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Rhetor: Revue de la Société canadienne pour l’étude de la rhétorique 5 (2013) <www.cssr-scer.ca>
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Reservoirs of Ethos: Symbolic Authorship and the New Media
Adaptation
Mark Rowell Wallin
Thompson Rivers University
From the banalities of the technical writing or advertising team, to the big-budget, big-return
world of film and video-game adaptations, the practical intricacies of the individual author-as-
genius are long dead. But the public desire for the mythology of the author persists in its
absence; the trappings of the rugged individualist that belie the realities of collaboration surround
us as auteurism has become part and parcel of our media culture. Given these multifarious
manifestations of authorship, in what sense is Peter Jackson the author of The Lord of The Rings,
or Sid Meyer the creator of the Civilization game series? These “authors,” each titularly identical
but functionally distinct, are not hermetic, but exist in system of relationships, each author-figure
depending upon others to fulfill their larger rhetorical purpose: to imbue the text with ethos, or
the legitimacy of authority. This symbolic authority is not vested in individuals, but rather in
symbolic phantasms or even venerated texts themselves, given life by the projected desire of an
audience hungry for the mirage of direct, heroic authorship. This symbolic authority also
suggests to us a set of complex dynamics that author-figures engage in when adaptation
relationships are formed; if we are aware of the collaborative realities of new media texts, the
additional wrinkle of those texts being adaptations lends to the dizzying complexity of audience
responses. How gamers, film viewers, or even readers respond to new media adaptations depends
on the relative cultural resonance, power, and authority vested in author figures presented by
legal, corporate entities, as set against the cultural resonance, power, and authority of the model,
which stands behind the adaptation like a poltergeist. All these relationships are linked across
interlocking fields of both symbolic and material powers: the financial and legal owners of texts
purchase rights to earlier texts (often ones already rich with credibility), imbue symbolic authors
as vessels of authority for public consumption, and then task labor-authors with the work of
producing those new media texts.
Figure 1 gives us a picture of the complex system of relationships that occur when we are
presented with the realities of corporate and adaptive authorships. While much of our everyday
economy of art circulates on the assumption of a straightforward relationship between an author
and her work (whether it be the book’s author, the film’s director, or the video game’s designer),
Figure 1 portrays a matrix of power, responsibility, and desire. But the figure does not simply
represent the reality of corporate, new media authorship, but the dynamic that occurs when new
media texts are adapted from earlier works in other modes. When a videogame adapts a film or
novel, there may be several levels of perceived authorship and authority operating
simultaneously. For example, when Electronic Arts released Lord of the Rings: The Return of the
King (2003), game director Glen Schofield was not the most prominent author of the text, despite
his leadership of the design team as well as his recognition and credibility in the gaming
community. Rather, Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King film, and J.R.R.
Tolkien’s Return of the King novel, both lent credibility and cultural power to the game to which
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they had been titularly associated. Different audiences would perceive each as having more or
less credibility based on their associations with those modes; fans of the films would identify the
marketing, packaging, and gameplay associations with the film and see Peter Jackson as the
author, while gamers would see Schofield, while still others would be drawn because of their
veneration of Tolkien’s novel.
Figure 1: The Cycle of Adaptation Ethos
Model of New Media Authorship
In order to finally understand the way that adaptive ethos interacts with more conventional
understandings of authorship, we should examine the model from the ground up. Much of our
culture’s assumptions about the philosophical and legal rights of authors arise from late
eighteenth century conflicts about the relationship between art and artists. Many in the
philosophical and aesthetic movements of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries
attempted to conjoin the familial terms authority and authorship, vesting in individuals the
responsibility and power of aesthetic creation. Philosophers and poets such as Kant, Goethe,
Wordsworth, Coleridge, and many others sought to move conceptions of the artist away from
those epithets they saw as more closely associated with medieval manuscript cultures:
transcribers, archivists, or even transfusers. They sought to move towards a vesting in the artist
of the power of genius and spontaneous creation. By privileging newness, solitary genius, and
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aesthetic independence, Romantic theorists made the formerly straightforward act of borrowing
and adapting earlier texts a perilous puzzle of competing authority. This notion of authorship as
ownership forms the basis of our current understandings of intellectual property, as well as the
veneration of authors that fill bookshelves, pack movie theatres, and drive videogame purchases.
