“Bioshock seems to suffer from a powerful dissonance between what it is about as a game, and what it is about as a story.”
– Clint Hocking, 2007
Papers, Please
Lucas Pope’s Papers, Please was released in 2013 to wide acclaim. Set in the fictitious eastern European nation of Arstotzka during the 1980s, Pope describes the game as follows:
“You play a border inspector at a contentious check-point. People are coming into your booth, and they want to get from one side to the other. You’ve got to check their documents and make sure everything’s in order before you let them through. It’s hard to describe the game and make it sound fun.”
The point of the gameplay, at least ostensibly, is to process as many people as possible within a limited amount of time. Each day you are given a set of rules to follow—for instance, claimants from certain countries must have a work visa to enter—and you must either allow or deny entry based on the paperwork they present to you. If you correctly process an applicant, you are awarded with a small amount of money. If you incorrectly process too many applicants, you are penalized money. This matters because at the end of every day you must spend your limited resources on food, shelter, and medicine for sick relatives. In essence then, you must accurately process as many claimants as you can, or else you are not able to adequately provide for your family.
This is tense enough, but the game gets really interesting when you take into account some of the narrative elements that serve to humanize the claimants.
There’s one moment in particular from the game that I think about from time to time. A young woman is fleeing her abusive pimp, anxious to cross the border to safety. She’s desperate to get away, and I want to help. All I have to do is approve her application request and she can leave a horrible situation behind. One small act on my part and I can help out a fellow human being. But I don’t. She doesn’t have the proper documentation and so I reject her application claim. Despondent, she walks away, doomed to further horrors.
Likewise, at another time an elderly man wants to enter the country so that he can visit his dying wife. Once again, he doesn’t have the proper paperwork, and so from a ludic perspective it is better to deny him access; if I show mercy and let him in, then I will be penalized and potentially lose money for the day.
Why did I reject their claims? Why not do the right thing and just let them in? Because according to the rules of Papers, Please,if I incorrectly process their claims I’ll potentially lose money for the day. This means I’ll have less money to buy food or medicine for my family, and if I keep incorrectly processing claims, it will eventually result in the game ending.
There’s a tension here between two different parts of the game. The gameplay’s emphasis on efficiency clashes with the desire to help a person in need (the narrative context). Ultimately, I must decide between helping out a sympathetic individual, or accurately processing paperwork and earning more money.
Papers, Please is filled with these difficult decisions, and it’s precisely these difficult decisions that make the game so compelling to me. This tension between wanting to do the right thing and wanting to do the beneficial thing is at the heart of the game. But to talk about this tension, I have to use what’s become a dirty term in game studies: ludonarrative dissonance.
Ludonarrative Dissonance
Broadly speaking, ludonarrative dissonance is when the gameplay and story seem at odds with one another. For instance, being told that your next mission is urgent (narrative) only to spend the next several days mining planets without penalty (game rules) doesn’t seem right. The story and the gameplay seem to contradict each other.
I know many people are tired and/or suspicious of the term (you can get a good sense of the discussion here). For some, its insistence on a divide between a game’s play (ludus) and its story (in cutscenes, etc.) creates a false binary, needlessly placing these components into opposition with each other. For others, it is a pretentious term, harking back to the stuffiest of stuffy academic languages, Latin. For others still, ludonarrative dissonance probably doesn’t exist, and if it does, nobody cares about it anyway. It is admittedly a much mocked and maligned term. After all, it’s been seven years now (!) since Clint Hocking first coined it in his discussion of BioShock, and it has since spawned many, many articles. I definitely understand the fatigue.
Furthermore, ludonarrative dissonance is generally seen as a weakness or flaw in the game’s system, since it implies a lack of cohesion or wholeness; it is thought to take players “out of” the game. It is without question that in some—perhaps most—cases, dissonance can detract from a player’s engagement with, or enjoyment of, a game. It can take the player out of a game, or spoil the coherence of the fantasy.
However, this need not always be the case. Games can and should take advantage of their multifacetedness, as doing so can create generative, serendipitous systems. This can create interesting forms of tension, a key component to any play experience.
Thus I want to argue here that the term ludonarrative dissonance is both a valuable tool for analyzing games, and more to the point, that the concept itself reveals a fundamental aspect of all videogames. This isn’t to suggest that all games are dissonant, but rather, that all games are made up of many different things at once, each of which profoundly influences the others.
