This is my eleventh monthly Patch Wednesday post where I discuss a question about video games that I think is unanswered, unexplored, or not posed yet. I will propose my own tentative ideas and invite comments. 

The series is called Patch Wednesday to mark the sometimes ragtag and improvised character of video game studies.

The word formalism has resurfaced again in discussions around video games (here, here, here). This post is not specifically about that discussion, but I would like to use the moment to discuss the idea of formalism in video game studies.

First: Formalism, formalist and more specifically anti-formalism have appeared a number of times in discussions around video games, but with often contradictory meanings. With this post I am attempting to give an overview of the terms’ history in relation to video games.

tl;dr The term “Formalism” has no particular set meaning and its politics are wildly contradictory. Its only universal meaning is the derogatory function of denouncing someone as theoretically, morally or politically bankrupt. But there are many interesting discussions in the details.

Let us go through the history and number the anti-formalisms we meet. Warning: If you are not familiar with every discussion, this will be quite compact. I identify 8 variations of anti-formalism, the 7 of which relate to video games. Here is the list.

• Formalism #1: Experiments are formalist. Don’t make experimental art – that would make you an enemy of the people
• Formalism #2: Experiments are formalist. Form, experiments or aesthetics are anti-political (or anti-progressive)
• Formalism #3: Experiments are formalist, and experiments are a way of fighting against oppression, and for letting marginalized voices speak
• Formalism #4: Defining things is formalism, and formalism is a way of locking down video games to prevent experimentation
• Formalism #5: Formalism = looking at game rules to the exclusion of looking at story, experience, meaning
• Formalism #6: Formalism = assuming that game meaning comes exclusively from the game rules
• Formalism #7: Formalism = looking at game design to the detriment of looking at players
• Formalism #8: Formalism = game definitions as stifling + focusing too much on rules

Formalism #1: Experiments are formalist. Don’t make experimental art – that would make you an enemy of the people

The history of anti-formalism really starts with Shostakovich and the 1948 Khrennikov decree in the Soviet Union (I’ve written about it here), according to which composers should stop making formalist (i.e. experimental) music.

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.”

“Formalist” and “formalism” in this case meant anything experimental, and anything non-sanctioned by the regime. Fun fact: Shostakovich wrote a piece called Anti-Formalist Rayok (text here) making fun of a committee meeting about stamping out formalism in music. “O let us love all that’s beautiful, charming, and elegant, let us love all that’s aesthetic, harmonious, melodious, legal, polyphonic, popular, and classical!”

This is the original variation of anti-formalist thought, and I think this is the one whose echoes we are still hearing. It is clear that we can divide this in to some subthreads, but this is the source of the baseline air of accusation that is present when someone denounces someone else as formalist.

It’s not much of a stretch to see the relation between Soviet-era anti-formalism and other types of conservative attempts at preventing art experimentation.

Formalism #2: Experiments are formalist. Form, experiments or aesthetics are anti-political (or anti-progressive)

This is a common extrapolation of formalism #1: don’t play around with form, just state your politics in a well-known format. Similarly, from a theoretical standpoint: don’t analyze form, just analyze politics (or lived experience).

In prescriptive variations, this can be perceived as quite stifling. Those who lived through 1970’s will often, regardless of their political persuasion, talk about how oppressive the atmosphere could be, with constant requirements that all aspects of culture should be subservient to dominant political ideas. I am not saying that this necessarily applies to the criticisms I just mentioned, but it is a mode of thinking that has been used to such ends.

Of course, there are particular stories concerning (for example) painting, where (it is usually said) formalist art criticism hailed abstract expression as the highest form of painting, thereby concretely focusing on form to the exclusion of other issues. Such as, say, representation, politics. (Ian Bogost also discusses the broader history of the term here.)

Formalism #3: Experiments are formalist, and experiments are a way of fighting against oppression, and for letting marginalized voices speak.

If we consider that the Khrennikov decree was written under Stalin, then anti-formalist thought can also be seen as a way of protecting the powers that be against ambiguity and new voices speaking. To me, this speaks to my discomfort that some committee, however nice, should decide what experiments we are or aren’t allowed to use.

Formalism #3 is therefore completely contradictory to formalism #2, because experiments in form are assigned a completely negative role in #2, but a positive role in #3.

