ABSTRACT
This chapter explores promotional authorship in video games, revealing a concept of creativity and the creative process as conferring value on a media product vastly unlike those common in film and television. The chapter demonstrates the absence of the author figure in game promotion, instead laying out two models that promote collaboration and teamwork as key to value in the production of a game: the leadership team model and the studio authorship model. The chapter offers the concept of authorship as invitation, based upon not a distance between the audience and a reified singular author figure but an ideology of communal creation and personal familiarity between studio staff and players. These ideas are traced to the history of games and the founding myth of the garage developer, which create a discourse very different from the foundations of film and television within the discursive realm of art. The chapter concludes on identifying trends of resemblance between producer-audience relationships as built in game studio blogs and those emerging in television social media accounts, showing ideas of authorship moving between media colonising new ecosystems.
