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

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.)