According to Ian Bogost, Simon Ferrari, and Bobby Schweizer, games such as Walden and JFK Reloaded seek to record an event, its space, and its stakeholders posterity. These goals categorize the games as documentary games. Now can videogames represent actuality (the truth of an event, not just the way something looks) in the way that cinema, photography, and nonfiction writing have done? My immediate answer is yes. Videogames are so entwined and dependent off cinema, photography, and nonfiction that of course they can. The authors agree by stating that videogames can engage actuality three ways: explorable spatial reality, operational reality, and procedural reality.

These ways seem nearly fool proof.  But in the end, does the proof that videogames can represent actuality really matter when the public cannot accept them? One of the last points made in the article is the controversy over documentary games, and I can see why.

Newsgames – Journalism at Play points out that procedural documentary does not weave a path through evidence like film or articles to provide a backdrop to the historical situation. Instead, it models the behavior and dynamics of the situation. Characters, setting, and even events are just a side effect of the overall logic. It’s because of this that I feel documentary games appear distant and cruel. For the most part, the public seems used to games that have more emphasis on the self, if not emotion. There’s an isolated and awful feel to playing events like they actually happened. This unfavorable reaction is only heightened with events with great casualties, which happen in games such as Super Columbine Massacre RPG and 9-11 Survivor.

It’s with games like these that documentary games are more likely to be labeled “survival horrors.” Tampte claims “a realistic portrayal of the battle must frighten the player, like a horror game might do,” and I have to agree. To portray a historical event truthfully, the maker should depict it in all of its frightening glory. But as far as the general public is concerned, I don’t think they will ever be completely ready or happy to play videogames that reenact charged events and memories. I can imagine it to be torture for some people to live through the past so accurately. This is where I think documentary videogames can take actuality a step further than the other mediums. But by no means should we expect the public to willingly go through the trauma that some of these documentary games could cause them.

Three emotions came to me while reading “The Death of the Author” from Image-Music-Text by Roland Barthes. The first emotion was critical. I get a little defensive when I read that “writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away,” or shortly after, “the novel ends when writing at last becomes possible.” I suppose I felt this way because I’d like to think writing has that special place in the world where the subject becomes all the more enlightened with words. That comment on the novel also seems a bit harsh (and I’m not even that big of a novel fan).

Barthes does start making points that are less harsh and by the last page, I understand. “The Author, when believed in, is always conceived of as the past of his own book” makes sense, while still relatively depressing. Barthes uses the metaphor of the relationship between a father and his son. The Author is thought to nourish the book, which is to say that he exists before it, think, suffers, and lives for it. Or at least, that’s how it was. I wish Barthes made more of an indication that this parental relationship belongs in the past before introducing the idea that the modern scriptor is born simultaneously with the text.

I’m somewhat skeptical to this original idea, but mostly agree that writing can no longer designate an operation of recording. Instead, it’s more of a “performative,” a rare verbal form. Along with the skepticism, I again become critical when Barthes again attacks the writer. For example, Barthes claims that “the modern scriptor can thus no longer believe, as according to the pathetic view of his predecessors.” Really now Barthes, pathetic? Later, Barthes states that “we’re no longer fooled by the arrogant antiphrastical recrimination of good society.” If Barthes were to tone down the adjectives, maybe the reader’s response would be less critical and more understanding.

Despite the harsh adjectives used by Barthes, I still praise the author for pointing out what we’ve been oh so ignorant to. I can now see how expression is a thing translated from a ready-formed dictionary, how the author only has the power to mix writings, and how life never does more than imitate the book, that the book itself is only a tissue of signs, and that writing is to be disentangled and cannot be deciphered.

I feel like I’ve made progress until the last sentence which causes my last emotion: confusion. A texts unity lies in its destination, in the reader, instead of the origin and therefore the author. Here I thought Barthes was emphasizing the importance of the reader. The the last sentence says, it is necessary to overthrow the myth: the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author. I thought Barthes was pushing for the death of the author…

I believe the author of “Five Elements of Digital Literature” from Reading Moving Letters, Noah Wardrip-Fruin, wanted to make a specific point. The process should be interpreted in digital literature after separating the process from the surface. This point is, I’m guessing, the answer to his question in the beginning of the reading: “Why do we need to read, to interpret, when we read digital literature?” Interpreting the process will let us better understand and read digital literature.

Except I never would’ve thought that was going to be Wardip-Fruin’s conclusion, and I’m still confused about what exactly the process is. The confusion might stem from my disbelief in his terminology. He claims that digital literature is in relation to computers, specifically found in computer engineering phrases that require the digital computation performed by laptops, servers, game consoles, etc. Furthermore, “digital information, as opposed to analog information, is represented by discrete rather than continuous values.” Fruin takes the word digital directly from the word digit. When I think of the word digital, I think involving or relating to the use of computer technology. When asked why we need to read and interpret digital literature, I internally reply “because it’s literature.”  No matter the type of literature, we still read and analyze it.

This is where I don’t follow his argument. He refers literature to fiction, poetry, and drama like I do. So why does he present this question? With all the references and too many points made (1, 2, 3, 4, a, b, c from pages 40 and 41), I’m confused to what this digital literature and process actually is.

I feel like I’m on to something when Chris Crawford says that “Processing data is the very essence of what a computer does” and Fruin explains that processes are optional for digital literature. But then I’m lost again when I imagine the difference between email narratives (that don’t require processes) and other “digital literature.” I’m not convinced that both types should be considered literature.

Moreover, I’m offended at Fruin’s notion that “writers innovate on the surface level, on the reading words level – while computer scientists innovate at the process level, the algorithm level, perhaps without words at all.” While perhaps not intentionally, Fruin suggests that computer scientists are more evolved authors than the basic writer. I however, disagree. Instead, I propose that computer scientists and writers stay in separate categories with their digital and non digital literature.