Personal Styles and Inner Meanings: Applying Auteur Theory to Video Games

Published in

Scripta Ludica

40 min readMay 12, 2019

(This piece was originally written in the march of 2013. As an introductory note I would like to specify that the aim of this piece was to develop an analytical framework based on auteur theory, as I felt it was the best way of critically shifting the focus from “brands”, to the people actually making the games -the extreme focus that mainstream critique of popular culture products has on big-company-defined brands I feel is a problem that remains today-. It goes without saying that anyone using the excuse of “oh but they’re an auteur”, to defend garbage people who foster toxic work environments or go around sexually harassing co-workers, is completely missing the point on why we use authorship as a critical construct and should just fuck off. That said I now also recognize how a careless use of authorship-based critiques without the proper critical context, can indeed foster an environment where people’s awful behaviours are excused because of their “status”. While I still think that authorship-based analysis is a valid and useful tool in a critic’s toolbox, it has to be used carefully and with consideration.)

INTRODUCTION

When talking about video games the concept of directorial authorship is one that is too often ignored. While plenty of studies have analysed games as cultural or historical artefacts, there seems to be a lack of analysis that looks at them in the context of who exactly makes them. While an established technique in game studies, analysing video games in the context of their director’s ludography still seems like an esoteric concept in game studies.

Some papers have engaged with the possibility (or lack thereof) of games to be a personal and expressive medium on the premises that such characteristic is necessary to define something as “art” (Smuts, 2005) but that is not the only reason why developing a critical appreciation of ludic auteurs is important. Apart from just being a generally handy tool to critically discuss a creative medium (Jacobowitz and Lippe, 2013) and adding a different point of view which can help us enjoy different facets of a work (Sarris, 1962), giving importance to an authorial framework of analysis is also a way

“[…] to combat the actual or putative norm of a hierarchical studio-based production system” (Burton, 1985)

which seems particularly important in an industry where most of the mainstream information outlets are still conceptually constricted by a flow of information dictated by big publishers.

This paper will look at the concept of directorial authorship in video games by using as a basis the cinematic concept of Auteur Theory. While still a fiercely debated subject in the field of film studies, it is undoubtable that the introduction of Auteur Theory by critics like François Truffaut and André Bazin during the 50s and 60s has pioneered new and revolutionary critical approaches to the medium, helping moving forward the understanding that we have of cinema as a whole.

By looking at the medium of film through the literary critical concept of “authorship”, Auteur Theory for once shifted the focus of film criticism, from ontology and aesthetics, to the ways in which the personal influence, individual sensibility, and artistic vision of a film’s director might be identified in their work. Switching the focus of critical analysis in such way helped cinema transitioning from an era in which very few directors were known by name, to one where the artistic craft of filmmaking was put in the foreground, celebrating those auteurs who managed to use it to express unique and personal concepts (Kuhn and Westwell, 2012). New appreciation was also found for Hollywood directors like Alfred Hitchcock, who managed to fight through the artistic restrictions imposed by the Hollywood studio system to fully realize their artistic vision through their films (Kuhn and Westwell, 2012).

In video games studies the subject of authorship has also been often discussed, but mostly with the only intent of “pinpointing” who exactly is the author of a video game (Mandiberg, 2013) or if there is one at all (Berger and McDougall, 2013). While those are surely discussions that are important to have, they often seem to ignore the reality of a video game scene where uncelebrated auteurs have been silently building up impressive bodies of work, characterized by interesting recurring themes and unique design approaches. Looking at the ludographies of directors/designers like Yasumi Matsuno, Shinji Mikami or Jason Rohrer it is almost impossible not to notice a strong authorial drive behind them.

While even in film studies authorship is not considered anymore an all-encompassing theory, the figure of the auteur, especially in its structuralist iteration, is still an extremely useful and valid concept to discuss the medium (Jacobowitz and Lippe, 2013). Developing an awareness of auteurial discourses in video games is an important step in furthering the constantly developing language that allows us to discuss games critically.

The aim of this paper will be to take a closer look at how games can be analysed through the critical lens of authorship and how the artistic view of a game director reflects on the content of a game in different production contexts. This will be accomplished by presenting two case studies: Jason Rohrer’s Transcend, an example of authorship in a “one man development team” and The Evil Within (Mikami, 2014), an example of a video game auteur directing a fairly big number of people in a “triple A” production environment.

Each case study will be approached in two parts. The first step will be going through the director’s ludography, identifying recurring themes and patterns in their games. That thematic framework will successively be used to analyse one chosen game, to understand how that game fits in the director’s ludography and what can be learned by looking at it through an auteur-driven perspective. The methods through which the games will be approached will be Consalvo and Dutton’s Game Log and Interaction Map (Consalvo and Dutton, 2006), as they will easily allow an analysis particularly focused on a specific thematic framework.

AUTEUR THEORY IN FILM

The first use of the word auteur can be traced back to the 1954 Cahiers du Cinéma article “A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema” (Truffaut, 1954). In that article Truffaut uses the term to describe French New Wave directors like Jean Cocteau and Jacques Becker, putting their self-written and directed works in direct contrast with the metteurs en scène of the Tradition of Quality, who limited themselves to adapting literary works.

While similar ideas had already been boiling for a while in the content of Cahiers du Cinéma, Truffaut article signed the day in which those concepts of directorial authorship and “pure” use of cinema were given a name. Cahiers du Cinéma became a focal point for the development and discussion of the politique des auteurs, or Auteur Theory, a critical approach to cinema that identified the director as the driving creative force behind a film (Encyclopedia Britannica, 2014). This approach based itself heavily on Alexandre Astruc’s “Camera-Stylo” theory, which described how directing can be used as an artistic tool with the same communicative range of other forms of art.