What sort of things am I talking about? We can pick any we like, really. It depends on the game, but to name a few we can say a game has some code, hardware, a series of rules, some audio and/or visual output, an interface, a production and distribution system, sometimes a story, sometimes victory conditions, and so on.
Which elements you choose to analyze and how is essentially arbitrary, as no one element is inherently primary over the others. For example, there’s no reason why a game’s rules are necessarily more important than the art direction or sound design. The point is that each of these elements influences the others and that none of them exist in isolation.
This idea is far from new. Janet Murray’s Hamlet on the Holodeck (1997) discusses various strategies—visual, procedural, textual—for constructing narrative. This implies that there are different parts to a videogame, each replete with its own strengths and weaknesses. Even amidst the stake-claiming of the ludology/narratology debate, most participants agreed that a game was never only its rules or only its narrative, but instead acknowledged that these components existed in a relationship with each other. Furthermore, T.L. Taylor and Daniel Joseph have both written about games as assemblages, amalgams of complex, inter-related parts, though their focus is primarily on social and economic pressures not confined to the game itself.
But perhaps the most focused work on a configurative model of the videogame is Ian Bogost’s Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism (2006). Here Bogost puts forth an approach—unit operations—that analyzes how a text’s component parts, or “units,” exist in radically dynamic relationships with each other. For Bogost, unit operations prioritize relationships and context over holistic or totalitarian approaches. As he puts it, “Unit operations are characteristically succinct, discrete, referential, and dynamic…. In general, unit operations privilege function over context, instances over longevity”[i]. Unit operations operate according to the Spinozean concept “of innumerably re-creatable relations between objects”[ii].
This approach recognizes that a videogame—and anything really—is an aggregate, a configuration of many component parts. The key point is that although these parts each exist as their own discrete entities, they also can’t help but exist in a dynamic, mutually constitutive relationship with one another. Each unit uniquely influences the other units in the configuration.
Change one part—say, a cutscene or musical score—and you’ve also changed how we understand the other parts—for instance the gameplay or visual content. In Bogost’s words, unit operations thus “strive to articulate both the members of a particular situation and the specific functional relationship between them”[iii].
In this article I’m looking at two units, the gameplay and the narrative. This type of analysis looks at how the gameplay and story interact with one another, whether they’re in agreement or dissonant. However, it’s just one possible configuration among many. I could look at audio-visual dissonance, ludo-visual, audio-narrative, etc.. There are dozens of possible configurations, and each potentially tells us something useful about how we understand a given text. And it’s certainly not confined to videogames alone.
In film we see audio-visual dissonance all the time. You might recall the very graphic torture scene in 1992’s Reservoir Dogs.
Here a man is brutally tortured while Stealers Wheel’s somewhat silly song, “Stuck in the Middle With You,” plays in the background. One of the reasons the scene is especially creepy, I think, is due to the tension created by the disconnect (juxtaposition) between the visual and auditory content. On screen we’re seeing something awful, but the accompanying soundtrack is fairly lighthearted. These two units (the visual and auditory) don’t quite add up. But this isn’t a bad thing. Here the dissonance between units actually generates something, i.e. an increased sense of unease which reinforces the idea that the torturer is a remorseless sadist.
Ludonarrative dissonance in videogames can also be a good thing. It doesn’t have to be a weakness, nor does it necessitate a binary opposition between game and story. It simply acknowledges that the story and game are two distinct—though permeable—units.
In BioWare series like Mass Effect, for instance, I’d often find myself facing dilemmas when choosing party members. I might like the narrative or dialogue options of one character, but know that another character will provide a ludic advantage during the mission due to a special power.
For example, at one point Shepherd and the team must confront Liara’s mother, Matriarch Benezia, about some suspicious conduct. From a narrative perspective, it would be interesting to bring Liara and see how the two interact. They’ve had a strained relationship and I’m curious to see how it plays out. However, from a purely ludic perspective I know I’m probably better off bringing Wrex, since he provides some much needed firepower. There’s a tension here surrounding whom I choose to bring, and this tension results from ludonarrative dissonance. Here the narrative and ludic “units” are pulling me in different directions.
