A New Formalism: Critical Proximity talk
The debates about “what is a game” happened between multiple overlapping circles that have very little to do with one another… “Games” is never going to fall into one bucket or critical lens… We enrich ourselves and our mutual understanding not by claiming pre-eminence of one circle, but by learning to move between them.
As regular readers know, I have been involved in a lot of discussions about “formalism” in games over the last few years. This talk was an attempt to reset the conversation with insights into “formalism in the real world” as Brendan Keogh put it on Twitter, a look into the ways in which looking at the formal structure of games is able to help out and illuminate all sorts of games criticism. Including “softer” or more humanistic approaches, such as historiography, study of play, and cultural studies approaches.To that end, I deployed a set of analogies from other media: fine art, and poetry, and music, to help draw connections between the ways formal approaches and even notation are used in these other fields, and how we might use them in ours.
My talk is below the fold (hover over the slides for the notes text), and for the full transcript plus a link to the video, go here.
There were many other talks I highly recommend… the entire Twitch stream is available (see that same link) and lasts 8 hours!
I’m here to represent the formalists!
6 Responses to “A New Formalism: Critical Proximity talk”
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RT @raphkoster: A New Formalism: slides and transcript of my Critical Proximity talk http://t.co/62gmhmIhFx #critprox #gdc
Leigh Alexander liked this on Facebook.
RT @raphkoster: A New Formalism: slides and transcript of my Critical Proximity talk http://t.co/62gmhmIhFx #critprox #gdc
@raphkoster I was watching that talk with friends last night, glad to have the slides!
[…] This one from Raph Koster about music criticism and games w/r/t/ formalism. […]
[…] Critical Proximity I pointed out that the avant-garde/art/whatever games would have been called “formalist” in any other medium, so I like this […]