Astruc noticed that as cinema was evolving from its origin of “filmed theatre”, directors were maturing their styles and developing unique ways to communicate meaning through film. While directors of the past used the unique visual characteristic of the cinematic medium just as “background illustrations”, to reinforce the meaning of existing texts, the “new avant-garde” used the visual element as the main way to communicate with the audience. To put it into the word of the Encyclopedia Britannica:

“The auteur theory, which was derived largely from Astruc’s elucidation of the concept of caméra-stylo (“camera-pen”), holds that the director, who oversees all audio and visual elements of the motion picture, is more to be considered the “author” of the movie than is the writer of the screenplay. In other words, such fundamental visual elements as camera placement, blocking, lighting, and scene length, rather than plot line, convey the message of the film.” (Encyclopedia Britannica, 2014)

As the title of Astruc’s article implies, new directors were using the camera as a writer uses a stylo, from French: a pen (Astruc, 1948). This emerging style brought Astruc to a conclusion:

“This of course implies […] that the scriptwriter ceases to exist, for in this kind of film-making the distinction between author and director loses all meaning. Direction is no longer a means of illustrating or presenting a scene, but a true act of writing” (Astruc, 1948)

again putting the director at the creative centre of film production, as the true holder of the creative tools at the heart of cinema.

Auteur Theory used Astruc’s concept of Camera-Stylo to argue that talented film directors could infer as much authorship in their work as lone artists like sculptors or painters. Those directors were given the name of auteurs and celebrated in publications like the aforementioned Cahiers du Cinemà. A great auteur was one that managed to infer their films with personal and unique meanings and used every aspect of the cinematic medium to convey them (Kuhn and Westwell, 2012).

The independent directors of the French New Wave were not the only artists that Auteur Theory helped elevate. In fact, French critics also started to identify clear auteur figures in Hollywood cinema. Directors like Alfred Hitchcock were re-discovered and praised for their ability to develop a strong auteurial style despite working under the restrictions of the Hollywood studio system (Kuhn and Westwell, 2012).

This celebration of “the auteur” brought a shift in the framework that was used to analyse and criticize films. While most critics of the time only searched for social and political themings in films, followers of Auteur Theory started analysing them in the context of their director’s filmography, focusing on finding patterns and recurring themes in it. This new approach allowed them to extract new meaning from new and old films. One of the best examples of this is the ending paragraph of Andrew Sarris’ “Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962”:

“I recently saw Every Night at Eight, one of the many maddengly routine films Raoul Walsh has directed in his long career. […] The film keeps moving along in the pleasantly unpretentious manner one would expect of Walsh until one incongruously intense scene with George Raft thrashing about in his sleep, revealing his inner fears in mumbling dream-talk. The girl he loves comes into the room in the midst of his unconscious avowals of feeling and listens sympathetically .This unusual scene was later amplified in High Sierra […]. The point is that one of the screen’s most virile directors employed a feminine narrative device to dramatize the emotional vulnerability of his heroes. If I had not been aware of Walsh in Every Nights at Eight, the crucial link to High Sierra would have passed unnoticed. Such are the joys of auteur theory.” (Sarris, 1962)

Sarris in this small segment of texts shows how Auteur Theory is not simply a way to “grade” directors from the most auteur to the least auteur (as many critics of the theory stated (Sarris, 1962)), but an effective way to view film differently, exploring meanings and facets of their essence that could not have been accessed otherwise.

In the early 70s film criticism started switching to a structuralist approach, a method that took elements from structural anthropology and semiology to look at films with a more rigorous methodology, focusing on finding recurring structures through works pertaining to the same genre or cultural context (Barry, 2012). Auteur Theory was transitioned into this structuralist context by Peter Wollen in his 1969 book “Signs and Meaning in the Cinema” (Wollen, 1969) which initiated the idea of an auteur figure that does not necessarily coincide with the physical person that “wrote” the text. Wollen initiated auteur-structuralism, which looked at auteurs not as intentional creators of meaning, but as a posteriori structural constructs that allowed critics to talk about the recurring themes (most of which considered to be unconsciously authored) in certain filmographies (Kuhn and Westwell, 2012).

In the following years, a reaction to the rigour of structuralism grew and film criticism saw the rise of a new post-structuralist approach. Post Structuralism saw the meaning of a text as being shaped by a complex interplay of cultural, artistic and historical factors (Kuhn and Westwell, 2012). This brought forward a new wave of criticisms aimed at the auteur concept, the most famous being Roland Barthes’ “The Death of The Author” (Barthes, 1968). Barthes’ fierce attack on the concept of authorship was then followed by a more moderate post-structuralist response by Michel Foucault in his “What is an Author?” (Focault, 1970), in which he rebuilt the concept of authorship by expanding on Barthes’ post-structuralist theories:

“The author’s name characterizes a particular manner of existence of discourse. Discourse that possesses an author’s name is not to be immediately consumed and forgotten; neither is it accorded the momentary attention given to ordinary, fleeting words. Rather, its status and its manner of reception are regulated by the culture in which it circulates” (Focault, 1970)

Despite the multitude of discussions that theories based around the concept of “the auteur” have spurred during the years, auteur studies are still a commonly accepted way to analyse films and Auteur Theory is still considered one of the pillars that made film theory what it is today (Kuhn and Westwell, 2012).