I recently wrote about how magic realism was interpreted as a way of saying what could not be said in traditional novel form. Rushdie says:

El realismo magical, magic realism, at least as practised by Márquez, is a development out of Surrealism that expresses a genuinely ‘Third World’ consciousness.

The recent wave of Twine games is distinctly formalist in this sense: finding new form for games to express what cannot be expressed in traditional game form.

Formalism #4: Defining things is formalism, and formalism is a way of locking down video games to prevent experimentation

Here formalism/formalist are not used to describe particular works or creators, but are instead applied to theorists:

In the so-called “Zinesters vs. formalists” debate (summarized at the bottom of this post), some people, especially in the Twine community, felt that  their work was being excluded by formalists (mostly identified as Raph Koster) who were applying narrow definitions of what games are.

In the slightly different context of Jamin Brophy-Warren’s PBS show, I was also identified as a formalist (though not in a bad way) for having made a video game definition. This is a tad more subtle. “Formalist” may be a misnomer in this case, given that has an uncertain relation to any previous uses of the term.

As for the content of that discussion, I do think there is a distinction between is and aught: to identify historical cultural expectations for things called “games” (as I mostly do at least, hence the name “classic game model”) is very different from claiming that this should be used to evaluate or exclude experiments. I do also find that identifying expectations and conventions are a great way to generate new ideas and experiments. And I have a deep-seated hunger for game experiments.

The flip side of it is that nobody is really that aesthetically inclusive anyway: no “game” festival is going to include a word processor in the competition lineup, so isn’t it preferable to ask ourselves if we have criteria than to pretend that we don’t? (Writing this does make me consider whether you could make a mystery game that was basically a modified version of Libreoffice.)

Formalism #5: Formalism = looking at game rules to the exclusion of looking at story, experience, meaning

This is at least how I interpret Janet Murray’s 2005 DiGRA keynote (with its wonderful “mind of winter” metaphor):

According to the formalist view Tetris can only be understood as a abstract pattern of counters, rules, and player action, and the pattern means nothing beyond itself, and every game can be understood as if it were equally abstract. … To be a games scholar of this school you must have what American poet Wallace Stevens called  “a mind of winter” ; you must be able to look at highly emotive, narrative, semiotically charged objects and see only their abstract game function.

Again, formalists are theorists, and in this case they emphasize rules structures to the exclusion of everything else.

Note that ludology and narratology are equally formalist according to some views (se #7 below).

Formalism #6: Formalism = assuming that game meaning comes exclusively from the game rules

This is what Miguel Sicart goes up against in Against Procedurality: the idea that game meaning comes exclusively from game rules (rather than from graphics, story etc..), and in a completely deterministic way.

Formalism #7: Formalism = looking at game design to the detriment of looking at players

TL Taylor recently tweeted a series of quotes from what she considers criticisms of formalist video game theory, let me cite a few:

(written by John Dovey and Helen Kennedy in 2006) “As already indicated, these ‘rules’ shape and structure our experience of a game to a greater or lesser degree, but they do not inevitably determine our whole experience. […] These kinds of activity and experience [cheating and mods] cannot adequately be accounted for by a reliance solely on structural or formalistic accounts of games.”

(Jenny Sunden in 2009) “The tension between these two directions in game studies, between games as mechanical-aesthetic objects and games as social practices, echoes the kind of friction between ‘playing the game’ and ‘being played by the game’ characteristic of any act of game play.”

(TL herself): Running nearly parallel to the familiar track of the classic narratology/ludology framing has been scholarship that sought to understand actual players and their everyday practices, as well as research that considered broader structural contexts and histories at work in the construction of play.

(Mia Consalvo in 2009) “What if, rather than relying on structuralist definitions of what is a game, we view a game as a contextual, dynamic activity, which players must engage with for meaning to be made. Furthermore, it is only through that engagement that the game is made to mean”

As you can see, the criticism does not concern rules or definitions as such, but rather the assumption that game design is able to determine actual use by players. Formalism here therefore is a shorthand for focus on game design, including as story, graphics etc…

The difference between #5 and #7 is that #5 promotes the interpretive tools of the humanities, while #7 promotes a social science perspective.

