Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Authors (Game)'

The purpose of this thesis is to establish the pattern of Joseph Knecht's awakening in Hermann Hesse's The Glass Bead Game. Based on the premise that Knecht, unlike Hesse's previous protagonists, is an integrated individual living within a disintegrated and segregated environment, a secondary intent of this paper is to examine the paradox of Knecht's Castalian existence. Each chapter concentrates on a stage of Knecht's development, both formally as a Castalian, and psychologically as an individual who is committed to serving the highest authority. This authority is not the rigid, one-dimensional Castalia but rather the dynamic force which governs all life. Knecht compares himself to music and perceives his life as a process of becoming. As he ascends the ladder of Castalian hierarchy, Knecht's own consciousness develops through the intervention of several antithetical figures who challenge him to reconcile the subjective nature of Truth and the transience of all forms. When he can no longer justify serving an Order which is governed by the pretense of perfection and permanence, Knecht feels obligated to warn Castalia of its own temporality and to resign his position as Magister Ludi. Knecht's leap beyond Castalia and into the deadly lake at Belpunt serves two purposes; not only does he take the first step toward integrating Castalia and the outside world, but he fulfills his own life by sacrificing himself to his pupil Tito.

Though tabletop role-playing games, or TRPGs, have received some scholarly attention since the creation of Dungeons and Dragons in the 1970s, very few scholars have considered how TRPGs function as a vehicle for long-form narrative. As an inherently collaborative form of narrative, the TRPG demonstrates a unique relationship between author and audience, as participants take on both roles during play. Previous narratological models of author-audience interaction are insufficient to understand the way that authorship functions in the TRPG, and the rise of actual play shows, where TRPGs are broadcast for an audience of nonparticipants, adds an extra layer of complexity to these author-audience relations. This thesis identifies key narrative elements of the TRPG, including game mechanics, framing, and collaboration, and examines how popular actual play shows and their graphic adaptations engage with these elements to create their narratives. This examination indicates that TRPGs create complex author-webs where each participant is both author and audience, and this influence pushes actual play shows and further adaptations of TRPG narratives to expand the ways in which audiences can influence and interact with narratives as they are created. The TRPG genre continues to explore how these elements can be developed beyond traditional understandings of narrative, and this development provides a framework for further narratological study of interactive works, which will only continue to evolve and grow in popularity and complexity in the continuing digital era.<br>Master of Arts<br>The tabletop role-playing game, or TRPG, has been growing in popularity since the creation of Dungeons and Dragons in the 1970s, and the rise of the actual play show, where a TRPG game is broadcast to viewers via video or podcast, has spurred both casual and scholarly interest in the TRPG. Players of TRPGs create narratives through collaborative storytelling moderated by certain rules and game mechanics, so each participant in a TRPG acts as both author and audience, as they create certain elements of the narrative and also witness the narrative creations of the other players. This particular collaborative author-audience model is not seen in any other form of narrative, and existing models of author-audience interactions do not account for authorship in the TRPG. Therefore, this thesis examines how several elements of the TRPG, such as the use of game mechanics to structure the narrative, the multiple frames in which players interact with each other, and the collaboration inherent in every game, contribute to the ways that authorship and audience interact in the narrative. It also looks at how popular actual play shows and the graphic novels they've created of their narratives engage with these elements to create their own unique audience interactions. As audience participation in the development of the stories they're consuming become more prominent with the rise of video games and other interactive media, an understanding of the evolving relationship between authorship and audience developed by the TRPG becomes important for examining interactive works in general.

The question of fidelity, which has long been at the center of adaptation studies, pertains to the problem of authorship. Who can be an author and adapt a text and who cannot? In order to understand the problem of fidelity, this thesis asks larger questions about the problems of authorship, examining how authorship is changing in new media. Audiences are taking an ever-increasing role in the creation and interpretation of the texts they receive: a phenomenon this thesis refers to as participatory authorship, or the active participation of audience members in the creation, expansion, and adaptation of another's creative work. In order to understand how audiences are creating texts, first the place of the player within video games is addressed. Due to the nature of the medium, players must become active co-creators of a video game. Drawing a parallel between video game players and performance, it is argued that players must simultaneously perform and author a text, illustrating the complex and multilayered nature of authorship in video games. In the second chapter the role of the fan is examined within the context of the My Little Pony fandom, Bronies. Like players, fans take an active role in the creation of the text and destabilize the traditional notion of authorship by partially controlling of a text from the original author. By examining the place of the player and the fan the traditional notion of authorship is destabilized, and the more open and collaborative model of participatory authorship is proposed.

