don’t know how sympathetic I am to that formalism games/zines piece
think I’m personally on board with a much more rigorously mechanistic kind of formalism, more formalist than the formalists if you will, i.e. you have ‘video/computer games’ as simply all interactive electronic media (though this is probs too porous, what about internet pages etc.), football et al are sports, then you have board games etc., there’s no need to subsume all these under the much broader form ‘game’ and then kick out the experimental stuff about trans awareness or whatever because it’s apparently not ‘fun’ etc., basically make it a matter of media
because what that reminds me of is the whole thing with non-narrative cinema
like I had people tell me while I was doing my dissertation on stan brakhage that “it’s not even really cinema though is it” and I was shocked to find at the time that even the wikipedia article on ‘film’ defined it as “moving pictures which tell a story” which is terribly sloppy
the best definition we have I think is peter kubelka:
“Cinema is not movement. Cinema is a projection of stills—which means images which do not move—in a very quick rhythm. And you can give the illusion of movement, of course, but this is a special case, and film was invented orginally for this special case.”
i.e. the fundamental ontological ground of cinema is the projection of still image(s), anything else goes and simply ‘movement’ let alone ‘narrative’ etc. are just epiphenomenon, not defining formal aspects
and then you have a definition which doesn’t needlessly exclude a whole hundred plus years wealth of incredible films which a lot of people would usually dismiss as ‘not fun’ i.e. boring because it doesn’t have a story or whatever
that’s not what happened anyway. even though people like brakhage saw themselves as working very firmly within the same tradition of cinema as eisenstein, dreyer, griffiths and so on, even the academy has often fenced him off, and so you get the situation where during 3 years at the university of warwick film dept. the most ‘out there’ thing we were shown was l’age d’or and the rest of the time were stuck between tame european arthouse, hollywood, and contemporary ‘world’ cinema as though that was everything there was to this art form. meanwhile the art history dept. was running modules featuring brakhage. non-narrative cinema ended up sequestered in the gallery space, becoming ‘video art’
chris kraus describes the process well in ‘indelible video’:
…the tape is really a documentary film. But it’s shown, sold and reviewed as an artwork. A slight shifting of emphasis… there is no longer an audience, no distribution system in place for nonnarrative film, but the impulse to make it and watch it remains, so its affects have migrated to the art world. Consequently, the film becomes less an autonomous act — a thing hurled into the culture — and more like an artifact, a branded product, to be viewed through the career of the artist.
