Ludocriticism: Steps Towards a Critical Framework for Games

Koenitz and Eladhari's paper argues that game criticism remains marginal compared with film, literature, and theatre, and that this marginality stems from two linked problems: the reliance on analytical vocabularies borrowed from other disciplines, and the scarcity of frameworks aimed at aesthetic, semantic, and societal evaluation rather than functional description. The authors frame the absence of mainstream games criticism as a cultural limitation, one that leaves games perceived as cheap entertainment even among their own audiences. Rather than proposing a new analytical model, the paper seeks to identify the missing structural pieces needed for a critical framework specific to games.

The authors contend that terms such as patterns, textual analysis, close playing, and cinematic vocabulary like framing and mise-en-scène have been adopted with limited scrutiny of whether they fit interactive, procedural artifacts. They argue that the narratology and ludology debate has not been fully resolved, leaving the ludological project unfinished. Drawing on Gerald Prince's distinction between functional and evaluative approaches, they observe that most existing game frameworks describe what games are, while critical traditions for novels and films focus on whether a particular work is accomplished, meaningful, and insightful about the human condition.

Despite this gap, the paper identifies substantial existing work that could form the basis of a critical meta-framework. Research on gender, ethics, religion, ethnography, player practices, fan re-tellings, developer biographies and postmortems, and aesthetic concepts such as Juul's art of failure and Murray's immersion, agency, and transformation are all cited as relevant building blocks. The authors' argument rests largely on a conceptual and literature-based analysis, and their proposed steps are twofold: integrating these diverse approaches into a holistic meta-framework, and translating academic criticism into forms accessible to developers and the public, a move they acknowledge risks being seen as diluting scholarly rigor.