The thesis argues that there is a pressure on the authorship concept since the emergence of collections of facts, anthologies, and adaptations of pre-existing works. These works were the reason that Judges offered various interpretations to authorship and originality, as some Judges lessened the requirement of originality to obtain copyrightability for these works and some raised it. This led to make the protection granted by copyright law to intellectual works vague and uncertain. This became apparent in conflicts in courts decisions on copyright subsistence in works. This subsequently led to confusion around the criteria of interpretation that should be adopted and the theory or justification that copyright law is founded upon. The thesis argues that this vagueness and uncertainty is related not to the authorship concept but to the failure of law to adapt to two separate natures of works, one including authorial, mental and personal contribution and the other only including manually skilful contribution. Those two kinds cannot be subject to same principles or justifications of protection. The inexistence of such differentiation in doctrine, judiciary and legislation led to the distortion of authorship and originality concepts in the attempts to reduce their interpretation to suit those works that actually miss authorial contribution. Alternatively, whole attention was paid to granting ownership to right holders of these works, which led to the prevalence of the ownership concept as being a necessity for the marketability of cultural works over the authorship concept. The thesis finds that this difference in nature can be uncovered by settling on a differentiation between two kinds of skills that are used in creating works: the mental skills, which are authorial skills, on the one side, and manual skills, which are the collecting, combining, performing or executing skills, on the other. Accordingly, this thesis proposes a categorisation of works, that of ‘high, low and non-authorship’ works, which relies on the nature of the works and elements of authorship in the work. The thesis finds that every category of works needs a separate criterion that can suit its nature and constituent authorship elements; also, the protection needs to be graded depending on the level of authorship in the work. This thesis suggests that such a legal proposition be implemented digitally in what it calls the ‘Digital Cultural National Gate’, which decides the category the work should belong to and the correspondent protection, and that through some questionnaires on the work the authorship elements can be recognised.

Cette thèse porte sur la question du lecteur dans trois textes de Rétif de la Bretonne : Le Paysan perverti (1775), Le Ménage parisien (1772) et Le Pornographe (1769). Malgré la diversité de son contenu et de sa structure, ce corpus a en commun de mettre en abyme la figure du lecteur. Bien que sollicité, souvent même à l’excès, le lecteur des trois textes entretient des relations très tendues avec l’auteur. Celui-ci s’emploie à conditionner l’exercice de la lecture tout en simulant de favoriser la liberté du lecteur. Ce rapport de force se déploie à plusieurs niveaux des ouvrages étudiés. Il est explicite à travers la figure du lecteur intradiégétique. Il est plus subtil et latent, en revanche, quand Rétif construit dans le texte l’image du lecteur « idéal ». Outre un attachement « viscéral » à l’oeuvre, nous décelons dans l’écriture romanesque rétivienne une conception moderne de la relation auteur/lecteur. « Inégal » dans sa production, « maladroit », « impertinent », Rétif a pourtant très tôt lancé une réflexion inédite sur le rôle du lecteur dans l’accomplissement du fait littéraire. Le lecteur y est, en effet, considéré comme l’émule de l’auteur : un copropriétaire potentiel, voire un propriétaire légitime de l’oeuvre dont dépend son devenir. Mais Rétif n’est pas pour autant prêt au partage, encore moins à être « dépossédé » de son oeuvre. Le tiraillement permanent de l’auteur transfigure ainsi l’expérience littéraire en une expérience humaine<br>The thesis purports to investigate the ‘reader’ in three works by Rétif de la Bretonne which are: Le Paysan perverti (1775), Le Ménage parisien (1772) and Le Pornographe (1769). Though diverging in content and structure, the three works converge in the desire to inscribe the reader in the text. Although sought for, quite often in an exaggerated way, the reader in the three texts has an extremely tense relationship with the author who is committed to control the act of reading while pretending to leave the reader total freedom. This struggle for power is felt at various levels in the three texts examined; it is made overt through the figure of the intradiegetic reader but subtler when appealing to the figure of the ‘ideal reader’. Apart from the visceral tie to the text, we distinguish in the retivian novelistic discourse a modern conception of the author/reader relationship. Though ‘uneven’, ‘clumsy’ and ‘impertinent’, Rétif, early on, declared implicitly within his work a first-time vision of the role of the reader in the accomplishment of the literary act. The reader is in fact inscribed in the text as the emulator of the author: a potential and legitimate owner of the work on which depends his becoming. However, Rétif is not ready to surrender his authorship. The continual division of the author transfigures the literary experience into a human one