AUTHORSHIP AND VIDEO GAMES

In the video game industry the concept of renowned auteurs, while not common as in cinema, is not unheard of. Designers/Directors like Shigeru Miyamoto have been praised by both mainstream critics and the general audiences alike for their ability to create unique and interesting games, slowly becoming true “institutions” in the video game industry (Smuts, 2005). Even when looking at marketing campaigns there are plenty of instances in which games have been publicized by focusing on the “big names” attached to them (Mandiberg, 2013).

In academia, the concept of video game authorship, and more in the specifics of the video game director as the main auteur of the text, is a contested one. Some papers, like Parker’s “An Art World for Art Games” (Parker, 2013) or Smut’s “Are Video Games Art?” (Smut, 2005) passingly defend director authorship in their effort to evaluate the artistic validity of the ludic medium. Other instances of authorship discussion in academia had their focus in identifying the ludic medium as heavily authored, or co-authored, by the player themselves (Homan and Homan, 2014).

I will not argue that, through their interpretative agency, the player is a big part of the creation of the meaning of a text, but papers like Buchanan-Oliver and Seo’s “Play as co-created narrative in computer game consumption: The hero’s journey in Warcraft III” seem to imply that the “video game text” is primarily the narrative generated by players engaging with the game (Buchanan-Oliver and Seo, 2012). While analysing the narrative generated by the playing of a video game is surely an interesting way to look at the medium, when trying to attribute authorship to a product it seems a somewhat limited approach. Hocking put it quite straightforwardly in his “On Authorship in Games Article”

“First, there is authorship in games […] Second, interacting with work does not shape the work it only reveals it” (Hocking, 2009)

Ian Bogost in his 2008 paper “The Rhetoric of video games” takes the exact opposite approach to the one taken by academics like Buchanan Oliver and Seo. Bogost looks at the “video game text” not as a piece of narrative, but as a set of authored rules that procedurally generate meaning:

“To write procedurally, one authors code that enforces rules to generate some kind of representation, rather than authoring the representation itself” (Bogost, 2008)

This approach, that could be considered close to the cinematic “Camera-Stylo” (Astruc, 1948), effectively frames the act of playing as a more “visually obvious” version of other media’s interpretative agency, focusing the concept of authorship on the core communicative dimension of games: the rules that define interaction. When looking at games through this approach they are not simple pieces of narrative with a nonlinear element to them, but authored generators of “possibility spaces” built to recurrently convey a set of meanings -or rhetoric- (Bogost, 2008).

Bogost uses the concept of procedural authorship to describe a particular wave of games that try to communicate social and political concepts through what he calls Procedural Rhetoric. His theories though are easily applicable to any video game, and in fact, Bogost himself notes that Janet Murray, in her 1997 book “Hamlet on the Holodeck”, pointed at procedurality as one of the core property of any digital artefact (Murray, 1997).

It is worth to notice that when applying Bogost theories to more linear games there will inevitably be some narrower possibility spaces. An extreme example of this could be cutscenes: this ludic element will usually be governed by rules that determine the moment in which the cutscene triggers, what is shown in the cutscene and how the cutscene can be skipped. This leads to a possibility space where the statuses the player can move through are represented by the time at which the cutscene is shown and their choice to skip or not said cutscene, while the main communicative content of the cutscene remains pretty much the same. It is safe to assume that a procedural product (or a “Digital Artefact”, as per Murray’s writing (Murray, 1997)) can still contain elements of nonprocedural narrative.

This focus of authorship on the design process does not necessarily mean that games cannot be catalysts for creativity; on the contrary, Bogost himself compares the design process to the creation of the poetic structure of Haiku (Bogost, 2008). The interactive nature of the medium easily allows players to stop just “playing the game” and rather use it as a starting point to author a derivative product. This though is something that necessitates intentionality and usually results in a “shift of authorship”. An easy example of this is the modding community (Wallace, 2014) but it could easily apply also to popular forms of internet video production, like “let’s plays” (commented gameplay videos popular on YouTube).

DIRECTORIAL VISION

Bogost’s concept of procedural authorship is an interesting one and it is extremely useful to delimit the boundaries of the authored “video game text”, but when observed in the framework of Auteur Theory it represents only a small portion of the “bigger picture”.

As mentioned before, in most games the text is not delivered only procedurally, but through an intersection of procedural and non-procedural structures (although the line between the two might be quite blurry). This means that a true auteur would have to be the one to supervise both of these elements. In video games, this position can be easily identified with the Director/Creative Director.

The American critic Andrew Sarris, while looking at the works published in Cahiers du Cinéma, described three main “premises” behind an auteur: Technique, Style and Inner Meaning (Sarris, 1962). These three concepts can be quite useful to look at the authorial agency that should characterize an auteur game director.

Technique indicates the “directorial expertise” of the auteur. In games as in film this is a concept quite difficult to qualify but it can be traced to the director’s knowledge of the industry and the medium. While an auteur is not needed to have in-depth knowledge of all the aspects that go into making a video game, it is implied that they should have enough understanding of them to closely supervise each area of development. The element of technique can be summed up as the ability of the director to direct a team, making it follow their “directorial vision”.

It is interesting to notice how, on a purely technical level, it could even be said that auteur-like control in game development is easier to obtain, mainly for three reasons inherent to the game development workflow:

Video game development does not have potentially non-directed phases of development.

While a film director’s only way to imbue their creativity into a script is to write it himself (Astruc, 1948), as the script is always written before the production starts, a video game director usually supervises every “phase” in the development of the game.