Yet digital technologies are exposing the cracks in the myth of authorship in ways predicted by
both the New Critical movement of the early twentieth century, as well as the postmodern
declarations of the author’s death. Scholars such as Jeff Rice (2007) are noting that
compositional processes such as web design are returning us to a pre-Romantic acceptance of
borrowing and appropriating in the form of “sampling.” The DJ, according to Rice, stands as the
postmodern artist, exposing the complex matrix of authorship by weaving new art from old.
If we presume a pre-Romantic view of authorial rights, as Rice suggests—one where
texts are created by arranging samples of earlier works into new forms, sometimes overtly
associated with their antecedents and other times not—certain patterns of force emerge that
explain how texts are produced and distributed. Kress and van Leeuween suggest in Multimodal
Discourse that all text is hinged on a series of four metaterms, or strata of practice, which operate
simultaneously. These terms can be roughly diagramed into two axes: a production one (which
would include aspects of both design and production), and a distribution one. For Kress and Van
Leeuween, design “stands midway between content and expression. It is the conceptual side of
expression, and the expressive side of conception. Designs are uses of semiotic resources,” while
production is the “organization of the expression … the actual material articulation of the
semiotic event or the actual material production of the semiotic artifact” (2). Production requires
skill in particular media and therefore requires labor suited to work traditionally associated with
authorship: invention, composition, etc. Distribution, on the other hand, constitutes a re-coding
of semiotic events for a range of purposes from recording to transmission. In other words, while
design and production are text oriented, distribution’s orientation is entirely toward the
consumer/listener/reader. Its force moves produced texts toward dissemination.
While Figure 2 gives us a field in which to place the production-side life of a new media
text, it is vague as to agency. We see that there are forces exerted to produce a text, and that text
is molded and recoded for distribution, but who is exerting that force? What is the nature of those
forces at play in text production? We can begin to fill in our model of new media authorship by
identifying key agents and their respective roles. Yet, while we identify agents and participants
in textual production, we must reconcile the legal and public perception of author/text
relationship as a one-to-one correspondence, with the theoretical absence of the author; in other
words, we must accurately represent the fragmentation in real-world text production. Therefore,
we must turn to a representation of authorship that might accommodate such a multiplicity of
agents.
Wayne Booth presents authorship as a fragmented body that spreads across elements of
flesh and blood, imagination, text, and projections of readership. Booth’s model goes some way
towards a reunification of our practical and philosophical systems of authorial analysis. But more
is at work than a shattered author-figure. Systems of force operate in new media design settings,
foreseen by neither modern rhetoricians, nor postmodern critics. By corporatizing authorship,
twenty-first century business has created a new system of textual production that redistributes the
traditional roles of author and publisher into a consolidation of capital and power in the hands of
an elite.
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Figure 2: The Field of New Media Text Production and Distribution
Booth proposes five distinct levels of authorship,1 two of which are relevant for our terms
here. First, in a position that we might situate at the bottom of the production axis are the labor
authors. These are the “real people” who compose and produce texts: “There is first a postulated
flesh-and-blood person, a man or woman who writes only sometimes and who otherwise lives a
more or less troubled or happy life. I shall call this ‘real’ person the writer” (Booth 268). Note
the distinction Booth draws between authors (characterizations wielding rhetorical authority) and
writers; as the nuts and bolts of the creative act are now vested largely in collaborative
enterprises, groups of artists, from graphic designers to programmers, music directors to
scriptwriters, all work in a coordinated effort under the watchful and responsible gaze of the
producer/director/creator. In Boothian terms, these are called “flesh-and-blood” authors. In
Rhetoric of Fiction, the flesh and blood author fits three criteria: 1) they are “immeasurably
complex and largely unknown, even to those who are most intimate;” 2) they write for, or
“postulate” possible readers; and 3) they choose “(consciously or unconsciously) to create an
improved version, a second self (the implied author)” (428). These three criteria, when applied to
the corporate system, generate certain lines of force that act on the textual production:
specifically, labor authors are given the responsibility of design, and in turn, to fulfill this
responsibility, must coordinate with each other to implement the process of production. These
1 In Rhetoric of Fiction Booth attempted to reintroduce a more nuanced perspective of authorship by clearly
demonstrating that a text has not one author, but five: the “flesh and blood” author (or the writer), the implied
author, the teller of the tale, the career author and the public myth. Booth’s strategy was to fragment authorship, to
unmask the authority of textual production as a complex system of material and symbolic figures; some of these
figures (such as the writer) actively produce texts, some will be inferred from authority within (implied authors and
tellers of tales) and behind a text (the career author), and some are direct projections of audience’s desire (the public
myth).
