I don’t think the formalist stuff is irrelevant to games in general. I just think the focus on the waggly thing doesn’t seem right for formalism.

In SL the other day I came across a place entirely in black and white. It’s stunningly good 3D building, with realistic textures and good lighting, but the creator also occasionally includes simple white 2D drawings into her 3D world. The scribbly drawings are entirely flat, stamped onto a transparent 2D surface. There are two stickmen talking (in cartoon bubbles) in the middle of what would otherwise be a remarkably realistic main street. There’s a bizarre cluster of white squiggled flowers out behind the house which functions as a “garden.”

Now THAT’s doing something interesting (and potentially defamiliarizing) because it’s using the 3D engine to interrupt its own grammar. At the most unlikely time, it pulls us back to the margins of our cheap lined paper.

Your comments were helpful as I think they’ve made me recognise the futility of what I was trying to do (in a good way). I think the problem here is the impossibility of making an analogy between two different forms and their respective modes: one of representation, the other of simulation. While we can obviously look for narratives and representations within video games – and probably should – we would ultimately miss their ‘video game-y-ness’, particularly if we try to get overeager with comparisons between interface and reading.

One entry point might be what someone categorised as the distinction between film and gaming, namely, that film operates through empathy and gaming through agency. In that model, interface becomes about deliberate or unintended constraints on agency and there’s probably some fruitful (or at least interesting) links to ideology there.

The defamiliarisation bit was interesting too. I’m not sure what to make of it yet as you’re quite right about the whole ‘intuitiveness’ thing on the Wii – my *mum* can play it. I guess what I’m trying to think through is the simple question of what makes games ‘fun’. Shooting people, as far as I know, isn’t fun – yet yesterday I really enjoyed playing a game in which ‘I’ was ‘shooting at people’. I think the distance there is more than the usual sense of representation as re-presentation – interface has something to do with it, even though I’m totally unsure what.

Oh, sorta’ unrelated, but you probably right about the Wii just getting annoying – Super Mario Galaxy is practically dripping in design genius but I’m already wishing I could just play without having to waggle anything.

this may be part of our ongoing disagreements about the value of wiis, but the stories of people forgetting where they are and leaping across the room into a lamp tell me that there is very little frustration or defamiliarzation going on here. these people are acting “normally.” it is “intuitive.” in fact, the popularity of the wii seems entirely based in the idea that its grammar is easy to learn and accept. it does not cause frustration or meaningful “tension.”

two further complications. formalism is formal. it’s about how the narrative or poem itself is constructed. to be honest about this, you would have to look at the structure of wii tennis as a kind of isolated narrative. what figures are represented? what kinds of goals are explored in this kind of game? that is, a formalist text doesn’t have an “interface.” the formalist idea is that the text exists as a formal structure WITHOUT a reader (or an author, really). to introduce particular “interfaces” is to enter the world of reader response, interactive reading, bakhtinian dialogic imaginations, discourse, or whatever.

speaking of which, this does become more complicated if you think about this problem in relation to someone like Bakhtin, who argues (and i’m paraphrasing here) that the russian formalists are full of shit.