Formalism #8: Formalism = game definitions as stifling + focusing too much on rules

Which brings us to the present day. I see the current discussion (here, here, here) as being a combination of Formalism #4 (game definitions as stifling) and Formalism #5 (focusing too much on rules). This is one of the reasons why it has been a confusing discussion: different things were meant when people said “formalism”.

Conclusion: Which formalism is right for you?

Short answer: none. It’s a term with many contradictory meanings & politics and lots of bad historical baggage. It’s also not conducive to discussion.

Here are some names for the fallacies we are often guilty of in these discussions.

• You are x. This is probably not as conducive to discussions as “is it possible that you are overemphasizing x“?
• Counterfactual generalization by point sample: generalization made explicitly without considering whether it is true, i.e. saying that “a excludes looking at b” even though there is a chapter on b immediately following the chapter on a.
• Graduate luck: The amazing stroke of luck when your graduate studies just happen to be in the theoretical tradition that is superior to all the others. (We have all been there.)
• Exclusion by proxy: arguing that a perspective you dislike is exclusionary of other perspectives and therefore has to be excluded.

This is my tenth monthly Patch Wednesday post (this one a bit out of band) where I discuss a question about video games that I think is unanswered, unexplored, or not posed yet. I will propose my own tentative ideas and invite comments. 

The series is called Patch Wednesday to mark the sometimes ragtag and improvised character of video game studies.

[Note 2014-12-19: From the feedback on this post, it became clear that my general intuition (“there is surprisingly little work on video game genre”) is not universally shared. Thanks everybody!

So I should explain why I believe this is the case. If we compare game studies to the history of genre work in literature or film studies, there are whole classes of academic output that game studies should have now, had  genre played the same role in our field (correct me if I am missing some event or publication):

1. Several monographs on video game genre
2. Several conferences on the subject
3. Several journal issues
4. Conference keynotes on genre
5. Academic feuds based on genre.

These seem to be MIA, hence my desire to hypothesize about the different role of genre in game studies.]

****

Someone asked me the other day: couldn’t you use the concept of genre for analyzing video games, or for thinking about video game history?

Let us ask this in the general: why is genre such a neglected concept in the study and discussion of video games?

The standard argument for genre is something like this: genre plays an integral role in the design, promotion and consumption of video games. We design a video game as an adventure game, a game is promoted as an adventure game, and as players we see a game as an instance of The Adventure Game, and this concretely shapes our expectations and behavior.

So why is there so little discussion of genre in game studies?

I think the short answer is this: Though video game genres are volatile and changing like all genres are, video game genres just change at a faster rate. And more importantly, video game genres lack some of the important touchstones that have made genre such an interesting topic elsewhere. Examples follow.

There is some discussion of video game genre, of course (see [1] [2] [3] [6] and much more), but I think it is safe to say that genre does not figure very prominently in the study of games or in game design discussion. Genre just tends to take a back seat to discussion of smaller units such as design patterns or mechanics. Why is that?

Are video game genres more volatile than other genres?

One simple explanation is that video game genres change very quickly and hence form little basis on which we can actually make any analysis, apart from noting how quickly video game genres change.

Wait, you may say: but genres in all art forms are always in flux!

This is true, but in different ways. Consider Tzvetan Todorov’s 1976 article on The Origin of Genres, where he discusses and rejects the sentiment that genres used to exist, but have been splintered and made irrelevant today.[4]

Everyone knows that they existed in the good old days of the classics – ballads, odes, sonnets, tragedies, and comedies – but today? Even the genres of the nineteenth century (though not altogether genres to our way of thinking) – poetry, the novel – seem to be disintegrating in our era, at least in the literature “that counts.”

Certainly, we can find a similar sentiment expressed about video game genres: that they are “a mess” [3]. But what is different is that there is no “good old days” of stable genres to refer to. There is no set of classical genres from some early time before genres splintered. (This may be an imagined situation in literature anyway, but it is a belief that exists.)

Did genres always exist?

A parallel observation from Todorov notes that genres have always existed:

There has never been a literature without genres; it is a system in continual transformation, and the question of origins cannot be disassociated, historically, from the field of the genres themselves. Chronologically, there is no “before genres.”

Again we can say that this argument does not work for video games. The early history of video games (1960-1980 perhaps) is rather one of nearly complete invention outside genre labels. So there is little sense of any stable past that has been replaced by a current “mess”; video game genres rather started out messy, and in living memory too.

