Games are Leaking: Towards an Updated Formalist Methodology for Digital Gameplay
Marji, Yanal (2025)
2025
Master's Programme in Game Studies
Informaatioteknologian ja viestinnän tiedekunta - Faculty of Information Technology and Communication Sciences
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Hyväksymispäivämäärä
2025-05-13
Julkaisun pysyvä osoite on
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:tuni-202505105228
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:tuni-202505105228
Tiivistelmä
Games are leaking.
In other words, the interactive technics developed and mastered in the digital game have escaped its confines and travelled to every aspect of the cultural imaginary through tools such as gamification and alternate reality game marketing. Game studies, as a field still haunted by the remnants of the ludology vs. narratology debate, its own iteration of the form vs. content debate, is yet to produce a socially and historically situated dialectical formal analysis of games that can be exported and utilized by the wider field of cultural studies. This thesis, positioned at the intersection of literary theory’s new formalism, cultural studies, and game studies, aims to provide a starting point for this toolset. The additional motivation for this thesis is to work towards a methodological approach capable of analyzing games with political meanings to the fullest extent, allowing the analysis of games to connect to material relations of production and their play to emerge as an act of critique.
Starting with Teresa L. Ebert’s work on Marxist cultural criticism as its theoretical backbone, this thesis investigates the history of formalism in digital game studies and its contemporary positioning and application within close reading methodologies. Relying on the new formalist framework put forth by Caroline Levine, this thesis presents an updated understanding of form as an arrangement that permeates both cultural texts and social reality. In applying the method, this thesis studies the rhythmic structures of the indie horror game Basilisk 2000, relying on Tom Apperley’s application of Lefebvre’s rhythmanalysis to digital games to anchor rhythmic form to the analysis of power structures presented by works in game production studies, thus connecting the formal analysis to the material relations of production.
The goals of this work are twofold: Updating game formalism to become more relevant to the analysis of political power and structures operating in and through games, and positioning Basilisk 2000 as a work of material critique through its confrontations with labor conditions within the game industry.
In other words, the interactive technics developed and mastered in the digital game have escaped its confines and travelled to every aspect of the cultural imaginary through tools such as gamification and alternate reality game marketing. Game studies, as a field still haunted by the remnants of the ludology vs. narratology debate, its own iteration of the form vs. content debate, is yet to produce a socially and historically situated dialectical formal analysis of games that can be exported and utilized by the wider field of cultural studies. This thesis, positioned at the intersection of literary theory’s new formalism, cultural studies, and game studies, aims to provide a starting point for this toolset. The additional motivation for this thesis is to work towards a methodological approach capable of analyzing games with political meanings to the fullest extent, allowing the analysis of games to connect to material relations of production and their play to emerge as an act of critique.
Starting with Teresa L. Ebert’s work on Marxist cultural criticism as its theoretical backbone, this thesis investigates the history of formalism in digital game studies and its contemporary positioning and application within close reading methodologies. Relying on the new formalist framework put forth by Caroline Levine, this thesis presents an updated understanding of form as an arrangement that permeates both cultural texts and social reality. In applying the method, this thesis studies the rhythmic structures of the indie horror game Basilisk 2000, relying on Tom Apperley’s application of Lefebvre’s rhythmanalysis to digital games to anchor rhythmic form to the analysis of power structures presented by works in game production studies, thus connecting the formal analysis to the material relations of production.
The goals of this work are twofold: Updating game formalism to become more relevant to the analysis of political power and structures operating in and through games, and positioning Basilisk 2000 as a work of material critique through its confrontations with labor conditions within the game industry.