If you’ve followed this blog, you will know that I obsess a bit over being called a “formalist”. (Digra 2005, matching tile games.)
As a one-liner, formalism is probably supposed to mean privileging the formal properties of the medium over user experiences, contexts, cultural codes, and so on. (I.e. just thinking about the rules, but refusing to discuss players.)
But I really experience it as simple name-calling: Being a “formalist” is 100% wrong, and you are a formalist.
I had just about forgotten the history of anti-formalism, but I stumbled across this article on Soviet composer Shostakovich. Basically, in 1948 Stalin struck down on “formalist” composers (those without much melody) in favor of “socialist realist” composition:
Khrennikov reported that people “all over the USSR” had “voted unanimously” to condemn the so-called formalists and let it be known that those named in the decree were now officially regarded as little better than traitors: “Enough of these pseudo-philosophic symphonies! Armed with clear party directives, we will stop all manifestations of formalism and decadence.”
This is not to say that any criticism of formalism is “Stalinist” nor to say that I am a persecuted Soviet composer, just that it is always a good thing to think about the historical roots of your theories.
But of course! What a raaaaahhhh towards the whole thing! In my opinion you are far from a formalist. You’re more a revolutionary – and we hate you because you tell truth! Seriously, I’ve never seen gameplay explained so indepth and so revealing as you do! One of the elite, in my opinion! We hate you because you acknowledge that gameplay might just be beyond narrative. And I love you for that! Narratology is useful in gameplay – but we need more, because it is not all! And you’ve taken the first steps towards finding that! Some of the students I talk to, actually hate you…what a compliment! Because they feel so deeply that they’re part of a story a.s.o. And they hate you for taking that away from them. But it’s funny….when you get them on a talk about violence in computer games…they’re right behind you! I love that! I love the fact that gamers are quite attached to their narrative, yet cannot explain the fact that they love killing grandma! How to understand what gameplay is? I still don’t know, and I have a feeling I never will. But your thoughts and your analysis is extremely helpful. I absolutely adore the way you managed to combine fiction with rules of play. It’s such an obvious notion….and yet I’ve never seen it uttered before you!
So yeah…formalist is too strong a word for you! You just know what you’re talking about!!
What a timely post. I was just speaking with somebody that labeled my work formalist and refused to hear any counter-argument as to why it was important work.
It always surprises me how anti-formalist videogame research has become given the many interesting avenues of thought that have emerged from other media as a result of formalism.
For instance, many of the theories regarding editing in film would probably never have been developed in an environment absent of formalism. The problem is when people take formalism to extremes and shun everything else, but that would be no different than disregarding formalism entirely.
In my sophomoric understanding, the meaning of ‘formalism’ changes slightly as the perspective is shifted from formalist authorship to formalist critique. Even given its historical controversies, I don’t think (contemporary) formalism denies critical theory the chance to include the audience/player. It suffices to say that given the various avenues of authorship the gameplay experience of a videogame provides- the game designer, the programmer, the programming concepts, the marketing, the player, and the various genres and cultural forms (narratives) that may inform the game’s design and appearance- there are forms to be found in the medium. This is not so controversial.
It sounds more like you are being accused of a kind of formalist technological-determinism, but this is unfair, and I can think of a dozen other published videogame scholars more guilty of the same thing… All of this politics and academic ‘boundary construction’ (as Copier Marinka calls it) is puerile and nonproductive.
While the term ‘ludology’ may become stabilized as a trope for the entire field, it still reeks of the masculine, territorial tendency that seeks to contain and guide the discipline and discourse.The name of the program at my own University is the nauseatingly unoffensive ‘Interactive Arts and Sciences’; but it will provide for a spectrum of voices and perspectives, instead of filtering all discourse through an arbitrarily narrow critical lens. As soon as we are done with name-calling the polemics (this is my last one, I promise!) and academic ‘campaigning’ the discipline may just start to produce some substantial critical discourse.
One last note about ‘name-calling’. (since I have just realized my own intimate and embarrassing involvement with this thread) I should clarify some things I am responsible for writing.
Being called a formalist should not be taken as such a swipe when the issuer himself identifies with formalist approaches.
To revisit the statement, the “formalism bereft of theory” is precisely this determinism I mention in the above post, when it is blithely observed outside the context of the other kinds of configurative performances that occur in the human psyche, in social systems, in work and production, and in our very approaches to understanding, our sciences and technologies. Deterministic interpretation is a habit of all discourses on media, culture and technology and we are obliged to be skeptical to approaches sympathetic to this habit.
