Neoformalist Game Analysis A methodological exploration of single-player game violence

This thesis positions itself within the scholarly debate around videogame violence. However, other than focussing on the effects of game violence which dominates much of this debate, this thesis focuses on the formal characteristics of the game and asks: how does violence in single-player videogames work? This means that this thesis explores the different rules, style elements, and narrative components that make up and surround violent encounters in games and that structure our ingame behaviours and our perceptions of these violent actions. When seeking an approach to study these formal components, currently available ‘formalisms’ in game studies are found to be lacking. Ludology’s focus on rule systems in detriment of the game’s semantic layer does not allow for an adequate analysis of game violence since game violence is largely shaped by audiovisual cues. Furthermore, proceduralism’s focus on finding meaning becomes problematic since it does not account for the ludic function that components making up the game violence may (also) have. For a balanced analysis of rules, stylistic and narrative components, this thesis therefore borrows from, adapts, and expands on a neoformalist approach to films, and proposes a neoformalist approach to games as an alternative to both ludology and proceduralism. With a focus on the way that different devices function to structure a player’s response, this approach does not only prove helpful for an equal consideration of different formal game components but also helps to consider the player’s inherent role in actualising the perceptual, cognitive, emotional and behavioural effects. In fact, this approach functions as a poetics of game violence that takes player responses as departure points and asks which combination of devices are at work in cueing these responses. In exploring a range of different single-player videogames with a neoformalist approach to games, this thesis first shows how different components surrounding game violence can be there for ludic reasons (facilitating configurative behaviour), compositional reasons (creating narrative), realistic reasons (appealing to notions of the real world), transtextual reasons (appealing to knowledge of other works), and artistic reasons (contributing to the game’s abstract shape). Furthermore this thesis explores how these different reasons suggest different play responses by