These are some over-excited thoughts that I’ve written on an empty stomach with very little revision or proof-reading. I’m sure I’m wrong about a lot of things, but I just wanted to put this out because OMG FEELINGS

A while ago I was fortunate enough to engage in a very interesting discussion with Raph Koster, in the comments under a blog post I wrote advocating for an ethnological approach to understanding what “game” means.

It was an experience that made very clear to me that while I and others may believe the project of defining words and fixing boundaries to be a form of epistemic violence, Raph himself (and also Tadhg Kelly and presumably most other people engaged in projects of this kind) are actually driven by a desire to build connections and facilitate dialogue. I understood his work a lot better after that. His use of the word “game” sometimes describes a subset of a larger category, as “poetry” is to “poem”. Nevertheless, I continued to believe that no matter how he polished up the logic, the project of defining a boundary to what a “game” is will be just as fraught with power struggles as trying to tell someone that their writing is not poetry even if they intended it to be so.

I owe a huge debt to formalists like Raph, because I need a framework with which to discuss the design of interactive media in order to study their historical changes. Without the work that people like him have done, design histories of video games would be far, far harder to write. It’s my job as a historian to try to be critical of how those frameworks fit into larger discourses and power relations, even as I attempt to use them as part of softer, more “networky” approaches to design analysis.

More recently, Raph has been engaged in long Twitter discussions with people who are far smarter and more accomplished than me, to try and understand why formalism is so maligned among game developers whose game designs are motivated by a desire to portray underrepresented narratives. I’ve been mostly observing this from the outside, and occasionally making a fool of myself by putting my head above the parapet and saying something pointless. But I’ve been struck by how seriously Raph takes his search for dialogue. It’s a bit embarrassing and fawning to say this about someone I have never met, but he has been calm in the face of hostility, has somehow managed to never take people’s criticism personally, and has continued to reach out to people even though the seemingly endless discussions must be completely exhausting. I honestly could not do what Raph is doing, and I’m surprised more people haven’t admitted the same.

Today he published his latest set of thoughts on how formalism can cope with the subjective and personal nature of game experience. He calls it ‘Playing with “game”’ and I think it’s going to be one of those landmark texts for me. It’s going to take me a while to understand every line of it, but basically he says that while their systems are observable and real, games are subjective and contextual, and that therefore formalist analyses of games will never be objective – it will only ever be one point of view among many.

To me, this is huge. For as long as I’ve been writing about games I’ve said that the current taxonomies of game design analysis fail to account for games as processes, instead treating them as static objects. I have a penchant for using words as verbs rather than nouns. “Game” is a verb. It is a thing that you do. For one of the leading voices in formalism to acknowledge something along those lines (I’m sure that’s not exactly what he said) and try to have formalism work on that basis is a real turning point.

Seeing games in this way makes the work of game developers harder. In my view – and I have no idea really if this is what Raph is saying – you can’t create a process. You can only contribute to the context in which a process happens. Games aren’t made by developers alone. Games are network effects that arise from a multitude of connections that include, but are not limited to, a developer’s creation of systems and a player’s actions within that system.

A friend of mine told me that Raph is rewriting Theory of Fun this year. I can’t wait to see what comes out of this discussion. This is just one more reason why this is an amazing time to be working with games, and an amazing time to be alive.