Creative Project Abstract: The creative project of this thesis is a script prototype for Underland, a crime drama video game and digital playable story that demonstrates writing and design methods for negotiating narrative and player agency. The story is set in October 2006 and players are investigative psychologists given access to a secure police server and tasked with analysing evidence related to two linked murders that have resulted in the arrest of journalist Silvi Moore. The aim is to uncover what happened and why by analysing Silvi’s flat, calendar of events, emails, texts, photos, voicemail, call log, 999 call, a map of the city of Plymouth and a crime scene. It is a combination of story exploration game and digital epistolary fiction that is structured via an authored fabula and dynamic syuzhet and uses the Internal-Exploratory and Internal-Ontological interactive modes to negotiate narrative and player agency. Its use of this structure and these modes shows how playable stories are uniquely positioned to deliver self-directed and empathetic emotional immersion simultaneously. The story is told in a mixture of enacted, embedded, evoked, environmental and epistolary narrative, the combination of which contributes new knowledge on how writers can use mystery, suspense and dramatic irony in playable stories. The interactive script prototype is accessible at underlandgame.com and is a means to represent how the final game is intended to be experienced by players. Thesis Abstract: This thesis considers writing and design methods for playable stories that negotiate narrative and player agency. By approaching the topic through the lens of creative writing practice, it seeks to fill a gap in the literature related to the execution of interactive and narrative devices as a practitioner. Chapter 1 defines the key terms for understanding the field and surveys the academic and theoretical debate to identify the challenges and opportunities for writers and creators. In this it departs from the dominant vision of the future of digital playable stories as the ‘holodeck,’ a simulated reality players can enter and manipulate and that shapes around them as story protagonists. Building on narratological theory it contributes a new term—the dynamic syuzhet—to express an alternate negotiation of narrative and player agency within current technological realities. Three further terms—the authored fabula, fixed syuzhet and improvised fabula—are also contributed as means to compare and contrast the narrative structures and affordances available to writers of live, digital and live-digital hybrid work. Chapter 2 conducts a qualitative analysis of digital, live and live-digital playable stories, released 2010–2016, and combines this with insights gained from primary interviews with their writers and creators to identify the techniques at work and their implications for narrative and player agency. This analysis contributes new knowledge to writing and design approaches in four interactive modes—Internal-Ontological, Internal-Exploratory, External-Ontological and External-Exploratory—that impact on where players are positioned in the work and how the experiential narrative unfolds. Chapter 3 shows how the knowledge developed through academic research informed the creation of a new playable story, Underland; as well as how the creative practice informed the academic research. Underland provides a means to demonstrate how making players protagonists of the experience, rather than of the story, enables the coupling of self-directed and empathetic emotional immersion in a way uniquely available to digital playable stories. It further shows how this negotiation of narrative and player agency can use a combination of enacted, embedded, evoked, environmental and epistolary narrative to employ dramatic irony in a new way. These findings demonstrate ways playable stories can be written and designed to deliver the ‘traditional’ pleasure of narrative and the ‘newer’ pleasure of player agency without sacrificing either.

<p>Abstract</p><p>Purpose/Aim: The aim is to investigate if there are any differences in the reporting from the Olympic games and the Paralympic games, according to different periodicals or magazines, with focus on Paralymics and sports for handicapped. If so, what are those differences?</p><p>Material/Method: The material consists of two periodicals, or magazines; Svensk idrott which is the official paper for the swedish Riksidrottsförbundet, and Handikappidrott, which is the official paper for the swedish Handikappidrottsförbundet. Articles considering the summer games in 1972 and 1976, 1984, 1996 and 2000 was studied with regard to models developed by Algirdas J. Greimas. The methods are both quantitative and qualitative.</p><p>Main results: The main results are that the biggest difference between the periodicals really lie in the selection of articles and also in the amount of articles published, considering the games. In Handikappidrott, the articles are aimed towards an initiated audience who are supposed to know much about handicapped people and their sports. Svensk idrott focuses a lot more on different aspects of the Olympic games, such as politics and economy. Also has the aspect of normalisation been of current interest – the problem is that the more of handicapped people and issues that are presented to the audience in order to pinpoint the normality of the issue, the more focus come to lie on what is different from the non-handicapped, and in that way enlarge the gap between handicapped an non-handicapped.</p><p>Keywords: Olympic games, Paralympics, actants, narrator, implied author, normalisation</p>