Film auteurs usually have a circle of recurrent persons helping them with various aspects of movie production (for instance director Christopher Nolan often uses Wally Pfister as his cinematographer)

The structure of software house/development studios, as companies based in specific places, “formalizes” this concept, allowing game directors to have fixed collaborations with more stability. An example of this could be the recurring collaboration of director Hiroyuki Ito and “scenario writer” Hironobu Sakaguchi in the Final Fantasy series.

Games can be made by an extremely low number of people.

While big budgeted “triple-A” games usually employ quite a big number of people, developers like Jason Rohrer or Anna Anthropy demonstrate that games can be also made as a painting or a sculpture would, by one person. While someone may argue that Citizen Kane (Welles, 1941) is not “made” by the auteur Orson Wells (Carringer, 1978), there is no arguing that Transcend is not a game “made” by Jason Rohrer or that Dis4ia (Anthropy, 2012) is not a game “made” by Anna Anthropy.

The second aspects Sarris described in his “profile” of the auteur is Style. This concept refers to the personal style that an auteur infuses in the products they direct.

Style is the most straightforward of the three aspects, as it directly refers to the patterns that are found in the work of the auteur. It will also be the one concept that will be prominently used as the main guideline to guide the two case studies in this paper, as it is also the most identifiable in a critical analysis.

Inner Meaning, or “Soul”, is the last and more ambiguous of Sarris’ elements of an auteur. The term refers to

“[…] the intangible difference between one personality and the other” (Sarris, 1962)

This is pointed out as the most difficult one to write about, as it is intrinsically tied with the structure of the medium. The best way it can be described is as a more subtle version of the auteur’s personal style. Unlike the director’s style though, Inner Meaning is not born from conscious design and structural patterns but from

“[…] the tension between a director’s personality and his material” (Sarris, 1962)

A good example in games could be found by comparing Miyazaki’s Dark Souls (Miyazaki, 2011) and Demon’s Souls (Miyazaki, 2009) with Shibuya and Tanimura’s Dark Souls II (Shibuya and Tanimura, 2014). While the three games share pretty much all of the core mechanics, when actively playing them the two Miyazaki games undoubtedly feel “different”, presenting what can only be described as a “subtle eeriness” that is completely absent in Dark Souls II.

CASE STUDIES

To show how elements of an auteur’s vision can be found in video games we will now proceed to present two case studies. These analyses will approach games through the thematic frameworks of their director’s ludographies, showing how those themes can surface in interesting ways when an auteur-driven analytic approach is applied.

METHODS

Each case study will be split into two parts.

The first part of the analysis will look at the director’s ludographies. The focus will be on finding patterns and expressions of a personal style in the games directed by the director in question. Those patterns, together with the eventual “feel” (or Inner Meaning (Sarris, 1962)) that the games share, will form a thematic framework that will be then applied to the second part of the analysis.

The second part will involve looking at a single game by using the “auteurial framework” that was obtained from the analysis of the director’s ludography. This part is intended to show how a video game can be analysed by using elements of Auteur Theory and how looking at a game in the context of their director’s ludography can help understand that game in a different way.

Both parts of our case studies will be approached through Consalvo and Dutton’s concepts of “Game Log” and “Interaction Map” (Consalvo and Dutton, 2006).

Approaching a game through a Game Log involves playing through that game while asking oneself questions on various aspects of it (an example might be: “how do the rules evolve as the player progresses?”). The objective of this method is to gain an awareness of how all the elements of the game come together and how they are used to deliver meaning (Consalvo and Dutton, 2006). This approach is particularly useful because it easily allows the application of particular frameworks to it.

This is done by simply adding to the questions one asks himself when approaching the game.

In the specific case of our case studies those added questions are:

Do the themes and mechanics of the games show a pattern?
If a pattern has already been found, does this game contains elements of that pattern?
Are those recurring themes of mechanics just genre tropes or are they particular to the director?
How are those recurring themes delivered?
Do the games share a particular “feel”? (referring to Sarris’ concept of Inner Meaning (Sarris, 1962))

A relevant question would also be something along the lines of “do the recurring themes have any connection with the director’s personal history?” but sadly, unlike in cinema, there is quite the lack of information about the personal history of video game directors.

The Interaction Map is another extremely useful tool when approaching a game, as it allows to keep track of elements of procedural authorship. By looking in an abstract and schematic way at the rules that delimit player agency it will be possible to extrapolate the subtler elements of procedural rhetorics. This approach is especially useful when analysing Rohrer’s games, as they are particularly notorious for communicating concepts through rules and structures, without necessarily explaining them fully to the player (Parker, 2012).

SAMPLING

The two games to analyse have been chosen to give a complete view of how game authorship works in two diametrical opposite contexts: “The independent scene” and “triple-A development” (the latter being the common term for big budgeted studio games (Lipkin, 2012)).

As the meaning of terms like “indie” and “triple-A” is still widely discussed, due to the industry’s ever-shifting economics (Lipkin, 2012), the terms will be explored at their “extremes”, with a “one-man development team” producing free games on one side and a “big studio game” on the other side. This will also be helpful as it will allow us to have an insight into two radically different workflows (one man making a game vs a director making a game by directing a big team)

The two games sampled are:

Transcend (Rohrer, 2005) is the first game of indie developer Jason Rohrer. Rohrer is an independent designer and programmer that focuses on making small games with pixel art visuals. Rohrer is effectively a one-man development team, personally dealing with every aspect of the production of his games, from design to programming to visual assets. Analysing Transcend will give us an insight into how an auteur can inflect his vision while enjoying the artistic freedom given by an indie production cycle (Martin and Deuze, 2009). More importantly, this analysis will search for authorship in a context where only one man personally authored every single aspect of the game.
The Evil Within (Mikami, 2014) is the last game by renowned game director Shinji Mikami. After having directed such commercial hits like Resident Evil (Mikami, 1996) and Dino Crisis (Mikami, 1999) Mikami earned himself a fairly big amount of public recognition, this allowed him in 2010 to found his own software house: Tango Gameworks. Produced by Bethesda Softworks and developed by the aforementioned Tango Gameworks, The Evil Within is the exact opposite of Transcend: an example of an auteur working in a “triple A” environment and leading a fairly big team in the production of a game.