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lines of force that find their loci around the labor author must have origins (someone who has the
authority to delegate this responsibility), and in turn, must move towards effect. That the
responsibility is delegated and a finished product handed over points to other agents in the
system who obscure the public’s clear perception of the labor authors. That is, these groups of
writers who operate behind the scenes, unseen by the public until the rolling of the final credits,
are given significant quantities of data and demographic studies upon which they base their
designs. Finally, their work contributes to the sustenance of the two other significant
author/agents in the system.
At the top of the production axis sits the legal author. Authorship in a corporate
environment (both in the sense of collaborative creation and multinational economic
organization) is divorced and far removed from the actual creative act; legal authorship is
defined in terms of the proprietary ownership of intellectual property. Legal authorship, or what
Ede and Lunsford have identified as “corporate authorship” (139), exploits conventional
perceptions of authorial genius and symbolically vests an employee with the public perception of
authorship while institutionally retaining the legal and economic benefits of the product. While
Booth has a great deal to say about labor and, as we will see, symbolic authors, he is
unconcerned with the legal ramifications of authorship, but we would be remiss if we were to
dismiss the importance of corporate, legal authorship as a factor in the textual life-cycle. In
Foucault’s “What is an Author?” he posits that when we speak of authors, we are not speaking of
the people, as such, but rather four distinct “author functions” (344). Author functions are, he
contends, “objects of appropriation” (344), suggesting that they are the property of figures
external to the function itself. While Foucault’s conceptualization of the proprietary nature of the
author function is primarily concerned with the discipline exercised over writers near the end of
the eighteenth century onward, his notion of the power and control the valuation of property
gives over products and even author functions is generative. His suggestion that both the text and
the author function are legally codified and configured as property may lead us to conclude that
corporations function, more often than not, as the legal author which exerts control (and
discipline) over the creation, dissemination, and reception of the new media text.
But the public has a fondness for heroes, and corporations do not meet the public
standards of what an author looks like. Obviously, the final goal of the entertainment industry is
to produce a commodity that will sell. This is the essence of the distribution axis: companies
create means and modes through which they deliver the produced text to the paying public. The
issue becomes the various means by which credence is bestowed upon the title. Products need an
image upon which they can be hung in order to complete the movement from the labor authors,
to the corporate legal author, and finally to consumer, and neither design teams nor corporations
retain enough rhetorical power to persuade based on character. Therefore, the desire of the
audience and the willful actions of the legal authors manufacture the figure of the symbolic
author as the repository of all the romantic ideals associated with the figure of the author. Hence,
the distribution axis serves to provide a face of authority to the public: a type of branding by
proxied authorship. In reference to conventional authorship, Booth calls this type of figure, “The
Public Myth,” or
a kind of super-author, a fictitious hero created and played with, by author and
public, independently of an author’s actual woks. Our only current word for this is
‘"image,’" but I resist contributing to the corruption of this good old word; it still has
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so many other duties to perform. "‘Character,’" in the old sense of ‘"reputation,"
comes close to what I have in mind. (Booth 271)
What is significant here is Booth’s use of the associated terms “image,” “character,” and
“reputation.” He is speaking overtly of the classical presentation of ethos. In other words, the
symbolic author is the repository of ethos generated by the labor authors in their composition, the
legal authors, in their ownership, and just as significantly, the desire of the audience. Mark Rose
points to such an authorial phantasm as being vested in “the name.” He suggests that the “the
name of the author—or artist, conductor, or, sometimes, star, for in mass culture the authorial
function is often filled by the star—becomes a kind of brand name, a recognizable sign that the
cultural commodity will be of a certain kind and quality” (1). Thus, in place of (or in concert
with) the corporate brand, the carefully crafted image of the author becomes a reservoir filled at
both ends, by both corporation and buying public.