(De)Humanization
Back to Papers, Please, in my view the primary tension between the narrative and ludic units revolves around the theme of dehumanization. I have to essentially choose between quantifiably positive outcomes (more money) which require me to ignore claimants’ stories, and a less straight-forward moral victory which requires me to ignore the potential money I’ll earn. Either way, I must do one at the expense of the other.
In other words, the gameplay’s emphasis on efficiency and increasing capital is dissonant with the narrative, which humanizes these claimants and evokes a sense of compassion. I want to do right by these people, but my bank account pulls me in another direction. This tension is one of the reasons why Papers, Please is such an interesting and compelling game.
Many of us recognize this tension in our own lives, though usually with far lower stakes. Whether it’s been with a government bureaucracy or customer service representative, most of us have probably been treated in a way that makes us feel as though we’re just another file, another task to get through instead of a complex and unique human being.
Bureaucratic processes are inherently dehumanizing and through playing the game I sort of see why: there are just so many people to process and you have to be done your shift by 5. However, the narrative strategies in Papers, Please individualize claimants and ask the player to treat them as people, not as numbers.
If we look outward from the game, Papers, Please provides a commentary on the nature of bureaucracy as a whole, and not just in an authoritarian state. The state, the insurance company, the telecommunications company, etc., must constantly choose between treating its citizens/customers as human beings or as numbers. This disconnect between feeling like a number or a human being is beautifully expressed, I think, in Papers, Please.
So not only does the game use ludonarrative dissonance as a method for creating challenging in-game decisions, it also uses this tension to implicitly articulate the tension faced by real bureaucracies: Human or number? How shall I treat them today? Whether we want to engage in a close reading of the game or use it to describe a real-life process, ludonarrative dissonance helps us in both cases.
Conclusion
This is just one critical approach among many. I’m not trying to exclude any others. There are even other ways to discuss dissonance in Papers, Please. For example, tension is created through a sort of intra-narrative dissonance, where two parts of the narrative pull at one another. Do I help these refugees or my family? The money I’ll lose from illegally helping a claimant might mean that I can’t buy medicine for my sick grandparent. In this case the tension arises within the narrative unit, out of a conflict between altruism or empathy for strangers and familial loyalty.
Videogames are a complex medium, however, and so any critical approaches or emphases are bound to be arbitrary. Still, a unit operations approach to criticism, which looks at how different parts work together, leaves “opportunities open rather than closing them down”[iv].
It should also be said that it’s probably not possible to speak of a game as dissonant on the whole. Rather, it is only individual parts within the game that can be considered dissonant, and then only according to a particular normativity. As Zoya Street has noted, the concept of dissonance is by no means objective.
In the first place, what’s dissonant to some may not be dissonant to others. Harmonic dissonance in music, for instance, is highly dependent upon the sounds and songs you’ve encountered throughout your life. The notes, chords and arrangements used in many south Asian musical traditions are often different from those we’re used to hearing in North America. Our environment is thus a crucial component for developing notions of what constitutes dissonance in music. This same principle is true for videogames. What’s dissonant for me may not be dissonant for you.
From my experience the primary tension in Papers, Please is, “do I want to save this person or do I want more money, i.e. points?” Your experience may have been different. You may not care about the individual stories and just want to see all of the endings. Or maybe you didn’t find the pleas very compelling. And that’s all fine. I’m not suggesting that my reading is objectively correct or anything. Instead, I simply want to advocate for the usefulness of an often maligned term. If nothing else, the concept of ludonarrative dissonance illustrates the possibility of multifacetedness, the very benign fact that videogames are not holistic things. And for me this is an important first step in any critical enterprise.
[i] Ian Bogost. Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism,(2006), p. 4.
[ii] Ibid, p.9.
[iii] Ibid, p. 14.
[iv] Ibid, p. 7.
“In the first place, what’s dissonant to some may not be dissonant to others.”
That quite depends on the formal content of the term. Some people can and do use it to refer to specific musical qualities that are either present or not present in a work. Some people leverage it as a concept against western musical tradition to generally describe a piece of music as “pleasant” or “unpleasant” to the ear. While this is clearly a qualitative criteria, it is not a trait that is ascribed a widely held positive or negative value. To say something is unpleasant to the ear is not to say it is a poor piece of music. It is not even to say that I do not value listening to it. Papers, Please is not meant to be pleasant to the gaming ear, but that says nothing whatsoever about its value or quality. This is not a very controversial stance.