There are many factors that contributed to the proliferation of visual codes, metaphors and references to the gendered gaze in women's fiction of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. This thesis argues that the visual details in women's novels published between 1778 and 1815 are more significant than scholars have previously acknowledged. My analysis of the oeuvres of Jane Austen, Ann Radcliffe, Maria Edgeworth and Fanny Burney shows that visuality — the nexus between the verbal and visual communication — provided them with a language within language capable of circumventing the cultural strictures on female expression in a way that allowed for concealed resistance. It conveyed the actual ways in which women ‘should' see and appear in a society in which the reputation was image-based. My analysis journeys through physiognomic, psychological, theatrical and codified forms of visuality to highlight the multiplicity of its functions. I engage with scholarly critiques drawn from literature, art, optics, psychology, philosophy and anthropology to assert visuality's multidisciplinary influences and diplomatic potential. I show that in fiction and in actuality, women had to negotiate four scopic forces that determined their ‘looks' and manners of looking: the impartial spectator, the male gaze, the public eye and the disenfranchised female gaze. In a society dominated by ‘frustrated utterance,' penetrating gazes and the perpetual threat of misinterpretation, women novelists used references to the visible and the invisible to comment on emotions, socio-economic conditions and patriarchal abuses. This thesis thus offers new insights into verbal economy by reassessing expression and perception from an unconventional point-of-view.

In this dissertation I argue that invisible characters, as they appear in Paul Auster’s novels, serve a very specific function within the interpretative framework of a text and that they should be considered to play a functional role, in order to arrive at a more holistic interpretation of the text and a more accurate analysis of said texts. I argue that Auster knowingly includes these characters in his novels as part of his narrative technique, in order for them to serve specific functions and to contribute to the structure of postmodern fiction. I make use of a contextualized close reading of five of Auster’s novels and attempt a hermeneutic interpretation of these novels to arrive at a hermeneutic circle when combining these novels into an integrated whole, individual, work of fiction. Certain parallels can be drawn between Auster’s various novels and these parallels contribute to the various motifs and themes found throughout his work. The importance of space in Auster’s novels is also highlighted with emphasis on liminality which serves as an instigator for transgression to occur between different fictive worlds.<br>Thesis (MA (English))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2013.

My goal in this thesis is to propose a new theory of truth in fiction. In Chapter One, I will examine David Lewis, Gregory Currie and Alex Byrne’s theories of truth in fiction. By the end of Chapter Two, I will discuss six conditions a theory of truth in fiction must meet (for example, the theory must account for stories in which there is no intelligent life to tell the tale, and also for truths in authorless fictions.) In Chapter Three, I will explain Kendall Walton’s distinction between the “work world” and the “game world” — the fictional world of the story versus the fictional world of the game of make-believe that the reader plays with the story. Finally, I will introduce a new “fictional author,” located in a game world, in order to propose a new theory that satisfies the conditions.<br>October 2016

碩士<br>國立中正大學<br>外國語文研究所<br>90<br>Six Characters in Search of an Author is a play about life and art. Life is real and it can be regarded as an unpredictable show. Art is a game of play that represents and penetrates life. Faced with the magic bond between life and art in this play, the six Characters are quite conscious of themselves. They realize that they are the fictional characters made by the Author; meanwhile they know that they are the characters, or the actors, so to speak, in the impromptu play. This study will explore six Characters' consciousness from structural and existential approaches. Chapter one discusses the Characters' consciousness from the aspect of Roland Barthes' "the Death of the Author." The author creates the work. However, as long as the work is done, the author loses his or her control over it. The work stays alive in the representation of the reader (scriptor), another sort of author. The Characters' searching alludes that they are aware of their being and that they are looking for the source to affirm their being. Chapter two deals with the Characters' consciousness from an aesthetic perspective and Sartre's notion of consciousness. The Actors and the Characters support each other. When the Characters' play (life) is performed by the Actors (art), however, the story is altered. The split between the original and the representation makes the Characters realize how the Actors think of them. In terms of Sartre, the Characters get what they are in the interaction between the Self (the Characters) and the Other (the Actors). On account of the Actors' representation, they see themselves as the objects in the subject. They get an entire understanding of themselves by the Actors' performance. The relationship between men and the world will be emphasized in chapter three. Albert Camus' opinions to the Myth of Sisyphus will be analogous to the powerless Characters. Sisyphus is condemned to push a rock up to the top of the mountain. The endless task tortures him forever. However, Camus regards that consciousness makes Sisyphus go beyond his destiny. The same with Sisyphus, the Characters fall into the games of theatre and their suffering does not come to an end. They are in a frame within frame. To refresh themselves, they have to suffer the representation repeatedly. The Characters are futile to their fate, but consciousness makes them transcend their fate. This will bring us to the conclusion that the Characters are "illusions" but they are realized due to their consciousness. Consciousness is the very first step that distinguishes the Characters from the Actors and makes the Characters true living being.