This contribution by the public cannot be understated—the creation of the reservoir of
power that is the symbolic author is not simply a matter of image manipulation by cynical PR
people, but a direct result of an audience’s desire for a figure upon which their veneration can
rest. Alan Wexelblat refers to this as a dual/symbiotic principle, heightened by new media
technology. Even traditional, non-interactive texts produce symbolic authors where the figure of
“the author is constructed by fans through the text created by the writer, where the primary
interaction medium between author and fan is the text” (209). But with new media and the
possibilities of perpetual interaction between author-figures and the public, the relationship
becomes even more powerful and personal “as writer and the fan jointly construct an author by
means of dialog in the new media. … The dialogue participants work from partially shared
models of what the author should be and relate their interpretations to this model, which they co-
construct” (209). The new media model of symbolic authorship then offers considerable new
power to the system of authorship, vesting it not only with an absent presence, in the Derridian
sense, but with a very personal relationship. This connection between the constructed image and
the desirous consumer produces the fanatical devotion to the romantic vision of authorship we
see in the public.
But significantly, this widely embraced romantic vision is at odds with the truth that texts
in an age of new media are produced by collaboration, owned by corporations, and promoted by
manipulated images. This unwillingness to recognize what is known points to Pierre Bourdieu’s
representation of the power of the symbolic order. Symbolic power is one of displacement and
misrecognition: it has
a power of constituting the given through utterances, of making people see and
believe, of confirming or transforming the vision of the world and, thereby, action on
the world and thus the world itself, an almost magical power which enables one to
obtain the equivalent of what is obtained through force. (170)
Symbolic power, or in this case, the power of the symbolic author, is created by a relationship
between those with legitimate power (legal authors, with the authority of the state supporting
their claim to authorship) and those without (the audience’s desire for a homogeneous author-
figure). Simply, the power of the symbol is achieved through a belief in a misrecognition.
Thus, the symbolic author, publicly referred to as the producer or designer (in gaming
circles) or director (in film), often stands between the composition/production team and legal
status of diffuse corporate ownership. This inheritor of the romantic, “auteurist” movement of
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the mid-twentieth century has become a hybrid of middle management and marketing insofar as
the director/designer has direct, public responsibility for the success of the product and stands in
as a single, symbolic reservoir for the authority of the legal authors in consumer–perception. It is
this position which is of the most interest for us, because it is this position that retains the
rhetorical power of authorship, yet is the most ephemeral in real world terms. Simply, the
symbolic author is a semiotic abstraction with a physical form.
Perhaps the best way to present this rather conflicted form of authorship, the one often
mistaken for the true, legal author, is by a more careful examination of the function of rhetorical
ethos. Ethos, quite unlike its frequent compositional invocation as character, is not an attribute
vested in authorship, but a constantly fluctuating relationship between text, audience, and
perceived authority: “ethos is not an attribute but an interpretation based on the way a rhetor
behaves in presenting an appeal and the manifold of reactions an audience has to these
behaviors” (Hauser 94). In other words, rhetors not only demonstrate their character through
their texts, but also through a repeated sequence of texts—the process is forward looking and
“concerned with the interpretation of character formed through the patterns of interaction that
occur in the actual rhetorical event” (Hauser 94).