Ludonarrative dissonance, as Hocking invoked it specifically as a criticism of Bioshock, does in fact ascribe negative value. Bioshock belittles the player for making a choice he was never allowed to not make, and then passes its judgment against the player off as profound. It is a work built around a gimmick that couches that gimmick in smarmy nihilism as a guard against criticism. In saying this, I am saying that Bioshock is bad. Hocking says that the game is nonsensical because it does not understand that the criticism that it levels at the player is premised on its own design, rather than any choice the player did or did not make. From the very beginning, when my avatar stuffs an unmarked syringe into his arm and injects himself, quite apart from my will, with a vaguely threatening-looking liquid, I am forced to suspend my disbelief or else put down the controller. I am told, immediately, that A MAN CHOOSES and A SLAVE OBEYS, but Bioshock is not interested in affording me any way to explore those dictums. They simply exist so that I can be rebuffed later on for having chosen to obey the rules of the game in order to play it.
There is no such problem in Papers, Please. The game is premised entirely upon an understanding that the player will have to choose between progressing effectively in the game and approaching the choices presented as one might approach them in real life, were actual human beings involved. I can criticize the game for being lazy by relying on the player’s pre-installed sympathies to create difficult choices rather than working in any meaningful way to create them on its own. I can say that the overarching exercise is empty in that it never develops any of its ideas (social systems are structured in such a way that they self propagate regardless of the will or beliefs of their individual members; the banality of evil, etc.) beyond the initial premise. I can also praise the game for finding a way to effectively illustrate its subject matter through organic, inventive play mechanics that offer a compelling perspective of a social problem, or for showing us how “gameplay systems” are in fact real-world constructs that structure our social behavior, and not just play states.
I can do any of these things, and more besides. What I cannot do is equate the premise of Papers, Please with the premise of Bioshock, because one wields its structure toward specific aims, in order to say specific things and produce specific responses in its players, while the other ignores its underlying structure entirely and then places the blame for that structure on an outside party. If we want to specifically return to the idea of dissonance, one could say that the “tension” you describe in Papers, Please is the result of a cohesive (read: “consonant”) design, while the dissonance present in Bioshock is the result of a flawed, ill-considered, or nonsensical design premise. Which is to say you are not talking about the same thing Clint was talking about. And beyond that, the idea of critically incongruent aspects of a work is not at all unique to video games, and furthermore the impetus to draw binaries between “game” and “story” in general is evidence of the critical immaturity of the medium and of the way we often approach it.
Thanks for reading! I certainly get how Hocking meant it, but I am quite intentionally trying to expand that sense of the term. I think it often is a weakness or flaw, but my point is that it doesn’t have to be.
And to be clear, I’m not trying to use dissonance as a means for either praising or criticizing a game, as Hocking does. That’s ultimately up to the individual. To be honest I’m not a reviewer so I don’t really care about that side of it. I’m merely stating that having a narrative component pull me in one direction while having a gameplay component draw me in another makes for a compelling form of tension. It’s subjective in the sense that I personally found the claimants’ stories (narrative) to be sympathetic, but others might not feel that way.
To address your last point, I don’t think incongruity is unique to videogames at all. I did explicitly discuss that by using the Reservoir Dogs example. I also have to say I completely disagree that we shouldn’t break up a game, or any text, into component parts. Doing so doesn’t necessitate a binary or mutually exclusive relationship. The value of Bogost’s Unit Operations is precisely this, at least in the way I’m using it – we can acknowledge that a cutscene is something distinct from shooting enemies, or whatever, while also acknowledging that each radically influences the other.
If we kept all the mechanics of an FPS the same but switched, for example, a pro-American narrative of the war on terror with a pro-“insurgency” narrative in Afghanistan, then how we understand the shooting will change. It’s like musicians in a band – swap out a guitar for an organ and you get a different feel on the whole. The drummer and bassist are still there, they’re still their own thing, but how they sound in relation to each other is now different. There’s no necessity for any sort of binary there. Now if you’re talking about some aspects of the ludology/narrative debate, then yes, that was reductive and evidence of an immature field. But that was 10-15 years ago. Hopefully it’s clear that I’m trying to do something very different here.
