During my continued adventures in learning about video game study I came across this ongoing debate. I was immediately curious because I love – seriously, LOVE – diffusing conflict using the power of raw logic. I won’t be able to ‘solve’ it per se considering how ill knowledged I am when it comes to the field, so it’s something I’m very interested in following. For now I’d like to map out my understanding of it.

From what I’ve gathered Narratology is the elder of the two fields and has it’s roots in mediums like Film, TV, and novels. Consequently the Narratological approach favours classical narrative analysis (techniques of which I am unfamiliar).

Ludology however regards video games as a medium so new, so mind blowing, so fresh that it deserves a field to itself rather than the old school field of Narratology. Where Narratology might prefer a structuralist approach to a text, Ludology prefers a formalist one that analyses a game based on what stimuli are offered in it.

In this article from 2001 the author Gonzalo Frasca suggests that due to the freshness of the medium it’s the perfect opportunity to take a Formalist approach to critique and analysis so that video games can receive criticism on it’s own terms. I had to look up what Formalist meant but it was a fantastic little nugget of information when I did as it’s an approach to analysis believing that any context or supplementary information is available entirely within a text.

Frasca seems to like this idea doubly so due to the youth of this kind of criticism, a youth yet underexposed to the more traditional ways of thinking and critiquing a medium, and he believes that this could potentially make for a brand new way of thinking when it comes to video game analysis. This idea excited me even more because I love a bit of chaos and disorder.

What’s also interesting about the concept of Ludology is that it draws on a plethora of humanities based subjects, critical and cultural theory, and a whole bunch of different faculties of thinking.

To be fair this was published in 2001 so some of it’s points may be somewhat outdated, something I’d like to find out in the near future as I explore these ideas more.