This essay will be looking at two passages from Freud’s Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming and Barthes’ The Death of the Author. Both make statements about the position of the reader. Both Freud and Barthes theories will be applied in relation to two of my own personal experiences with imaginative works. Which are especially interesting to look at in relation to the passages provided. These works will be the story driven Naughty Dog video-game The Last of Us released in 2013 and the Francoise Sagan novella Bonjour Tristesse originally published in 1954. I will treat the video-game as a text drawing on McLuhan theory on media, for McLuhan literature is a medium the book is an extension of the eye (gutnburg glixy). We can also look at the video games as a medium, similarly to literature as a medium, and when you look at both literature and video games as a medium you an compare them, in a video game you are the reader of the game/story but shape it as you read it. From the definition of the freud quote it is still an act of reading but a more direct one. The relationship between the producer an recipient is different in video games but there are also very interesting parallels with the author and reader of a novel. Freud argues in his essay Creative Writers and day-Dreaming, and in particular in the passages provided in the question that the enjoyment of the reader in any imaginative work stems from the fact that we are able to live out our fantasies and day-dreams without feeling the shame or self-reproach attached to these thoughts. For example if one was to dream about a life in which he was able to do whatever he wanted, for all the women of his dreams to fall at his feet and for him to be the ultimate man, rich, good-looking, smart and heroic, he would feel some form of shame or self-reproach because in reality this is of course not the case. If this person was then to read a novel in which the male protagonist had all of these attributes or if this person was to watch a James Bond film for example he is able to enjoy and in some ways live out these fantasies without the feelings of shame or self-reproach attached to them if he was simply thinking about these things. In Freud’s work he more generally sets out to explain the sources of inspiration and imagination, he argue’s that the creative process starts with child's play. Freud compares the idea’s of childhood play with the fantasy world of the adult (daydreams). He claims that the daydreams are a direct result of a desire to fulfill unfulfilled wishes precisely because they where never realized in the physical or real world. Freud creates a relationship between a child playing in a world of pure imagination to a creative writer conceiving his fictional world. Freud describes this process as substitution, the child’s games become the daydreams. This substitution at the same time parallels the process of a child becoming an adult. Thus, the creative writer is able to pull the reader away from the tensions that would otherwise stay in him by sharing his own fantasy world. The reader realizes that he is not alone in having these fantasies. The writer is thus able to live out and find liberation for his deepest fantasies and daydreams through this art form without arousing abhorrence from the reader. Freud claims that this power which the creative writer holds stems from his early experiences playing as a child. “Might we not say that every child at play behaves like a creative writer, in that he creates a world of his own, or, rather, re-arranges the things of his world in a new way which pleases him?” Kids just like creative writers expend a hugh amount of time and emotion creating the imaginative worlds in which they play, just like a creative writer when thinking about which fictional world, time, or place his novel will take place in. “It would be wrong to think he does not take that world seriously” Both a child and a creative writer use there imaginative brain as a means to create plots, settings, and characters. A child can take such a game or imaginative world so seriously and have such deep emotional investment in it that he forgets the real world which surrounds him. This is where the deep seated nature to live out the fantasies co