![]() ![]() Problematizing, interrogating, and subverting are the default options, the deeply grooved patterns of contemporary thought. Here’s the literary historian Rita Felski on the matter: It’s interesting to note that elsewhere in cultural criticism, poststructuralism led to a many decades long rise of the hermeneutics of suspicion, which is now (finally) cracking a bit in the world of literary studies. Once I called videogames a mess (in the John Law/actor-network theory sense) sense for that very reason. Systems, stories, consumer goods, byte code, software-hardware confluences, locuses of identity, objects of media discourse. So what are the materials games are made of? Lots, of things actually. They should be gratified to know that there is fifty years worth of thinking on the matter on their side.Ī different way of thinking about Sontag’s point: form really just means material, and formalists are thus really just materialists (not the Marxist sense, not necessarily anyway). This is, in some very literal sense even, all that the supposed critics of the purported era of game formalism are after. But also remember that poststructuralism never abandoned structuralism’s obsession with formalism and structure, it just pointed out the varied and contingent natures of those structures. This is really the right answer, and it’s the right answer for the same reasons that poststructuralism came along to remedy the immoderacy of structuralism: being an anythingist is usually trouble, at the end of the day, but it’s particularly troublesome when making top-down, universalizing claims about things. If you’d like to do that, I wouldn’t blame you. …considering ‘form’ is far more interesting than being a ‘formalist’… Formalismīrendan Keogh cites Susan Sontag, as follows: ![]() The belief in a field of study for games-call it ludologism, maybe, turned out to be somewhat undesirable at the end of the day. I’ll come back to that matter soon enough. ![]() And it’s also probably worth noting, without suggesting conclusion about, the fact that many of the key actors in this original debate, including Frasca, Murray, and Jenkins, have left game studies almost entirely. It’s also worth reminding ourselves that the traditions of formalism in general and narrative/literary formalism in particular find much of their origins and ongoing interest in Northern Europe, where game studies also got its start. This was always (partly) a formalist project, both in the traditionally structuralist sense of the term and in the looser, more art historical sense of distinguishing the ways different works are made and, in the case of games, operate. And in positing two equally formalist alternatives, ludology or narratology, the field-building exercise of the LvN debate succeeded, even if in part by means of the so-called ludologists tricking their “opponents” into entering a debate whose terms they didn’t actually embrace. It’s understandable that attempting to create a new field would entail the formation of formal distinctions between the target object of study for that field and its apparent overlaps in other fields. Back in the late nineties and early aughts, game studies’s primary goal was to establish itself as a stand-alone field. In any event, there’s an historical matter to consider, too. Purported narrativists like Janet Murray and Henry Jenkins were actually interested in the structure of computation more broadly (Murray) or in audience reception (Jenkins). ![]() The problem is, nobody really wants to fly that flag either-it only serves as a term of scorn to distinguish an opposing position. Michael Mateas and others have suggested the alternate term narrativist to represent the “real” opponent to a (formalist) ludology. (The fact that the earliest narratologists were the Russian Formalists is no accident here.) Thus, Gonzalo Frasca’s call for developing a ludology for the study of games akin to the general structural science of storytelling we call narratology can legitimately be seen as a call for formalization. Narratology isn’t just the study of story, it’s the study of the formal structure of storytelling itself, emerging out of structuralism. But watching it made me want to revisit an observation I once made, namely that the very idea of putting these two terms together assumes a kind of formalism in the first place. This Errant Signal video offers a great overview of the dreaded ludology/narratology debate in game studies. ![]()
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