In addition to those two games, the case studies will also involve the director’s ludographies. Those ludographies will only include the games in which those designers are credited as “director”, as the aspect of authorship we want to explore is the specific one of directorial authorship. It should be also noted that I decided to exclude Sleep is Death (Rohrer, 2010) from Rohrer’s ludography, as it is more a storytelling software than a full-fledged “game” (it is at its core an environment in which two players can move and share objects in a freeform way).

Just as the French critics of Cahiers Du Cinéma based their Auteur Theory both on the independent directors of the French New Wave and on Hollywood auteurs like Hitchcock, the aim with those case studies is to show how directorial authorship in games is possible both in small “one-man development teams” than in big studios like Tango Gameworks.

CASE STUDY #1: JASON ROHRER AND TRANSCEND

Games: Transcend (Rohrer, 2005), Cultivation (Rohrer, 2007a), Passage (Rohrer, 2007b), Gravitation (Rohrer, 2008a), Between (Rohrer, 2008b), Primrose (Rohrer, 2009), Inside a Star-Filled Sky (Rohrer, 2011), Diamond Trust of London (Rohrer, 2012), The Castle Doctrine (Rohrer, 2014)

JASON ROHRER’S LUDOGRAPHY

Even before starting to play the games, Rohrer’s ludography shows an interesting pattern in how the works have been released. The first block of games, from Transcend to Primrose, has been distributed as freeware by using the website Sourceforge.net (Between, being commissioned by Esquire.com, but still released as freeware), while every game afterwards has been self-published in a “commercial” way (Inside a Star-Filled Sky and The Castle Doctrine digitally through Steam and Diamond Trust of London physically on the Nintendo 3DS). This distinction does not seem to just affect how the games are commercially distributed, but also shows a different approach to design by Rohrer’s part, as Primrose and all the games afterwards are clearly designed to present more straightforward genre mechanics.

The theme that is omnipresent throughout Rohrer’s work is the one of “family” and relationships, as all the games in the first “block” of releases approach that theme in one way or the other.

In Cultivation the player has to tend their garden to form relationships with other gardeners and ultimately procreate
In Passage the game becomes more difficult if the player decides to take a spouse (although it also leads to “reap a larger reward from exploration” (Rohrer, 2007c))
Gravitation is an autobiographical game wholly based around Rohrer balancing family and work, as the player has to alternate playing with a little kid and exploring a vertically expanding “platform” environment
While in Between this theme is not explicit in the visual representation of the game, the whole experience is based upon two players collaborating. It is interesting to notice how this is the only multiplayer game made by Rohrer that is not playable without another player (both Diamond Trust of London and the multiplayer storytelling software Sleep is Death can be played “alone”). Between is a game that explicitly states through its ludic structure that the player cannot proceed through it alone
As mentioned above, with Primrose Rohrer enters into a more genre-oriented phase. Primrose itself being mostly a small divertissement oriented at the smartphone market. A small puzzle game designed around Rohrer’s love of the board game Go (the two games share plenty of concepts and rules)
Inside a Star-Filled Sky and Diamond Trust of London do not seem to contain themes of relationship and family, as the first is a quite straightforward top-down shooter and the second a simulation game about the industry of blood diamonds
With The Castle Doctrine Rohrer returns on working with the themes in question. The game, despite being a quite straightforward “tower-defence-like” puzzle game, is wholly themed around protecting your family from burglars invading the house
How those themes fit into Transcend will be looked at in the second part of the analysis
How those themes fit into Transcend will be looked at in the second part of the analysis

Another minor theme present in some of Rohrer games, especially in his early output, is the one of the inexorable passage of time. In fact, his first three games all deal extremely directly with the concepts of time and death.

This theme is introduced with Transcend, where the player has to protect flowers that bloom and wilt as time passes; it is then brought forward by Cultivation, in which the player is always aware of how much time is left before his avatar dies. This preoccupation of Rohrer with death and the passage of time arrives then at its pinnacle with Passage, a whole game based around how a human decides to live his limited lifespan (Rohrer, 2007c). Regarding death, all of Rohrer’s games also share an additional quirk: none of them uses a traditional checkpoint system, when death is mechanically present it is always definitive and it ends the game.

On a purely technical side, all of Rohrer’s games share an interesting peculiarity: none of them explains itself to the player. All of his games drop the player in their procedural structures and leave them to figure out how they work and in what way they can interact with them. Even Cultivation, the only one of his games with an explicit tutorial, starts off by saying that the player might want to ignore the tutorial as

“[…] it may reveals details and strategies that would be more fun to discover on your own” (Rohrer, 2007a)

Playing through Rohrer’s ludography it is also possible to identify a quite clear personality (or inner meaning (Sarris, 1962)) in all of them. Every game developed by Rohrer is carefully paced to be intimate and slow moving, even the shooter Inside a Star-Filled Sky makes the player slow and fragile, forcing them to calmly proceed through the levels and methodically plan his moves. His style of game design also focuses on creating extremely short “core game loops”. Rather than being games of long planning or of progression, Rohrer’s games are games of repeating patterns, games in which the player slowly learns the inner working of the system until they manage to find the one pattern of actions that make the game “progress”, finally revealing the true communicative form of the text.

