Story Ownership continued

The reason I went into an exploration of this subject is because of a story a friend of mine, Jonas, related to me about how he felt when he explored the multi-layered game Braid.

Built into the game is an explanation of the lowest, most subtle layers - the game, being non linear as games are, allows the player to seek out this explanation or leave it alone at his leasure. But it still serves not just as an external message from the author, but as a part of the game itself, that insists on being the "right" manner of understanding the subtleties.

Any other interpretation has the unfortunate concequence of making the experience a lot worse, so it really gains authority in this fashion.

But what happens when the player disagrees with the "correct" interpretation of the subtleties? What happens if he hates it, as Jonas did?

There's a breach - it's like playing a game of pen and paper dungeons and dragons and the dungeon master suddenly decides to destroy the story for one of the players by denying him the ability to participate. It's an implicit rule that the dungeon master will not do that. It's self governed - so there's noone there to punish the dm if he does it - but it remains a rule.

So how does this rule work with the idea of story ownership? If the author truly owned the story as if it were his property, then how can there be room for rules which inhibit what he can do with it?

The answer must be that - well, at least if my understanding holds up - story ownership is shared between an author and a reciever, and the fact that the reciever traditionally has had few tools for defending his part of the property is unrelated to the sensations and feelings involved.

In other words, the ethics of story ownership take their basis in culture, rather than in law; it is culture that dictates that the DM doesn't destroy a story mid-game, and it is culture that dictates that Jonas felt his anger was righteous, and that something had been stolen from him by the author upon discovering the deepest depths of the game.

Now I'm not suggesting any changes to ownership laws in my writings on this subject - rather, I would just like to explore the ethics of what a author can and cannot reaonsably do without infringing on the story ownership his audience feels, at least in our current cultural climate. I hope to return to this subject at some later date, again.

Story Ownership

Who owns a story?

It's a simple question with a complex answer; there's certainly one naive answer that immediately comes up - the one who created it.

Which makes a great deal of sense when the author, and the person who performs the story, are one and the same; which is really the way the first stories were related, so in a historical context it'll often be true.

It makes less sense, though, when the performance of the story is seperate from the author of the story - does a dead author still own a story, for example?, Because that butchers the idea of ownership pretty badly; once you're dead, you don't own anything anymore. Certainly the ownership is not generally inherited - the children of JRR Tolkien couldn't simply add an additional book in Lord of the Rings series if they saw fit. Legally they could, but it would not be percieved as if it had been written by JRR - so at the very least, the exact type of ownership JRR possessed is not inherited. Perhaps a different type of ownership is what the children recieve, but that's really besides the point!

What I'm getting at is not that ownership of a story depends on the proximity of the author and the performance; it's rather that the question has an intuitively trivial answer given some very particular, but fairly common, circumstances. That is, it's trivial if a story is performed and made by one and the same person.

But if it is written, such that the story is detached from the author, it almost gains a life of its own; it sometimes lives beyond the mortal life of the author, at which point ownership becomes difficult to define. It becomes apparent that there are several kinds of ownership (of which I have aluded to at least 3 here), and that these depend upon a lot of different circumstances.

I hope to touch on this subject again later, because it's worth exploring in more detail.