My thoughts on 'Game Studies, Year Fifteen' by Ian Bogost

My understanding of Ian Bogosts 'Game Studies, Year Fifteen' is that he is implying that games have more meaning than what we believe to know. I will try to break it down as he has wrote it.

The idea of 'Ludologism' being the combination of ludology and narratology is something that debates with me entirely because it gives off a formalist view which he mentions. The idea of studying a story and the structure of it is something that needs to be looked at differently, it's very hard to combine them both if you are say reading from a book. The great thing is that he allows the combination of the two to come together through games and bringing narratology into ludology. The idealist thinking behind this was to generate a story through visual effects which is what most games try to achieve.

Formalism is something he speaks very strongly of but does not wish to go into detail entirely so that he keeps peoples minds open and not allowing them to choose a path, he is letting everyone have these separate options so they can choose themselves, much like what games do today. He writes 'It's interesting to note that elsewhere in cultural criticism, post structuralism led to a many decades long rise of the hermeneutics of suspicion' here is something that I can agree on for once with his writing. I believe that culture and religion changes peoples opinions on the matter but some people refuse to look past their stubbornness and decide rather to ignore what is either fact or something that is proven to be real (normally close minded people).

Rather than rambling on about his writing I prefer to give my own opinion on the piece, the blog itself always manages to bring itself back around to game studies and how they're perceived. The issue I have is that he has minimal relevance with a lot of the writing such as saying 'after the 2008 global financial collapse' when realistically if you look at how games have been taking over way before this period and way after it so why does it need to be included other than him shoving some useless information in there to make him sound intelligent. This is just how I feel about it and others may feel the same if not more strongly about it. I just wanted to say that this piece was very insightful but also unnecessary at times.