4 ms·

At first glance, I agree with you, but upon further thought, I remember a literature class we had in college and we were reading something and had dissected it

by jjeaff 6y ago

At first glance, I agree with you, but upon further thought, I remember a literature class we had in college and we were reading something and had dissected it to bits. We had extracted and applied so much meaning to a few passages and a few of us pointed out that all this nuance was almost certainly unintentional and that we were reading far too deeply into it. But the professor's question was "does it really matter that this wasn't the intent?" And that sort of changed the way I approached the literature. When you are reading, are you reading and studying it to merely learn about what the author thought and experienced and intended? Or are you reading to better explore your own thoughts, perceptions, and interpretations? I would say, porque no los dos?

mercer 6y ago
See, for me that supports OP's point. The reason I developed a distaste for this kind of analysis is precisely because it became clear to me that the connection with the author was tenuous. I don't feel this kind of stuff is useless, it's just that I don't find 'death of the author' stuff remotely as interesting as actually figuring out /why/ the author wrote what they did, and /what/ they intended to convey, and /how/ they decided to do it the way they did. I suspect GPT-3 type stuff will never be able to convincingly replace an 'author'. Games might show up that finally have interesting, generated side-missions, but people like myself will likely still prefer human-created versions of them. Not because the generated versions are in themselves inferior, but because the ones that involve a human will necessarily involve said human's choices on a level above the missions themselves. (Of course, in reality things are much less black and white. In more than one game I've felt like the designer(s) used tools to generate stuff and then curated the results.)

by jjeaff 6y ago

mercer 6y ago

See, for me that supports OP's point. The reason I developed a distaste for this kind of analysis is precisely because it became clear to me that the connection with the author was tenuous. I don't feel this kind of stuff is useless, it's just that I don't find 'death of the author' stuff remotely as interesting as actually figuring out /why/ the author wrote what they did, and /what/ they intended to convey, and /how/ they decided to do it the way they did. I suspect GPT-3 type stuff will never be able to convincingly replace an 'author'. Games might show up that finally have interesting, generated side-missions, but people like myself will likely still prefer human-created versions of them. Not because the generated versions are in themselves inferior, but because the ones that involve a human will necessarily involve said human's choices on a level above the missions themselves. (Of course, in reality things are much less black and white. In more than one game I've felt like the designer(s) used tools to generate stuff and then curated the results.)