TRANSCEND

Transcend, distributed as a free digital release in 2005, is Jason Rohrer’s first published game. At its core it could be described as a top-down shooter: the player commands a small triangle that can move around on a flat plane, shoot and pick up items. What sets the game apart from other instances of the genre is that the player’s bullets initially do not have any effect on the enemies and that said enemies cannot really damage the player.

To progress through the three levels of the game the player will have to pick up the flowers placed around the environment and bring them to the centre of the screen. Once there, the flowers will start slowly blooming and wilting and will grant the player the possibility to shoot progressively more powerful bullets. The player will then have to alternate shooting at one “bigger” enemy, as killing it will complete the level, and protecting the flowers from the smaller enemies that constantly try to attack them.

There is no explanation of how this system works (apart from a text file explaining the key bindings), so the first phase of the game is explorative, forcing a player not yet ready to effectively engage with the game to slowly learn its inner working. After the player “gets” the rules Transcend, as most Rohrer games do, becomes a hypnotic loop of balancing actions. The player will be continuously balancing their time between shooting enemies and collecting flowers, while being constantly concerned about protecting the flowers they have already collected.

This structure is extremely similar to the one of Gravitation, in which Rohrer describes the difficult relationship between his job and his family by creating an interactive system where the player has to balance their time between the two interlocking activities of “playing with the kid”, exploring a vertical “platform” environment and pushing blocks into a fire.

Transcend, despite lacking the visually representative elements of Gravitation (Transcend’s graphics are entirely made by abstract shapes), seems to be approaching Rohrer’s recurring theme of family relationships from a similar point of view. The game puts the player in charge of balancing his time between work (attacking the big enemies to progress through the level) and fatherhood (protecting the flowers, an action with a symbolical connection to parenthood). Again, Rohrer uses procedural systems autobiographically, building another game that shows a “personal” sphere and an “artistic sphere” that are inevitably interconnected. Just as Between forced two players to rely on one another to construct a beautiful tower, and just as Cultivation directly connected the “art” of gardening to collaborating and procreating; Transcend ludically states that protecting the flowers is essential to the progression through levels, as it is only by fulfilling the former task than the player can shoot powerful enough bullets to accomplish the latter.

Despite the clear genre framing of Transcend, Rohrer’s imprint pervades every inch of the game. Most top-down shooters base themselves on an extremely frantic pacing (e.g. Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved (Cakebread, 2003)), Transcend on the other hand is steady and methodical. The slow patterns of the enemies and the flowers are punctuated by a dynamically generated soundtrack, which more often than not will sound closer to an ambient track than to the techno beats that usually characterize the genre (again Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved (Cakebread, 2003)).

Transcend may often look a bit distanced from the other games in Rohrer’s ludography, as it frames its gameplay through the canonical structure of a top-down shooter and it does not directly represent its autobiographical intent visually. Exactly because of this, it is interesting to notice that, despite the appearances, all the themes that Rohrer brought forward in his career are already present in this game. The fact that they work just as well as in his other games demonstrates once again how Rohrer’s game making style is much more rooted in proceduralism that into any kind of visual or literal representation.

CASE STUDY #2: SHINJI MIKAMI AND THE EVIL WITHIN

Games: Resident Evil (Mikami, 1996), Dino Crisis (Mikami, 1999), Resident Evil –Remake (Mikami, 2002), P.N.03 (Mikami, 2003), Resident Evil 4 (Mikami, 2005), God Hand (Mikami, 2006), Vanquish (Mikami, 2010), The Evil Within (Mikami, 2014)

SHINJI MIKAMI’S LUDOGRAPHY

As mentioned in the Sampling section, the directorial career of Shinji Mikami has been the exact opposite of the one of Rohrer. Unlike the American director, Mikami has always worked in fairly big studios, starting his career as a planner and designer in Capcom working on some minor licensed projects, just to then be “promoted” and directing his first project in the form of the first, iconic, Resident Evil (Parkin, 2014).

The one element that immediately jumps to the eye when playing Mikami’s games is his love for the horror genre. In the specific, what connect all of his horror games is the recurring theme of creatures of seemingly supernatural evil, being in fact created by the failings of futuristic science:

In the Resident Evil games, the zombies are created by a virus engineered by the infamous “Umbrella Corporation” (especially in the first game of the series this is treated as a big reveal, as the player discovers a secret research facility under the mansion in which the game is set)
In Dino Crisis the presence of aggressive dinosaurs is explained by a failed time travel experiment
Resident Evil 4 features new enemies called Las Plagas. Just as in the first Resident Evil those monsters are scientifically engineered in a research facility hidden in a seemingly rural setting
The characters of The Evil Within are all trapped into a “mind-melding” experiment by an insane scientist

Those elements are not just a pretext to believably insert “monsters” into a contemporary setting. In fact, all the climaxes of those games involve delving deep into research facilities to ultimately try to eradicate the evil at its core (apart from Evil Within in which that element is still present, but not in the game’s climax). It is also interesting to notice how even Mikami’s more light-hearted action games make constantly use of imagery rooted in futuristic technology, as both P.N.03 and Vanquish, behind their over-the-top style, deal with the dangers of advanced technology (the former dealing with cloning technology and the latter with military technology).

