and the perspectives of these games gives the player a feeling of alienation and immobility. I think this created dissonance is in part used to try and spur the player into real life action, which I’m not sure it does. I’m already against wars overseas and I still haven’t donated a single dollar to Darfur. While these games all have a clear perspective and motive behind them, is it truly effective? Do people’s opinions change based on video games?

Barthes seems to think of writing almost entirely as a product rather than as an experience or as a process. He completely discounts the author’s experiences and process of writing and skills to the end result of the reader consume the product and acts as though that is the only material that has value. He seems to be taking the mistaken idea of authorial intent and going to the exact opposite extreme. While I usually agree that the author is not vital to understanding the text, I am unwilling to go to Barthes idea that the author is dead and so is the idea of the godlike authority of the author over his creation.

I think that texts can and should be understood simply as the words on the page, but as the Borges essay tried to say, the context of the author is important. It’s one thing to write a novel in the 1800’s and quite another to write one set in the 1800’s. Barthes sets up the rhetoric of an author as this oppressive king or and dictatorial entity bent on destroying the intrinsic value of a piece, but that is a false understanding, a straw man set up to justify his own extreme position. I find it hard to believe that many authors have this kind of presence in their literary lives, especially considering that it is difficult to influence how their works are perceived after they are dead, such as how Ray Bradbury disagreed with the interpretation of his famous Fahrenheit 451 as stated repeatedly that his book was not about censorship. He could not control his work’s life, which is why Barthes argument is null and void. There is no Author/Deity creation to destroy. People read books how they want to read them and they always have, regardless of what the author says.

Really, how books are taught in classrooms has more influence. Teachers who claim that authors are all conclusive about a certain work are perpetuating a false train of thought that people do not naturally have. Of cause, there are substantiated and unsubstantiated reading of books, but I think that Barthes’ understanding of the author is unsubstantiated by fact (just as my opinion that he is wrong is mainly unsubstantiated). My point is, Barthes presented a theory and then stepped back. He did nothing to conclusively prove his point, and so I remain unconvinced. There is no author to kill. Authors can have their own opinions on their books just as I do. Both are valid (meaning, based on the text), but there is no need to metaphorically kill the author. The author is just another human. I guess what I’m trying to say is that Barthes attempted to make his point far too strongly and because of his harsh rhetoric, failed to convince me of anything other than that this man is presumptive and pretentious.

At first, I thought that Strings was a boring piece of kinetic typography, and in some ways it is. “youandme,” and both “flirt” pieces are rather unimaginative in their usage of kinetics, but others I found much more interesting, such as “arms” and “poidog.” The reason I think “arms” is better than “youandme” is not a difference quantified in the addition of five letters, it’s a matter of shape and movement. “youandme” doesn’t take and risks and just has the two words zoning around the screen. I understand that the point of the piece was personifying the two parties, showing that “me” if trying to get close to “you” and is whizzing all over the place to do so, but fails. “you” is more shy and slow moving and unresponsive. That’s all fine and dandy, he achieved his goal of making me think of an arrangement of letter in terms of a story, but I felt nothing as a experienced it, which to me says that he failed in to larger picture.

“arms” succeeded as a piece of kinetic typography because it made me feel something in the absence of more complex words. “youandme” set the stage for this piece and set the expectation of what he would do with the starting “your,” but then took it a different direction and abandoned the use of words at all in favor of shapes. “your” turns into “arms” and then arms turns into a circle that moves and shifts, which is much more evocative than the wibbly-wobbly blandness of “youandme.” That circle turns into “me,” and the experience of the piece evokes a positive feeling of comfort without every using the words embrace, comfort, or home. Yet those are the thoughts and feelings I had, while in “youandme” I had to search and create some small semblance of meaning.

As for “poidog,” I’m not really sure what the significance of the title is, but I thought the interconnection of the words make his statement that “words are like strings that push & pull out of my mouth” more meaningful that my typed up, unmoving transcription. By making the words appear one at a time, it forces me to consider the mean of each one a lot more than I would reading it in fast sequence. This is a much more pulled together idea than “haha,” which also makes the viewer think about sound in a different way.