Xeno-ludens: Deformativism and Playful Estrangement

This extended abstract, presented at DiGRA 2023, examines the intersection of video games and deformative criticism, an experimental mode of analysis that applies algorithmic rules or parameters to cultural artifacts such as literary texts, films, and games in order to estrange their forms and surface meanings that conventional interpretation might miss. The author argues that deformativism can be understood as a form of critical play, and that the video game is inherently a deformative medium. The paper frames this relationship through two perspectives: whether notions of deformation apply to games, and whether deformative criticism's "parametric turn" in the digital humanities can itself be seen as videoludic.

The text traces the development of deformative practice from Lisa Samuels and Jerome McGann's original concept of "deformance," through Lev Manovich's media visualizations of films and games, to later work by Kevin Ferguson, Claire Hentschker, Jason Mittell, and Alan O'Leary. It also surveys game-specific applications, such as Stephanie Boluk and Patrick LeMieux's Oulipian and topological remakes of Super Mario Bros and The Legend of Zelda. Scholarship on defamiliarization in game studies, including Pötzsch's procedural ostranenie and Mitchell's work on poetic gameplay, is reviewed as a related background tradition.

The paper's central proposal is a transmedial ludic estrangement, grounded in Gilles Deleuze's concept of the diagram and conceived as a "xeno-play" paradigm in which deformation produces strange forms of playing and strange forms of games. The author poses open questions, such as whether the same parametric deformance yields consistent formal effects across books, films, and video games. The work is primarily theoretical and conceptual rather than empirical, offering a framework and research agenda rather than reporting survey or experimental data.