Alongside with his fascination with “scientific horror”, another element that is always present in Mikami’s games is over-the-top action. Even in his more slow-paced games, like Resident Evil and Dino Crisis, there are multiple sections in which Mikami subverts the expected tone to insert bombastic chase sequences and grotesque monsters (an example is the Tyrant boss fight at the end of the first Resident Evil). This element seems to steadily grow more and more prominent in Mikami’s work as the time passes:

Mikami starts with Resident Evil and Dino Crisis, straightforward horror games with some sporadic over-the-top scene. The major example, in this case, is the ending of Resident Evil, as the player is chased by a giant disfigured zombie as the mansion in which the game is set is about to explode
He then approaches the action genre for the first time with P.N.03. The game never really devolves into “comedy” but it definitely uses the action framework to deliver more absurd and “bombastic” action scenes
Quite emblematic is Mikami’s return to the Resident Evil franchise with Resident Evil 4, a game that alternates quiet horror sections to a big number of over-the-top action sequences, often edging into parody (one boss fight involves the protagonist, Leon Kennedy, fighting a dwarf dressed as Napoleon that controls a tentacular abomination made of flash)
This tendency sees its peak with God Hand and Vanquish. Both games are entirely based on over-the-top action and comedy. The former being a fighting game in which the protagonist, using only his bare hands, faces giant demons and gorillas wearing lucha libre masks; the latter being a parody of American action movies, in which the player can slide on their knees in slow motion while shooting (at Soviet robots)

The best way to describe Mikami’s directorial personality is “polarized”. His games are full of really “quiet” moments and extremely “loud” ones, but never seem to reach a “moderate” pacing. The player is always left either fearing for their avatar’s life or taking down hordes of enemies while in complete control. Mikami constantly jumps from subtle horror, in which the emptiness of the environments makes the player constantly afraid of what could suddenly attack him, to the aforementioned moments of “bombastic” action, in which the player is faced with grotesquely absurd enemies. As already noted we can clearly see this “personality” shift as time passes, with his first games containing more of the former “extreme” and his later games more of the latter.

THE EVIL WITHIN

Directed by Shinji Mikami, The Evil Within is a horror game released in 2014 for PC and consoles. Unlike what we saw with Rohrer’s Transcend, The Evil Within shows its coherence with its director ludography right from the first visual impact. The horror theming, the grotesque monsters, the focus on resource management (in the form of ammunition) and the camera over the shoulder of the protagonist, are all elements that can be immediately connected to past games directed by Mikami.

According to Mikami this is supposed to be his last game as a director, as after a twenty-four years career he wants to use Tango Gameworks, the studio he founded, to give space to new and young directors (Purchese, 2012). While such declarations cannot always be taken at face value (game directors like Hideo Kojima have said similar things for years (Schreier, 2015)), The Evil Within really feels like an endpoint. The game could almost be described as a closing of the circle, as Mikami goes back to his horror roots to direct a game that focuses once again on his more subtle approach to game design.

The array of interactions available to the player is extremely reminiscent of Mikami’s Resident Evil 4, with the camera placed over the shoulders of the protagonist and a very similar scheme of controls: the player can move, shoot, use consumable items and eventually execute contextual actions. The main difference between the two games is that the weapons in The Evil Within are vastly less accurate; their weight is palpable as the analog-stick-controlled pointer constantly wavers ever so slightly in undesirable directions. This immediately brings to mind the notoriously imprecise and slow controls of the first Resident Evil, which so much helped that game convey its horror themes.

The first level of The Evil Within starts with an uncharacteristic section where the player is forced to hide from a series of overpowered enemies. This section shares some structural similarities to popular games like Amnesia: The Dark Descent (Grip and Nisson, 2010) and Outlast (Red Barrels, 2013), as for example the extreme fragility of the main character and the use of “scripted” sequences (the way in which the protagonist is restrained at the start of this level is also very reminiscent of a number of moments in Outlast). Interestingly, despite being only a small part of the game that is never repeated afterwards (or at least never in a way so similar to the aforementioned games), this section has been one of the most prominent elements shown in promotional material (GameSpot, 2013).

After completing the initial stealth section, the game returns to feeling unmistakably Mikami, as the tension is broken by an over-the-top cutscene in which the protagonist escapes from a city crumbling behind him by using a stolen ambulance. After that scene the game slowly starts entering its definitive pace, building an effective horror structure by re-contextualizing the tropes that have characterized Mikami’s ludography in the past years. The game alternates horror set pieces, almost devoid of enemies; shooting sections, in which just as in the first Resident Evil the player has to accurately manage their resources; and big over-the-top boss fights, that more often than not work as a fast-paced release of tension and fear. Despite the horror-oriented approach, there are even a couple of instances in which Mikami’s humour shines through, the major example being the twelfth chapter, when the game suddenly reveals a driving section in which the player is encouraged to run over hordes of zombies.

The game’s plot focuses on a mad scientist called Ruvik (we see again Mikami’s themes of misused science as creator of evil) melding his mind with a series of characters and tormenting them by creating horribly grotesque scenarios based on his own backstory.

It is hard not to make a comparison between Mikami and the Ruvik character, as the various scenarios in which the scientist will put the protagonist seem to share more than one thematic connection to Mikami’s previous games. There’s a mansion extremely similar to the one of the first Resident Evil, there’s a rural setting bathed in sunlight that can easily remind of Resident Evil 4, there is even a retreading of the original Resident Evil 4 concept (Yota, 2008) that Mikami never got to use in the final game (Ruvik, in this case, takes the part of the blue ghost, chasing the player as an unstoppable force).

