Introduction: The rise of videogame auteurism

Over the past decade, debates about videogame authorship have gradually emerged, enmeshed with discussions about videogames’ place within the field of culture. Examining the discourses about authorship is particularly relevant at a time when videogames are being redefined as cultural artefacts and gradually viewed as a form of legitimised culture. Considering that Europe has a long tradition of auteurism, which first emerged in cinema in the 1950s (Maule, 2008), it is worth exploring whether there is also a European videogame ‘auteur politics’.

The first step should be to ask ourselves a question: ‘What is an author?’ (Foucault, 1984). As Foucault shows in his famous text, the answer to this apparently simple question is rather complex and makes us reflect on the attribution of authorship and its role in our understanding of different types of texts in the Western tradition. The author's proper name does not simply refer to a real person but also to a ‘function’: ‘the author function is therefore a characteristic of the mode of existence, circulation, and functioning of certain discourses within a society’ (Foucault, 1984, p. 108). Every text (as a semiotic artefact), from a grocery list to a film, is created by someone, but not all creators count as authors and not all texts contain the ‘author function’.

Authorship serves a number of purposes; we invoke authorship to classify works (grouping together different texts and distinguishing them from others) and give them economic value (branding, intellectual, property).