This repeated exposure that constitutes ethos is called hexis, or disposition. In ancient
Greek rhetoric, one’s hexis, or patterns of behavior, created a character for the public to observe
and a means by which new addresses could be interpreted. “As we observe [the rhetor’s] public
behavior, we see their habits revealed in the choices they make. From observing their habits, we
draw inferences about their character, or ethos” (Hauser 97). The hexis is constantly produced by
action; it is simply synonymous with being—“a permanent condition as produced by practice”
(Miller 1974, 311). But character, sometimes portrayed almost as an ontological certainty—an
authored identity—is not fixed. Rather, “the nouns habit and character are not static—are not
states or conditions of existence, but rather they can be only dynamic states, that is, states
involving action” (315). These dynamic states are created deliberately and emerge from a desire,
or goal. Presuming that the individual desires the public good and chooses to act from that desire,
she will, in turn become a vessel for the attributes of public virtue.
Similarly, the auteurist sensibility depends upon this process of character creation in
order to perpetuate itself: “creators” who produce successful games are more likely to make
future quality games. The habitual production of particular kinds of games induces an
expectation in the audience—an expectation of a general hexis, manifested by individual
instances of ethos. When Firaxis games announces the impending release of the latest edition of
Sid Meier’s Civilization, strategy game junkies everywhere take notice because the first four
Civilization products and their accompanying press releases produced an impression of who Sid
Meier was, and perpetuated a mythology as to his abilities and control over product
development. Simply, as a Civ fan, I will buy anything to which Sid Meier attaches his name
because I have played all the games he has designed (Railroad Tycoon, Civilizations 1,2, 3 and 4,
and Alpha Centauri), read interviews with him and reviews of the games, and I am persuaded by
my repeated experiences with his work that he can be trusted to produce games with elements
that I have come to expect. In our model of new media authorship, Sid Meier would obviously be
considered the symbolic author whose name is associated with a series of titles, around whom a
mythos has been created, whose very titular association with a product is enough to ensure
success, whose repeated successes have generated a “virtuous” ethos, and over time produced a
positive hexis. Firaxis games, the corporation to whom Sid Meier’s Civilization belongs, would
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have us see Sid Meier as the wiz-kid creator, or even to the most knowing of new media users, as
the inspired product manager whose leadership translates into gold. But, as we’ve seen, the
success or failure of a product is far less dependent upon the single manager of the team than the
process as a whole. So what is the “creator” doing?
The simple answer is that the creator functions as a single, fixed point upon which the
public can focus. While the corporation is legally treated as an individual author, the public
perception is otherwise (plus, ethos depends upon a perception of virtue, and even the crassest
capitalist grants the corporation, at best, amoral status). The design team, unlike a sports team,
has no direct marketability, as corporate design has no sense of fixedness—sports teams draw
their audiences from a form of tribalism, a unity surrounding a location, or set of core principles.
The gaming auteur is necessary as a type of brand that transforms a hexis into dollar signs. The
“creator,” quite literally, becomes a symbol, a brand name that inspires trust and projects a set of
core virtues.
This process of branding is one whereby ethos is carefully cultivated and funneled
through a single, symbolic unit, or the brand. David Machin and Joanna Thornborrow describe it
as a set of discursive forms, a “contextually specific knowledge about a social practice” (454).
Invoking the social semiotic principles of Kress and van Leeuwen, they point out that each brand
has a set of values and legitimations to which it ultimately appeals. They produce clusters of
associations—lifestyle, ideological, and actual satellite product associations that all create an
impression of both the brand and the linked terms—selling the network by means of overarching
concepts. In the case of gaming auteurs, each of these great names is associated with an array of
values, usually specifically associated with the games to which they are attached. Sid Meier, as
identified earlier, co founder of Micropose, whose series Civilization has been hailed as the
greatest single game series of all time by Computer Gaming World (the first magazine devoted
exclusively to computer games) and many others, is renowned for his detailed and complex
simulations. In fact, his name has become so synonymous with Civilization that after the success
of the first installment his name was added to the official title of the series: thus, Civilization
became Sid Meier’s Civilization (or CMS). Additionally, in the third installment, the symbolic
author-image of Sid Meier becomes a significant character in the game as well. One of the
appeals of the series is that players can seek the assistance of advisors to guide their nation
building. In the first version, the advisors took the form of traditional help-style hyperlinks—
primarily text/icon based interactions. The second game added the feature of quick video clips of
stylized advisors in various forms of costume befitting the state of technological advancement of
the player (i.e. civilizations with roughly enlightenment level technology would have advisors in
Elizabethan costume). But in CMS 3, Sid Meier himself becomes the animated advisor to the
players. The symbol of the author, vested with the trust of the audience and authority of the
“creator” is iconically represented in his own creation. This direct interaction of course
highlights Wexelblat’s observation about the power of intimate contact between symbolic
authors and their audiences. The creator symbolically interacts with his audience, thus
reinforcing his own, albeit abstract, power while at the same time obscuring the precise nature of
the game’s creation and ownership. Thus gaming auteurs, like brands, become specific
discourses of cultural associations that allow the legal authors to divest themselves of public
authority, yet gain capital return. Simply, game “creators” become yet another marketing weapon
in the corporate arsenal.