I remain unconvinced that the term ludonarrative dissonance has any use outside of the specific criticism I mentoned, in which a game-as-work undermines itself by compartmentalizing its disparate parts. Uncharted’s is a relatively innocuous incompetence, in that it simply does not care that affable everyman Nathan and mass murder Nathan are incompatible. They exist separately from one another, but their refusal to cross paths does no real violence to what is essentially a bit of knock-off Indiana Jones pulp. Bioshock’s incompetence is systemic and compromising, but whatever, who cares, that’s not what we’re talking about.
But if you “don’t think incongruity is unique to video games at all,” which I’m sure you’ll agree with me is an obvious statement, then I find it unlikely we can gain much from introducing a unique bit of jargon premised on specific instances of said incongruity to stand in for the entire concept. Describing a systematic tension in Papers, Please seems to me to be rather enough, especially since the idea of ludonarrative dissonance is already rather problematically reductive in that it specifies that these tensions, incompatibilities, or incoherencies are exclusively premised on a schism between “play” and “narrative,” that, as you yourself said, is critically a decade out of date. To offer a short bit of analysis: are the tensions you describe in Papers, Please exclusively the result of game on one side, and narrative on the other? The ludic system of “inconsistencies in the processing of applications = a decrease in personal income, or else an indeterminate advancement toward a fail state” is narratively premised, in that the use of money is wholly arbitrary without the narrative backing of the avatar’s family. Similarly, the idea of the personal narratives of the applicants affecting you, as the player, is leveraged as a ludic system. The developers must weigh what number of narratives might plausibly influence the player, work that into the income/fail state progression, and properly game you to force the choices to have a ludic meaning. The narrative itself is a gameplay system, which is a truth that extends far beyond the realm of video games, and is in many ways the entire point of Papers, Please as a work. There are a lot of other holes to punch into this idea of the schism between “ludo” and “narrative” holding any weight, but that’s more or less besides the point, as I’m sure you agree with me on that conclusion.
But if you do agree with me, then I’d find it hard for you to also hold fast to a term premised on that schism, especially when the idea of the interwoven nature of the terms “game” and “narrative” also works against the concept of dissonance. Because the point of my original comment, and still the most salient criticism of the attempt to appropriate specific jargon as a means of expressing general artistic incongruity, is the fact that there is a difference between what I’ll call systematic incongruities, and systemic incongruities. Papers, Please’s incongruities, if we really want to call them that, are systematically premised in order to produce a coherent whole in which these incongruities serve to illustrate the point of the inevitable progression and propagation of social systems. The incongruities present in Bioshock are systemic, in that they infect the work at its heart by virtue of the design tenets it adopts (ie, that of a linear narrative-driven, progression oriented game in which all choices made by the player are exclusively ludic in nature), which are incompatible with its over-arching aims. Those are fundamental differences.
I suspect our differences here might come down to the hypothetical scenario presented in the last paragraph of your comment. You say that changing the narrative of a typical AAA corridor shooter from pro-American to pro-insurgency would change how we understand the shooting. I would counter by saying that it is in fact impossible to produce that game without drastically altering the shooting (and overall structure) to begin with, because that entire design is entwined with a certain social perspective. It is a specific ludic system that has already roasted over the pits of the American cultural ideology that has produced it. We already note this as a function and result of language all the time, which is why, for instance, you scare-quoted the word “insurgency” as a way of acknowledging the idea that the use of that word already implies a pro-American narrative. We can extend that conclusion from language to ludic states as well, I think, and in doing so note that the concepts of “play” and “play systems” are just as broad and fundamental as those of “language” and “linguistic systems.” To use your metaphor, these are fundamental components of game design that approximate the composition of a piece of music, rather than the timbre produced by the instruments that happen to play it.
I think I’ve addressed most of those points in the comments on Stephen Beirne’s blog here http://normallyrascal.com/2014/08/19/tension-and-ludonarrative-dissonance/
But I guess I just don’t get why a term – comprised of two already poorly defined terms – *has* to be kept so narrow. I’ll try re-framing though in terms of modality. The textual mode (that gives us narrative components) pulls me in a different direction than the ludic mode (in this case a reward). That doesn’t seem too controversial to me and kind of obvious.
