Some quick thoughts on videogame form off the top of my head

I can’t believe I just paused Alien to write about videogames and formalism but that’s what I get for checking Twitter.

Frank Lantz is currently saying all sorts of smart things on Twitter about formalism. I’ll put a link to the inevitable storify here when someone bothers to compile it but it ends with this twitlonger which makes a lot of the points again. He’s making good points and it’s an important discussion to have, to find a useful notion of ‘videogame form’ beyond the strictly narrow and conservative idea of a ‘formalist’ as someone who says Dear Esther isn’t a game.

But I’m still kinda uneasy in the way people are retweeting the tweets in this celebratory, “yeah! Formalism isn’t a dirty word!” kinda way. I mean, it’s totally true that it isn’t! I’ve personally become super interested in the idea of videogame form in the last 18 months or so and realised it’s an area I’ve been way too disinterested in. Especially around games like Tearaway and Mountain. Formal stuff, broadly, is super important and has absolutely been a blindspot for a lot of non-development-centric games criticism. Just the idea that videogames are things that are played with hands and plastic and code and stuff is something strictly humanities based videogame critics like myself have been pretty terrible at accounting for and that needs to be (is in the process of) being rectified.

However, this stuff still makes me uneasy. I think it’s because there’s an inherent ahistoricity to this ‘formalism isn’t bad’ idea, or the idea that those who say Dear Esther isn’t a game aren’t real formalists. I think it risks forgetting that for years we were stuck reacting against an incredibly narrow and conservative idea of what counts as a formal element of a videogame, which was itself incredibly mechanistic, incredibly game-centric, and incredibly software-centric. Videogames are games first, a lot of early academic writing on videogames claims, either implicitly or explicitly claiming that all the ‘non-game’ elements (characters, narrative, visual art) were less formally central than rules and goals and challenges and such. There’s a history to that formalism (I’m still content calling it a formalism. Or maybe a formalistism idk) tied up with a history of the gendering of technology studies which is way more complicated than I’m getting into in a tumblr post that I paused a really good movie to write. It’s a reductive and conservative formalism that did more damage than good but, to be sure, failed to account for ‘the videogame form’ in its entirety.

The political situation this led to in the past maybe five years or so is important to remember. It wasn’t just reddit trolls and Kotaku commenters saying Dear Esther or Proteus or Lim or Dys4ia weren’t videogames. It was developers and influential bloggers and youtubers and critics and academics. I think that’s at risk of being written out of history: that there was (and still is) a conservative formalist strand in videogame discourses (both popular and scholarly) that works with a narrow software-centric and game-centric view of what counts as the form of the videogame.

I’m reminded of Gonzalo Frasca’s paper “Ludologists love stories, too: notes from a debate that never took place” which, while a really useful paper that outlines a great review of the literature, tends to revise history to make a somewhat extreme viewpoint in game studies (videogames don’t tell stories) somewhat less extreme and, in the process, making those that reacted against it seem more extreme. Ludology vs narratology as a debate did take place, and so did a debate more recently where a range of videogame forms were dismissed as not videogames when measured against a certain arbitrary notion of what a videogame can be.

I guess I’m just worried that a justifiably reactionary stance (remembering that most of the videogames dismissed as ‘interactive art’ or what have you in recent years are made by a range of marginalised people traditionally less well heard in videogame discourses) will be painted after-the-fact as a straight-up reductive one. There were some pretty good reasons for a while there to be suspicious of ‘formalists’.

I want more critics accounting for videogame form. Art critics can talk about a type of paint used and film critics can talk about camera work and lighting and actors and scripts, and we definitely struggle with that as videogame critics. More accounting for videogames as things that are touched and played with and not just worlds that are magically entered is what we need. That means we need a more coherent language to talk about form.

Back in the late 60s Susan Sontag said something pretty similar, arguing that criticism needs to account for form better and not just what a work ‘means’. But she talks about the need to account for form while still decrying formalism. After talking about the need to account for form in art in “On Style” she then preemptively defends her point by saying:

“The objection that this would reduce art to mere ‘formalism’ must not be allowed to stand. (That word should be reserved for those works of art that mechanically perpetuate outmoded or depleted aesthetic formulas.) An approach which considers works of art as living, autonomous models of consciousness will seem objectionable only so long as we refuse to surrender the shallow distinction of form and content. For the sense in which a work of art has no content is no different from the sense in which the world has no content. Both are. Both need no justification; nor could they possibly have any.”

I find myself agreeing with Sontag (but it’s an essay nearly fifty-years-old, all the same) that considering ‘form’ is far more interesting than being a ‘formalist’. But maybe that is getting semantic. I don’t necessarily disagree with anything Lantz is currently saying, really. More people discussing the videogame form is great. I just hope that a) the videogame form doesn’t get reduced to the game form; b) the videogame form doesn’t get reduced to the software form; c) we don’t forget that there existed (and exists) a very conservative and pervasive strand of videogame formalism that actively works to maintain a status quo of videogame design ideologies and its margins.