Digital Games and the Category of Auteur: A Re-Evaluation and Perspectives

This extended abstract, presented at DiGRA 2023 by Filip Jankowski of Jagiellonian University, re-examines the application of auteur theory to digital games. It acknowledges that games are predominantly collective productions and that the auteur concept, borrowed from film studies, carries problematic associations, including conservative origins, the legitimization of exploitative industrial labor conditions, and a discourse that canonizes a narrow demographic of prominent designers such as Peter Molyneux, Sid Meier, and Will Wright regardless of their actual production roles. Rather than abandoning the framework, the paper argues for a contextual redefinition of the auteur in games.

The proposed redefinition rests on three principles. An auteur may be an individual creator or a small, persistently collaborating group, such as Auriea Harvey and Michaël Samyn of Tale of Tales. Developers who held varied roles, including designer, programmer, and director, can also qualify when their output shows coherence in design, graphic style, or implied message. Finally, an authorial signature, such as a developer placing their own likeness within a work, can indicate attachment to co-created material. This reframing moves away from seeking a single author for each title.

The paper's case study is Meg Jayanth, an Indian-British writer whose work falls outside the European cultural circle that dominates game auteur discourse. Although she authored the unfinished post-colonial text game Samsara and contributed scripts to titles directed by others, including 80 Days, Sunless Sea, Horizon Zero Dawn, Sunless Skies, Falcon Age, and Sable, her output is identified as thematically consistent. It critiques patriarchal values and Western colonialism, embraces nomadic themes, rewrites colonial history to foreground diverse characters, and includes her avatars as authorial signatures.

The study concludes that the auteur framework can meaningfully extend to a broader and more diverse range of developers than game journalism has typically recognized. The author argues that, despite its problematic foundations, the category can be reclaimed as a means of recognizing underprivileged creators.