As the themes and settings of Mikami’s “ludic past” repeat it feels more and more as the Ruvik character is a stand-in for the Japanese director himself (Fiandra, 2014). Aside from personally devising the nightmarish environments that the protagonist is forced to explore (just as a game designer would do), Ruvik is also never personally “aggressive” toward the player, with his dialogue mostly reading as sinister but challenging.

“I know who you are, Seb… I know what you crave… what you fear… will you be able to live with yourself knowing what I’m gonna make you do? Poor little Joseph couldn’t…Too bad they dragged you into this… but either way… you’re mine… to do as I please” (Mikami, 2014)

This coincidence between Ruvik’s past and Mikami’s “ludic past”, when read together with the character’s demeanour and Mikami’s statements about The Evil Within being his last game, makes this work feel almost like a “victory lap”. It is as if Mikami, through the character of Ruvik, is trying to open for one last time the doors of his mind to the players (Fiandra, 2014), closing the circle by going back to the genre that made him famous and showing the player what he has done and what he can still do.

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

These two case studies have shown two ludographies with clear signs of auteur-driven production in them. Rohrer and Mikami are two examples of directors which games not only follow a coherent mechanical and thematic pattern, but also present unique “souls”, effectively reflecting a clear “inner meaning” in their ludic approach.

Rohrer’s body of work showed a clear and constant personality, as the gameplay of his games is always characterized by a slow and loop-based pacing. While a couple of his works did not contain his “formal” themes of family relationships, there was still a pattern to his ludography. Its later games slowly moved away from those themes and started applying his “personality” to more canonical “genre games”. This pattern came to a conclusion with The Castle Doctrine, which finally conciliated the two approaches by creating a “genre game” themed around “protecting your family”.

On the other side, Mikami’s ludography showed a more linear pattern, as the “absurdist” element of his games grew more and more prominent as he put out new releases, just to then being reconciled with the horror genre in the multifaceted The Evil Within.

The main difference found between the work of the two directors has been in the specifics of how they convey their themes and personality. Rohrer, as a “one-man development team”, tightly delivers his themes through small procedural systems, while Mikami applies themings to broader genre structures. While the sampling of just two ludographies is not enough to pinpoint the reason for this difference, it is easy to imagine how the different context in which the games are produced might have some influence on this factor (as Rohrer has a tighter control of details, while Mikami has a more “broad” control of the product). Although it is also possible that this is just a difference in the personal style of the two auteurs.

The only other element we found that seems derived from the production context is the uncharacteristic initial section of The Evil Within. While it is impossible to definitively say if it was something imposed by the studio, its mechanical similarity with popular games like Outlast and its prominence in the advertisement material, makes it easy to speculate that there was at least a bit of pressure on the part of Mikami to include that level in the game.

Regarding the main aim of the paper, the two case studies have effectively analysed two games by using a critical framework derived by their director’s ludography. Looking at those games through an auteur-oriented framework has not just revealed recurring patterns, but has also allowed the readings to delve into aspects that would have been impossible to recognise without such framework, allowing us to explore new ways in which those games generate meaning.

Without the context of Rohrer’s ludography, and the knowledge of how he conveyed his themes in Gravitation, Transcend might have only seemed an abstract top-down shooter characterized by an oddly slow demeanour. In the same way, without knowing about Mikami’s career, The Evil Within setting and narrative might have seemed just erratic, with its continuous changes of environments justified in-game only by the slim “mind-melding” incipit.

CONCLUSIONS

In the literature discussion and in the case studies above, this paper has discussed the way in which an analytical framework based on contextualizing games in their director’s ludographies could be devised and used.

We used Bogost’s (Bogost, 2008) theories of procedural authorship to delimit the authored “video game text” and then proceeded to use Sarris’ work in the cinematic Auteur Theory (Sarris, 1962) to trace a profile of how directorial authorship would happen in games.

After having defined the concept of an “auteur” the next step has been to proceed to the case studies of Jason Rohrer’s Transcend and Shinji Mikami’s The Evil Within, by firstly finding a pattern in their body of work and then applying that framework to Consalvo and Dutton’s Game Log/Interaction Map (Consalvo and Dutton, 2006) to analyse the games. Those case studies showed clearly how contextualizing a video game into its director ludography could lead to a completely new point of view on the work, opening it up to readings that would have been impossible without such framework.

Studying how a strong directorial vision can influence a video game, or a body of work, is an extremely important step in developing the language with which we talk critically about games. While the current player-oriented analyses are surely important in understanding how video games work, without exploring the nuances of game design and game direction we will always be missing an important part of the picture.

What I hope to have accomplished with this paper is to have successfully set a base from which an auteur oriented critical framework could be developed and discussed in video games. Jason Rohrer and Shinji Mikami are surely not the only game directors to have developed personal and unique styles of game making and there is definitely a need, in both mainstream and academic media, to discover and celebrate talented video game auteurs.

As new prominent authorial figures, like Vectorpark or Jonathan Blow (Jagoda, 2013), keep revealing themselves in the video game industry, developing a framework to make us able to analyse games in the context of their author is particularly important. There are surely problems in exclusively using an auteur oriented frame of analysis, as critics like André Bazin pointed out in the past (Bazin, 1957), but doing the opposite and keep ignoring video game auteurs is just as dangerous, as it can easily lead to miss very important facets of games, or as Sarris calls them: “the joys of auteur theory” (Sarris, 1962)

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