Appendix N – Essays
Barthes, Roland – ‘The Death of the Author’. Or the Developer. A vindication of the rights of house-rules, fanfiction, and all other efforts to seize agency over our game experience. Once it is published, it belongs to us.
Berger, John – Ways of Seeing. If you must pick a volume of literary Marxism with which to understand the escapist/privilege argument for responsible and self-aware gameplay, pick this one.
LeGuin, Ursula K. – The Language of the Night. A little repetitive, to be sure, but LeGuin is both wise and witty, and by a third of the way through you will have her take on fantasy, society and the psyche down pat. That she hates superheroes and literary criticism are indicative of her calibre.
Mieville, China – ‘Fantasy and Revolution’ (interview). Mieville politely but firmly identifies everything that’s wrong with the post-Tolkienian fantasy and showcases a double handful of fantasies done differently.
Pereslegin, ‘Must Fantasy Be Stupid?’ (Russian original here). While Google Translate butchers the Russian sentence structure (my Russian is barely conversational, and not remotely up to translating an academic work), it does a decent job of conveying the hierarchy of errors which Pereslegin claims hamstring the genre (surfeit of imitations, inconsistent world-building, and a lack of psychological nuance in characters being chief among them).
Yancey, Katherine B. and Michael Spooner – ‘A Single Good Mind’. Excellent, if unconventionally structured, piece on collaborative writing and storytelling, and the plurality of perspectives within a text. Take ‘text’ to mean ‘game’ – either rules document or played experience – and you’ll get it.
