You are not outside the work. You are not looking in. You are already implicated.
A video game is an interactive system bounded by rules, logic, and code and yet, within those constraints, it offers something most other textual forms struggle to achieve: it makes the audience central rather than peripheral. You have felt the most impacted by a vision of art when experienced in the form of a game, so consider this project a consideration of that desire to eventually merge these methods of writing and practice in something which could be considered a game, which the site begins to allude to.
Meaning does not unfold in front of you; it unfolds through you. The narrative exists because you move, choose, hesitate, fail, reload.
Unlike most literature, painting, or film, where the audience is asked to interpret from a fixed distance, the game requires participation to function at all. Each copy of a game is technically identical, but no two playthroughs are the same. The text is incomplete without you. You are not a witness. You are a co-processor.
Long before video games, artists and theorists attempted to drag audiences closer to the work; to dissolve the invisible barrier between observer and object. Antonin Artaud, for instance, imagined a theatre that engulfed its audience entirely, collapsing representation into lived intensity. But such experiments were rare, often limited by the material constraints of their time. Games do not have this problem. Their very structure assumes variability, response, friction.
Historically, audiences were trained to behave: to sit still, to absorb meaning as it was delivered, to defer interpretation to institutions, experts, or canons. This posture produces distance — a respectful gap between the work and the viewer — but it also suppresses personal meaning, alternative readings, and misuse. The hunger to get closer to art has always existed. Games simply formalise it.
This desire was identified early on by Walter Benjamin, who recognised that technological reproduction did not merely multiply artworks — it transformed how people related to them. As images became reproducible, portable, and recontextualisable, the artwork’s traditional “aura” — its authority, uniqueness, and distance — began to decay. For Benjamin, this was not a loss to be mourned, but an opportunity: audiences could finally handle, reframe, and repurpose culture for themselves.
Digital games push this logic further. There is no stable “original” game object. A download has no patina, no singular source, no privileged instance. The game exists as code, copied endlessly, activated only in use. Increasingly, players encounter games not as finished products but as open alpha and beta builds — incomplete, unstable, visibly in-progress. Here, the audience doesn’t just interpret the work; they actively shape it. They report bugs, exploit systems, break balance, share strategies, influence development.
The aura does not even have time to form.
In this sense, the player resembles Benjamin’s politicised audience: no longer content to admire from afar, but eager to intervene, collaborate, and take possession of the experience. Games relocate the audience not only spatially; via first-person views, third-person centering, or god-like camera control, but cognitively. You are positioned as a meaning-maker and navigator by design.
This mirrors what reader-response theory argues elsewhere: that meaning does not reside inside the text, waiting to be extracted, but emerges through the encounter between text and reader. Games simply make this unavoidable. You cannot remain neutral. You cannot stay outside. Every input is an interpretation.
So when you play, you are not consuming narrative. You are performing it.
And when the system responds — when it adapts, resists, glitches, or breaks — that feedback loop becomes the real content of the work.
The game is not finished. The game is not authoritative. The game only exists while you are inside it.