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So our fully illuminated system of new media authorship would look something like
Figure 3:
Figure 3: The Fragmentation of Authorship of the New Media Product
Yet we should note that successful authorship of the new media text is not only a matter of
hexis—of repetitious success—but also of struggle against the very audiences who clamor for the
heroic author figure. The attraction of the video-game text, in particular, is largely the
opportunity for audiences to become, at least in part, authors of their own customized texts.
Strategy games are particularly enticing in this respect. As Cover points out, there often exists a
struggle for authority in the seemingly open-ended structure of the game. Using Eco’s model of
open and closed texts, Cover suggests that while video games ostensibly promise an open form, a
system whereby authorship is shared between the designer and the gamer, the designer wrests
final control and authority from their audiences by limiting options available to gamers (186), or
through a presentation of affordances and constraints which either produce interactive
opportunities or limit use at the level of design (Norman). The game process, in the case of CMS
series, is “goal-driven” insofar as gamers are given a range of game play options but towards a
larger, pre-determined, meta-narrative. In the case of CMS, it is the eventual human escape to
Alpha Centuri (conveniently setting up another game by Firaxis: Sid Meier’s Alpha Centuri).
Claudio Fogu suggests that this seemingly open, but procedurally limited affordance of
audience-authorship configures Sid Meier as a “procedural author” who, rather than creating
narratives in the conventional sense of authorship, creates “procedural models of external or
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imagined systems” and imposes “sets of rules that create particular possibility spaces for play”
(118). This clarification retains the notion of the symbolic author, as Fogu clearly stipulates that
it is the designer who is “the author.” Yet this nuance helps us understand that the new media
audience’s desire that creates the symbolic author is not uncomplicated or uncontested.
Ethos and Adaptation
But the purpose of this prolonged discussion of corporate, fragmented authorship is to
understand how adaptation in general, and gaming adaptation in particular, function semiotically
and rhetorically. How does adaptation—the literal addition of authors to an accruing text—alter
the model of new media authorship? What rhetorical terms can we use to describe the power
generated by the creation of an adaptation? What will become apparent is that the adaptation
produces an analogue to the symbolic author along the distribution axis. That is, while most texts
have only their symbolic author (along with the machine of corporate promotion) to produce
ethotic power, the adaptation draws upon the legitimating power of its model. Thus, just as the
adaptation produces a textual accrual, irrevocably altering the concept of the model and
producing a network of associations that contribute to our interpretation of both, so the principle
of authorship is similarly expanded and networked. This networking of associative links between
adaptation to adaptation, and adaptation to model, seeks to monetize cultural capital, based on
the value of the linkage. Simply, the overt connection an adaptation signals through its
association attempts to garner an added dimension of legitimacy, analogous to the symbolic
author. Depending on the hexis of the source, the adaptation’s cultural capital and its ethos are
improved—the audience’s desire for the source is channeled through the adaptation. But the
process of accrual is not a simple matter of addition—any number of texts have attempted to
capitalize on the ethos of culturally resonant tales such as Lord of the Rings, but do not live up to
the dual pressure from both the audience’s desire and the standard of the model. Thus, while
accrual allows culturally resonant texts to grow, adding to the totality of a larger work, those
works are vetted by means of agonism. Longinus suggests that Plato could not have achieved his
brilliance “if he had not, like a young antagonist breaking the lance with an established
champion, eagerly contended with Homer for the first place, over ambitiously perhaps, but
certainly not without profit”(13). The relationship between adaptation and model, then, is a battle
fought for the acceptance into a canon, adjudicated by the audiences who are both drawn by an
adaptation’s association with a revered model, or drawn to a model by the excellence achieved
by the adaptation itself.