The politics of genre

At the same time, we can consider more modern genre theory such as that of Jason Mittell [5], who gives many great examples of the political and economic stakes in genre discussions in television about music videos (Michael Jackson’s videos rejected by MTV ostensibly because they were too long), cartoons (which stopped being considered relevant for adults).

Bringing this to video games, it is clear that genre figures only weakly in the bigger battles and controversies we have had. Video games controversies rather concern questions of whether a game is “casual”, “indie”, or – always – whether something is a “real game.” And none of these are genres in any meaningful sense. Hence the interesting politics in games appear to rather take place in broader and orthogonal categories – “game”, “casual”, “indie”.

The object of study

This, I think, is why video game studies, and discussions, are generally more preoccupied with either smaller units such as design patterns and mechanics, or with the very big definitional questions.

The design pattern/mechanic angle is also so popular because (video) games really do consist of segmented units that can be replaced independently by other patterns. For example: the player’s energy level really is just a number, and thus any pattern or mechanic that can output a number can be brought to bear on the player’s energy level.

Hence video game genres are quite openly promiscuous about borrowing patterns and mechanics, with (say) infinite runner games suddenly borrowing inventories and character stats from role-playing games in order to facilitate microtransactions. And so on. Therefore the interest in these smaller units.

This is not to say that video game genre should not be studied more, just that these are the reasons why genre has not been the first choice for analyzing video games, or for considering developer or player expectations.

[1] Greg Costikyan, Game Styles, Innovation, and New Audiences: An Historical View, 2005, http://www.darkshire.net/jhkim/rpg/theory/styles.html.

[2] Thomas H. Apperley, “Genre and Game Studies: Toward a Critical Approach to Video Game Genres,” Simulation & Gaming 37, no. 1 (2006): 6–23.

[3] Dominic Arsenault, “Video Game Genre, Evolution and Innovation,” Eludamos: Journal for Computer Game Culture 3, no. 2 (2009), http://www.eludamos.org/index.php/eludamos/article/viewArticle/65.

[4] Tzvetan Todorov, “The Origin of Genres,” trans. Richard M. Berrong, New Literary History 8, no. 1 (October 1, 1976): 159–70, doi:10.2307/468619.

[5] Jason Mittell, Genre and Television (New York: Routledge, 2004).

This is my ninth monthly Patch Wednesday post where I discuss a question about video games that I think is unanswered, unexplored, or not posed yet. I will propose my own tentative ideas and invite comments. 

The series is called Patch Wednesday to mark the sometimes ragtag and improvised character of video game studies.

I have come to think that there are four main theories of “fun”, or at least experience in video games. They are: Rules, Fiction, Social and Feel. When I teach game studies classes, I usually invite students to mention their favorite game and then discuss which of the categories it falls under. The categories are not exclusive, but they have their own favorite game examples.

Here they are:

1) Rules

This is still the primordial theory of games. According to this theory, (video) games are by definition (or essentially) rule-based structures, and the player’s experience hinges on rules that create interesting mental challenges for the player. This theory tends to claim that it has identified something unique about games.

It can of course then be extended from the description to the prescriptive, and claim that because games are defined by the presence of rules, all games  should be centered on rules, with all other possible design elements (say, Fiction) being negative agents that dilute the purity of a game.

This theory has typically been promoted by game designers and people wishing to identify games as a unique art form. It is also very hard to imagine teaching video game design without it.

Favorite example: Go, StarCraft, Tetris.

2) Fiction

Another classic, this theory has some backing from especially the humanities, and argues that video games first and foremost are about experiencing, and possibly feeling immersed in, stories and fictions. This theory is particularly useful when we think about games in a cross-media perspective.

This theory has typically been promoted by literary and film scholars.

Favorite game examples: Final Fantasy, Uncharted, BioShock.

3) Social

This is a slightly different theory in that it doesn’t invoke the game’s content, but the social sphere around it. The paradigmatic game genre for this theory is currently MMOs. And this is sensible as an explanation of why many players keep returning to this type of game.

The social theory also has a stronger version in which the social sphere isn’t simply something around the game, but it defines or is the game, both for multi- and single player games. (Mikael Jakobsson and Anne Mette Thorhauge are probably the main proponents of this strong version.)

Favorite game examples: World of Warcraft, Dungeons & Dragons, Wii Sports.

