The Poetics of Videogames: The Logic of Sense and Meaning in the Videoludic Discourse

Introduction

The origin of a work of art is no longer a secret. One of the most important principles of art criticism consists in underscoring that Rembrandt, Tchaikovsky, Hitchcock, etc., do not have their complete meaning alone. As Bloom (2009) suggests when broaching the subject of poetry, the meaning of a work of art is the appreciation of its relationship with traditions and artists of the past. As readers or spectators we never stop searching for the new, and as critics we strive to consider a new work in light of the existing corpus. We are incapable of evaluating it on its own and only its relationship with the ideal state of the rest of the works provides us with the necessary tools for incorporating it in that patchwork that should, in one way or another, rearrange itself in a new order to accommodate it. In this sense, what happens to the new work of an artist also occurs to all those preceding it. In other words, just as past symphonies, novels and films alter the physiognomy of current ones, so too do the latter affect the former in a limitless exchange of memories. Therefore, we could say that each work is a fragment of memory, a thread that, whether we be creators, critics or receivers, should link us invisibly to a hybrid state in which the past and present merge.

For Gérard Genette, the object of poetics – this being understood as the set of principles or rules characterizing an artistic genre, school or author – can never be the uniqueness of a text, but rather its significance, namely, “all that overtly or secretly relates the text to other ones” (Genette, 1989, p. 10). Riffaterre, influenced by the works of Batjin (1986) and Kristeva (1978), refers to intertextuality as a mechanism inherent to literary reading. He puts forward the essential argument on which this chapter is based when recalling that it is in the intertext, be it literary or non-literary, where the significance of any work resides: (Riffaterre, 1980, p. 10). To his mind, the significance of a work “l'intertext n'est alors qu'un postulat, mais le postulat suffit, à partir duquel il faut construire, deduire la signifiance”¹ is a question that exists elsewhere, in a context that can be unprecedented or not for the reader, and differs from its meaning, a concept that inevitably stems from itself and which always occurs in the linear reading performed by the receiver: “Indeed, only intertextuality produces significance, while linear reading, inherent to literary and non-literary texts, produces merely meaning” (Genette, 1989, p. 11).

In view of this difference between meaning and significance,² we can claim that the poietic process underlying the production of narrative, literary, film and television works adapts to the transtextual or intertextual logics that, in the words of Riffaterre, allow for the transition from the meaning to the significance of a text. All novels, films and TV series generate their own meaning when read/watched by the reader/spectator. However, access to the sphere of significance can only be gained through the set of relationships that all works have with other absent ones. By virtue of this nexus forged in absentia, the mechanisms of influence that regulate the construction of characters and their roles, the establishment of genres and their typologies and, at another level of interference, the different generations of artists whose creative works have felt the weight of tradition are determined in the fields of theory and critique. It is thus possible and necessary to speak of a poetics of meaning, enclosed in each and every work, and a poetics of significance, only plausible beyond its limits, in the narrative environments of literature, cinema and television. Would it be possible to understand the nature of Anna Karenina without Emma Bovary? On the other hand, would the character of Emma Bovary exist without the idealistic influence that Cervantes exerted on Flaubert? Moreover, could Joyce’s Ulysses exist without Homer’s Odyssey? As can be observed, the realms in which the meaning and significance of traditional narrative works dwell are boundless and characterized by a creative free will only limited by the artist’s imagination. But transtextual and intertextual procedures can occasionally clash with the laws governing the protection of intellectual property and copyrights.