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Reference

Mitchell, A., & Vught, J.V. (2024). Videogame Formalism: On Form, Aesthetic Experience and Methodology (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.5117/9789463720663

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https://www.youtube.com/@weekendresearcher

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Welcome back to Revise and Resubmit, and welcome to our episode series, “Weekend Book Review” 🎙️📚

I want to start with a small confession. Most of us do not enter a videogame the way we enter a novel or a museum. We enter with momentum. With habit. With thumbs already rehearsing the next move. And then, every once in a while, a game interrupts us. It makes the familiar feel strange again. It asks us to look, not just win. 👀🕹️

That interruption is the heartbeat of Videogame Formalism: On Form, Aesthetic Experience and Methodology by Alex Mitchell and Jasper van Vught, published by Routledge in 2024, with the ebook arriving on 10 November 2025. This is a book that tries to rescue “formalism” from becoming a vague, everything-and-nothing label in game studies. Instead of treating formalism like a catch-all, Mitchell and van Vught trace its history and its seriousness, and then bring it home to games with a kind of patient clarity that feels rare. 🧠✨

Mitchell teaches at the National University of Singapore, where his work circles defamiliarization in gameplay, the pull of replaying story-heavy games, authoring tools, and collaborative storytelling. He is also a founding member of ARDIN, which tells you something about how committed he is to the craft and community of interactive narrative. Van Vught is an assistant professor at Utrecht University, working at the intersection of methods and teaching, wrestling with what it means to study games as texts and how to help students learn to see what games are doing. Together, they read like two people who love games enough to slow them down. 🎮📝

Their central idea is deceptively simple: games create aesthetic experience through form, through “poetic devices” that make forms difficult. Think jump cuts. Unconventional dialogue. A sudden shift in control. A break in the rhythm that jolts you awake. They move through titles like Kentucky Route Zero, Paratopic, and Breath of the Wild to show how these disruptions do not just decorate play, they reorganize perception. And the methodological anchor here is what they call “the dominant,” the organizing principle that guides what the critic should pay attention to, so analysis does not dissolve into vibe or trivia. 🔍🎯

So today, as we step into this Weekend Book Review, I want to sit with a question the book keeps placing gently in my lap: when a game makes you stumble, when it deliberately strains your habits and rewires your attention, what exactly is it teaching you to notice about your own life outside the screen? 🌍➡️🕹️❓

My thanks to Alex Mitchell and Jasper van Vught, and to Routledge, for making this work available. If you enjoy these reviews, please subscribe to the podcast on Spotify and subscribe to the YouTube channel “Weekend Researcher” ✅📌 This show is also available on Amazon Prime Music and Apple Podcast 🎧🍎