4) Feel

Feel is the newer theory, and it is only really articulated Steve Swink’s book on Game Feel. Here, video games are seen as centered on the immediate sub-second experience on controlling something and receiving audio and visual feedback. This is the theory for discussing game controls, graphics and sound. (Yes, you could argue for graphics as a separate theory, but let’s just put it here).

It is also a good theory for teaching how game design often starts with narrowing down a central core mechanic which feels good as in the picture, and how designers must then add context around the core mechanic for it to remain interesting.

I suspect feel hasn’t been popular in media or literature departments because it talks about an experience which is very hard to verbalize, and hard to connect to existing theories. (Though Donald Norman’s Emotional Design has some family semblance).

Favorite game examples: Super Mario Bros, Super Mario Bros, Super Mario Bros.

The meaning of “is”

The question of course is what we mean when we say that a video game is anything in particular. As always, there is a fine line between:

1. Proposing a particular description (“feel is one way to look at it”).
2. Insisting on a particular description (“to ignore the social is to ignore the lived experience of players”).
3. Insisting in having identified an essential component of video games (“without rules, there is no game”). (Though the rigid designator comes up here: it just is easier to claim a central position for rules than for, say, 3d graphics).
4. Insisting that all video games should be made with a particular theory in mind.

There are other theories, of course, but I think these are the four dominant ones at the moment, November 2014.

PS. This 4-part list does not replace the (cough) ludology-narratology debate or the rules/fiction distinction in Half-Real. The rules/fiction distinction is about how the players conceptualize the game that they encounter. Feel and Social are theories about other aspects of game-playing.

This is my eighth monthly Patch Wednesday post where I discuss a question about video games that I think is unanswered, unexplored, or not posed yet. I will propose my own tentative ideas and invite comments. 

The series is called Patch Wednesday to mark the sometimes ragtag and improvised character of video game studies.

It is easy, and probably common, to think of video game history as a series of innovations that propel video games “forward”, allowing for new experiences and expressions. (Not that anyone has written such a history in any significant detail.)

But what about in between? There are periods of time where, as I like to say, we know what video games are.

Four voices
When I took music classes in high school, I learned to do 4-voice arrangements of church hymns according a set of rules for harmony and voicing. Though it has later come in handy in weird ways, I can’t say that I appreciated learning those rules at the time, as it was rules about music that I did not care much for in the first place. In music theory, what I learned relates to the common practice period, ca 1600-1900, which is considered a stable period with certain rules about harmony, well-known chords and so on. One of the famous rules of the period is that two voices/instruments cannot follow each other in octave or fifth intervals. This was strange to me as I listened to much music, say Led Zeppelin, which often has the bass and the guitar playing riffs in unison.

I think I would have appreciated the lessons much more if I’d understood that the rules were a description of a particular musical style, and that all musical styles have sets of rules for what can and cannot be done.

Common practice periods in video games
And so it seems that video games have similar “common practice periods”, where video games, or at least certain video game genres, follow a set of rules. For example, the shooter genre is still in a common practice period where we expect a new game to contain both a single and multiplayer game, with the single-player game lasting between 10 and 30 hours for story-heavy games, and <10 hours for multiplayer-focused games. In addition, we expect such games to be promoted on ever “better” graphics, allow us to shoot firearms, collect more of them, manage ammunition, and so on.

In a bigger perspective, another common period was from 1980 to 2005 where we knew that video games were sold in boxes, aimed at a particular demographic, and (also) promoted on “better” graphics.

Does it follow that changing distribution models have bigger influence on the stability of game design than technology does?

And we can keep zooming out: When I was writing my game definition I dealt with the issue of change by not claiming that I had defined everything called games for all time, but rather that I was identifying a particular “classic game model” that had been dominant for several thousand years.

Institutions behind common practice
Going back to music, periods of stability may often have some institutionalized codification where rules are followed not only by observation, but may be explicitly taught to practitioners, and sometimes enforced. Video game educations and game design books can then also serve to define and maintain a period of common practice, though I suspect that many contemporary video game educations are more fascinated with breaking the rules than with maintaining them. Though that can become a type of common practice by itself, a “tyranny of pixelated platformers”.

That would be another type of history to write, one where we examine what it was that made certain periods of video game history so stable.