However I would add that this skepticism on my part is not primarily a reaction to your works or ‘ludology’ in general, but of a specific tendency on the part of some prominent videogame scholars to naturalize the concept of computer simulation as synchronous with nature and totemic in its ability to convey- trancendent, or “alternative” (Frasca) to previous modes of representation. This assertion implies a profound territorial claim on the part of ludology and enforces a critical theory that favours the novelty of concepts that are distinct from- and exclude those- of neighbouring discourses. This, in opposition to the inclusivity of theories which draw together concepts and frameworks from across a variety of fields. Ideas which tell us about the medium while also resonating with concepts outside the tropics of the study of ‘games and only games’. (or, ‘games according to Callois and Huizinga’)
So I would say that the implications of a matching-tile-game ancestral graph may prove to be useful, but the obsessive, taxonomic tic that seems to drive not only this heuristic enterprise but a great many other taxonomic attempts at charting and mapping the ‘forms’ of- and in- videogames.
So again, ‘formalism’ is not an accusation on my part, nor should it be recognized as such in any academic parlance. Unless it comes in the form of an email-from-beyond sent by Andre Bazin, which is highly unlikely; or unless there happens to be a group of academic campers who take to calling themselves ‘anti-formalists’ and wearing the appropriately coloured armbands, etc. (which, for all we know, has already happened) though I don’t think we should start to ruffle feathers or have paranoid fantasies of the ‘anti-formalist’ horde readying for a coup outside the walls of videogame studies. These marginal factions, if they do exist, will have to be isolated and perhaps strongly medicated at all times.
Others of us will have to supress what will come to be termed by therapists as the ‘anti-taxonomic’ complex, and will visit support groups and be strongly self-medicated at all times. Their access to the internet might be regulated somehow through use of an electronic ankle-brace, to prevent embarrassing encounters with prominent videogame-theorists.
I do regret the bluntness of the remarks in question, and I must again concede a sophomoric attitude on my part, toward contributing to this discourse. If all game scholars possess some kind of territorial habit; mine is slightly anarchistic, and often finds me stuck in these quagmires of my indiscretions. I apologize for any offense and for any unintended debasement of the discourse on this forum.
The meaning and charge of the word “formalism” changes with its context, and I don’t think that you can argue that your critics are using it in the same way, or with the same menace, that “Comrade” Khrenikov was. I think that Half-real and the work of other ludologists does resemble the work of literary formalists (like the Russian formalists), in that it avowedly seeks to define a transmedial, transhistorical object (“gameness” instead of “literariness” or “narrative”) to hang its analysis, and the discipline, on. What’s fundamental to the analysis in Half-real is structure (‘gameness’ and the ‘state machine’ of rules) rather than the agency of designers. This formalist method is substituted for, for example, a close, sensitve engagement with particular videogames in their historical and aesthetic contexts.
Half-real argues that the underlying structure of “gameness” that informs all games throughout human history (until videogames hatched the possibility of progressive play) is in a strong sense *real*, like a Platonic essence that manifests itself in various media. In distancing itself from narratological formalism it becomes its mirror image.
I passionately disagree with both literary/narratological formalism and the kind of formalism that underpins Half-real, not for any political reasons, but because its not capable of accounting for the pleasures I find in the enormous variety of cultural experiences/texts I engage with. This doesn’t align me with the Stalinists who, after Trotsky’s Literature and Revolution (still an interesting read) turned it into a term of abuse and an excuse for purges. It’s a little cheeky to suggest that people who don’t think that formalist analysis can really account for the pleasures of unique texts, made by and for human beings, are somehow harking back to or endorsing Soviet terror. Let’s keep it on the level of intellectual disagreement, otherwise we risk sounding like the person who brings up Hitler in a pub disagreement.
By the way, there are clear resonances between the arguments in Half-real and the following entry on ‘formalism’ in the Internet encyclopedia of philosophy, I think:
“Formalism,” like “Structuralism,” sought to place the study of literature on a scientific basis through objective analysis of the motifs, devices, techniques, and other “functions” that comprise the literary work. The Formalists placed great importance on the literariness of texts, those qualities that distinguished the literary from other kinds of writing. Neither author nor context was essential for the Formalists; it was the narrative that spoke, the “hero-function,” for example, that had meaning. Form was the content.”