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.