A Disenfranchised Youth

What is the common philosophical line between the co-editors of Austin C. Howe's "On The Ghost Of Formalism"? You've got Zolani Stewart, Lana Polansky, Iris Bull, Claris Cyarron, myself, and Austin, of course. We are all co-signers of a treatise that recognize that the systems that are commonly used to understand games is useless to us and consistently marginalizes our work.

An interesting thing to note is that some of the above signed are graduate students. And some of us didn't finish high school. We represent a range of ages, nationalities, classes, genders, and work spaces. We are critics, game designers, let's players, event organizers, writers, editors, activists, and scholars. Each one of us have been marginalized in different, life-changing ways by systems that dismiss an intertextual understanding of games. So the common point between us all? We are the disenfranchised youth.

I don't mean youth by age here: the age of those who would've been "Narratologist" game scholars fifteen years ago are now disenfranchised 30-40 year olds. Within The Debate That Never Took Place the losers of that debate were immediately ostracized as non-essential to the progress of the Great State of Games Studies. All of my mentors worked hard on close readings of lore, player interactions, themes, and spaces in games. They did this (a tradition I proudly continue alongside them within my Let's Plays) with full knowledge that this probably wouldn't help their dissertations, get them hired at a game company, be noticed by outlets like DiGRA, or even keep their blogs from expiring. Because of all of this, we've become used to having to create our own systems of representation.

So when we, the students, look to scholars for media critiques of video games, our primary outlets are anthropology lampshading as romanticized nostalgia, player-centrist close readings that end up feeding into formalist theory, and experimental hobbyist work. All of this is fantastic work, but it continues to get waylaid by formalist systems that are built to self-reproduce, franchise, crowd-out, and consume. Instead, we ask for an approach to games that respects interdisciplinary, intertextual, and auteur readings of games in which the player is not separate from the game, but inherently responsible for their play (The Anti-Ludonarrative Dissonance)

Lana says this is gonna keep happening over and over. We're gonna keep fighting about this as long as we continue falling into this disenfranchised state. So here is the real solution to Formalism: How do we support and enfranchise the youth, the scholars, and the game studies program as a whole?

If game studies can (re)enfranchise the youth, we will, without irony, achieve Post-Formalism.