The agonistic dynamic of authorship and adaptation is highlighted by Dmitry Puchkov’s
“translations” of The Lord of the Rings. Famous in Russia for his “cynical adaptations,” Puchkov
uses piracy and illegitimacy to overlay revered works with cutting political satire, commentary,
and puerile ribaldry; Lord of the Rings was chosen over Star Wars because “Tolkien’s rather
sentimental narrative offered more ground for sarcasm and parody” (Rulyova 627). The process
is a large-scale challenge to official dominant discourse of the Russian culture and politics. But
from an adaptive perspective, it highlights the ways that adaptation is both contextually specific,
insofar as its success depends, not upon its faithfulness to a “source,” but rather, an eurhythmatic
fit, or the way the adaptation conforms to a new audience, purpose, and context. Puchkov’s
cultural resonance is greater than that of either Tolkien or Jackson; his adaptations are a better fit
to the audience and context of modern Russia than either western artists’ works are without his
alterations. Yet we must note that, based on the selection criteria, Puchkov conveniently ignores
the fact that it is Jackson’s film, not Tolkien’s book that is adapted. Jackson’s ethos is brushed
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aside and ignored in favour of the presumption of “Tolkien’s” text. Thus, the agonistic
relationship between author-figures depends on the audience’s cultural associations with the
texts in question. Puchkov’s adaptive work is only subversive if he targets a revered and
venerated text, even if he has to conveniently forget which text he is adapting.
In order to best address how adaptation operates in an interactive new media context we
can continue to look to The Lord of the Rings’ sustained influence and adaptive power in the
interactive modes as well. The film and game industries are now so closely linked that it is
unusual to witness the release of a blockbuster film without a corresponding adaptation for PC,
Xbox, Playstation, or Nintendo game systems. Consequently, when Peter Jackson’s long awaited
version of Tolkien’s classic work was released it was no surprise to find that video games soon
followed. What makes this instance unique is several factors: first, rarely have film/game
crossovers had such a rich backstory—not only of three, three-hour films on which to draw, but
countless stories, drawings, paintings, books, and a vast body of criticism. Second, two
competing versions of The Lord of the Rings were released to video game to capitalize on the
success of the films—one, associated with Peter Jackson and New Line Cinema, the other with
the estate of J.R.R. Tolkien and the classic novels. And third, the direct and financially
successful connections between the game and the film (as opposed to the game and the novels)
highlight the distinction between the principle of an adaptive model (as a point of reference with
significant cultural capital) and the fruitless notion of an origin. The audience of the video game
culture has a long established connection with film, and filmic conventions, but comparatively
less with the linguistic textual tradition. So while Tolkien’s ethos is still present and powerful
enough to merit notice, the relative proximity of the media gives Jackson’s ethos more cultural
resonance with gamers than does Tolkien’s.
However, as I have noted elsewhere (“Myths, Monsters, and Markets: Ethos,
Identification, and the Video Game Adaptations of Lord of The Rings”), while the video game
adaptations of significant texts, like those of the Lord of the Rings films, align themselves
narratively and overtly with the texts from which they attempt to draw the most credibility, they
tend to cleave to well-known gaming models at the same time. While their initial hail uses the
authority of their ostensible narrative model, their operational ethos is created by structural
associations to a successful gaming platform. For example, the popular Battle for Middle Earth
series, the Electronic Arts adaptations of the battle sequences from The Lord of the Rings are
real-time strategy games, unlike their more traditional narrative-driven adaptations of The Two
Towers and The Return of the King. Using a god-like position over battlefield events, gamers
control strategic resources in order to act out scenarios that occur throughout the film series,
giving gamers the opportunity to change the story line if they are victorious in the “evil” option.