All texts can be analyzed multimodally (Routledge has a series on multimodality), but games have this ludic part to them as well. There’s no reason why you can’t look at — as I mentioned — audio-visual dissonance, or any other configuration in a game. I just chose to conduct a close reading of a scene in PP to demonstrate the value in creating tension between two arbitrarily chosen parts (gameplay and story). Now as for PP as a whole, yes, things are more complicated than that. But again, I’m focusing on just one particular set of scenes.
And I’m sorry if I misunderstand you, but to say that you can’t break a game into component parts (i.e. analyze it) is just not something I agree with at a very basic level. You say that games and narrative are “interwoven,” which is true, but you need two strands to be interwoven in the first place. Again, that’s the benefit of unit operations, assemblage theory, etc. – you can have parts and wholes at the same time. Even just in terms of production, many games (though not PP) will have writers, coders, artists, musical directors, etc. all working on the same game. Now they all affect each other, profoundly, and that’s what I’m interested – how do these parts “bounce” off of each other (or weave together) to produce meaning?
Finally, I’m not sure if you’re familiar with games like Under Ash or Under Siege or anything, but they essentially use typical FPS mechanics while employing a narrative that’s antithetical to the pro-war on terror stuff coming out of CoD or whatever. The mechanics, the procedures, etc. are pretty much identical, but because the character models and overarching narrative change, the experience as a whole is very different. Sure the FPS has its own “etymology,” but that doesn’t mean it can’t be used or appropriated in novel ways.
I don’t think I agree that Papers Please is a good example of ludonarrative dissonance, and I think the conversation about has become confused. The original 2007 article by Hocking on BioShock, where the term was coined, was talking about dissonance between the intended theme of the game as a whole, versus the theme which the gameplay actually conveys when considered in isolation. As that article says, the author(s) of BioShock appear to have intended to criticise “the Objectivist notion of individual interest above all else” – this is the theme we are supposed to absorb from the game. But the conventional FPS/RPG gameplay of BioShock undermines this and seems to suggest an opposite theme (in common with almost every FPS or RPG ever made). I don’t think the authors of BioShock intended for this unconscious gameplay-theme to be present at all. It is present because they lazily reused problematic FPS/RPG tropes without thinking about what themes they might whisper to the player, rather than coming up with a form of gameplay that supported their theme.
In contrast, in Papers Please the intended theme of the game as a whole is presumably about the procrustean nature of massive bureaucracies and the way they incentivise cruel behaviour. The gameplay mechanic of first forcing the player to sympathise with each person they process, then leading them to make cold-blooded decisions that instrumentalise that person in order to advantage themselves – that PERFECTLY ILLUSTRATES the intended theme. Far from being an example of ludonarrative dissonance, Papers Please is a great example of ludonarrative consonance. There would be dissonance if the gameplay failed to convey the idea that bureaucracy incentivises cruel behaviour.
I think what you are talking about in your Papers Please example is things like conflict, and irony, which are here being consciously used by the game designer to help convey the game’s theme.
IMO art always has an intended theme; it is always a way for the artist to communicate an idea about morality, politics or human experience. If a game (or anything else) is not made at least partly in order to impart a theme then it is not art. Ludonarrative dissonance is an unintentional flaw where the gameplay contradicts or fails to support the game’s intended theme, provided instead a counter-theme of its own. Games criticism ceases to be infantile once it engages with the intended and unintended themes of a game and the conflicts and perverse bonds between them.
Thanks for reading, Paul! I think you’ve hit the nail on the head over the confusion here. In a way I’m not using it as Hocking intended at all. I’m zooming in on one particular scene in PP to demonstrate that the narrative (the claimants’ stories) and the gameplay (the emhpasis on efficiency, etc.) make for a compelling form of tension. For me, good criticism will look at how a game’s component parts work together, for good or ill. The tension between narrative and gameplay has already been discussed, so that’s why I use the term.
Now Papers, Please as a whole is much more complicated, and as you go through the game there is in fact both a narrative and ludic impetus to break the rules. But again, I was just using one small part of it – a close reading basically – to demonstrate the value in dissonance between narrative components and game components.
The art and intentionality thing is a whole other can of worms. I’ll just say that I’m coming from a lit theory background – Barthes’ death of the author and all that – so the artist’s intention doesn’t mean a whole lot to me. In fact it’s interesting to me when a text reflects ideas/ideologies *not* intended by the author. Admittedly that’s coming from a very specific background so I’m not prepared to say one is inherently better than the other.
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