The slaughter of the author : analysing the shift from ergodic to non-ergodic media and its impact on authorship

Abstract

In light of the recent surge in video game to non-video game adaptations and transmediations during the last few years, I seek to analyse some of the challenges that may arise when translating a work from ergodic to non-ergodic media. More specifically, I aim to shed light on the inevitable loss of the co-authorial aspect present in video games during the transition to the single-authored nature of non-ergodic works. To illustrate this point, I turn to Roland Barthes' work, The Death of the Author (Barthes, 1977), where he argues that the reader should try to extract meaning through personal interpretation—what he refers to as “the birth of the reader”—rather than to ascribe meaning to a text strictly based on the life or opinions of the text's author. Using this concept as a basis for my own theory, I claim that the narrative branches and emergent storytelling possibilities of ergodic texts render us, to some extent, as authors—not of the text as a whole, but rather to the specific, realised and actualised iteration of our individual experience within it. Due to this relationship between the text and the consumer in ergodic media, I argue that the translation process risks “slaughtering” the player as author by recognising only a single path of engagement in the shift to a non-ergodic medium. To explore this topic of authorship between media effectively, I have chosen to analyse two pairs of case studies where the original works are video games and the secondary works take place in the medium of television: The Last of Us (Naughty Dog, 2013) and its adaptation The Last of Us (Mazin, 2023), alongside the Fallout franchise (Bethesda Game Studios, Black Isle Studios, & Obsidian Entertainment, 1997–2018) and its transmediation, Fallout (Wagner & Robertson-Dworet, 2024).