The point is that while the narrative overlay is cinematic (primarily created by pre-set cinematic
moments from the Jackson films that link events), the pre-formatted game structure and software
framework, otherwise known as the “game engine,” is identical to a previous EA title, Command
and Conquer: Generals; the appearance and play is Command and Conquer’s. In other words,
while gamers have relatively little connection to the linguistic models of The Lord of the Rings,
they do have profound connections to the game development cannon that undergirds The Battle
for Middle Earth; not only is Battle an adaptation of Peter Jackson’s text, but an adaptation of
Command and Conquer. For all practical purposes, the adaptive model of The Battle for Middle
Earth, just as its spectrum of authorship, is a contested site.
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Of concern for our model of new media adaptation, then, is the association of ethos, not
only with authorship in the figure of the symbolic author, but also with textuality in the symbolic
source. Common use of the term ethos inextricably links it with identity, personhood, ontology;
authors have ethoi through texts—the texts point to and reflect their author(s). But of course, this
presentation of the author/text relationship is extremely problematic. So, when we recognize the
reality of the absent author, or at best the symbolic author, we realize that the text produces ethos
for itself. It is the texts in which we have faith: we project authorship as a result of that faith.
This presentation of ethos as a location, a vessel, rather than an identity is in keeping with a
classical understanding of the term. Arthur Miller points out, “the basic denotation [of ethos] is
not character, but ‘an accustomed place’ and in the plural may refer to the ‘haunts or abodes of
animals’” (310). Thus, ethos is not limited to human agency, but rather to the larger rubric of
habituation. Audiences imbue authority to a model, be it a text or a projected agent, and that
model then carries with it authority—the source itself becomes a symbol. Bourdieu calls these
symbols “objectified symbolic capital” (277), or objects that resonate with and stand for the
relationship between powerful and powerless. The model becomes a physical manifestation of
projected and misapprehended power of authorship—a tactile analogue to the author-figure
itself. So when we turn our perspective to the Lord of the Rings series and all its complementary
emanations, we begin to see that the cultural power and authority of the adaptations is gleaned, in
part, from the authority—the ethos—vested in the model. This condition does not eliminate the
independence of the adaptive text. Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings success is not enslaved to
the model, for if the adaptive relationship were that simple, the rather unwatchable Rankin/Bass
adaptation of The Return of the King would have enjoyed some measure of success. No, the
source/adaptation ethotic structure is not fixed, but rather dynamic and relational. In the same
way, authors may grant new texts a measure of notoriety on the basis of their branding, so the
model adds credibility to the adaptation. We would, by and large, be more likely to grant an
unseen version of Lord of the Rings a viewing/playing/listening than Kull the Conqueror, simply
because of the authority of the model.
Conclusion
Linda Hutcheon, in A Theory of Adaptation, suggests that the best way to begin detangling the
complex web of adaptation is to first answer: “who adapts?” We find that when it comes to the
interactive new media text there is no single answer to this seemingly obvious question; rather,
the new media author is fragmented into three distinct components: the legal author, the labor
author, and the symbolic author. So if the author of the collaborative new media adaptation is
fragmented, how is the authority vested in authorship distributed amongst these parties? Ethos,
or the negotiated credibility between authors and audiences, becomes a complex system, but
most of the credibility for the new media text is housed in the symbolic author. Furthermore,
when we add the specter of the adapted text into our matrix, we find that we have competing
author-figures in that each new instantiation must, at a certain level, agonistically compete with
the model it adapts—each symbolic author must, to one degree or another, supplant the
preceding author figure and claim some measure of credibility. When the audience's projected
desire for the single, harmonious author meets the realities of corporate, collaborative, and
adapted authorship, the result is a symbolic figure, a stand-in that takes both the praise and blame
for the complex authorial relationships that jockey for position behind the scene. The symbolic
author becomes the placid and tranquil projection of the corporate process, a scarecrow standing
in for tempestuous and agonistic process of authority.
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