Videogame Formalism

Front matter

Alex Mitchell and Jasper van Vught

On Form, Aesthetic Experience and Methodology

Amsterdam University Press

Table of Contents

List of Figures and Tables Acknowledgements Preface

2. On Videogame Form 3. On Aesthetic Experience 4. On Methodology

5. Applying Formalism 6. Conclusion Bibliography

Preface

This book brings together ideas about defamiliarization and poetic gameplay that I have been exploring for some time but had not clearly grounded either historically or theoretically. Although my thinking about how gameplay can be made strange and unfamiliar drew inspiration from the work of Victor Shklovsky (20124), I had not traced the connections from this early work on defamiliarization through either the later work of the Russian Formalists, or that of the Neoformalist movement in film studies. I certainly had not explored in detail the various ways that game studies have viewed (and critiqued) formalism in its various forms. That is why, for me, when Jasper approached me to write this book together, I felt it provided the perfect opportunity to rethink my work on poetic gameplay patterns, and also bring in the strong foundations in the history of this approach that Jasper had been exploring in his own work.

Although I say that my work before embarking on this book was not strongly grounded in theory or historical context, what I am happy about is that it was firmly based on both the player's (my) aesthetic experience of the various works I have analysed, and in those works themselves. As Jasper and I worked to articulate our understanding of our videogame formalism, I was pleased to realize that yes, what I have been doing, namely starting from what intrigued me about these works and my particular aesthetic experience, and then working through and identifying specific ways in which that experience was defamiliarized, thus identifying the various poetic gameplay devices, actually aligned with much of what we were developing in the book. Where I found the most useful insights, both as a critic and as an author of this book, was the way that using the dominant as a means to focus the analysis and find the connections between the various devices, really seemed to strongly connect to what I had been seeing in my work, but had not had the vocabulary to directly articulate. This, plus the extension of the notion of devices beyond the purely ludic, which had previously been my main focus, felt like a major step forward in terms of my own thinking about these concepts. For this, if nothing else, I am thankful to have worked on this book. I hope that for you, the reader, you find similar insights and inspiration!

Alex Mitchell Singapore, December 2022

While I had worked on developing a formalism in game studies before, drawing from the tradition of Neoformalist film theory (van Vught 2016), I am glad I decided to let those early ideas simmer for some years before developing them into a book. This not only allowed me to further explore the Russian Formalist heritage that Thompson (1981; 1988) draws from in her work, it also forced me to reconsider some core tenets of the videogame formalism I thought I had figured out pretty clearly at the time.

In this earlier work on videogame formalism, I had basically done away with the whole idea of defamiliarization, thinking of it mostly as a nuisance that risked turning an otherwise useful and broadly applicable, systematic methodology into a highly narrow, evaluative theory of good art or, in my case, good games. However, once I had come across Alex’s work on defamiliarizing poetic gameplay devices (Mitchell 2016), I gained a renewed appreciation of the usefulness of the concept and started delving back into the theory to see where my thinking had taken a wrong turn. I started realizing that by doing away with defamiliarization I had inadvertently hollowed out much of the approach even though I was still of the opinion that the concept was too often used for a study of games as art.

This is where my thinking was when I asked Alex to join me in authoring this book. And over the course of the past year and a half, this thinking has matured significantly in the back-and-forth between him and me. The approach has now evolved away from its useful but oftentimes abstract theoretical underpinnings into a much more practical set of methodological considerations. This is probably what I feel proudest of and where I think our book offers the greatest contribution.

Having done quite a bit of work with my colleague René Glas on the challenges of teaching students to analyse games as texts (e.g., van Vught and Glas 2018), I am happy to be able to offer my students sections from this book that will take them through the more practical considerations of doing the analysis. I hope they will experience this book as an inspiring, comprehensible and helpful source.

Jasper van Vught New Zealand, December 2022

PREFACE 17 References

Mitchell, Alex. 2016. “Making the Familiar Unfamiliar: Techniques for Creating Poetic Gameplay.” In Proceedings of the First International Joint Conference of DiGRA and FDG 2016. Dundee: Digital Games Research Association.

Shklovsky, Victor. 2012a. “Art as Technique.” In Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, edited by Lee T Lemon and Marion J. Reis, 2nd ed., 21-34. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

Thompson, Kristin. 1981. Eisenstein’s “Ivan the Terrible”: A Neoformalist Analysis. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.

Thompson, Kristin. 1988. Breaking the Glass Armor: Neoformalist Film Analysis. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.

Vught, Jasper van. 2016. “Neoformalist Game Analysis: A Methodological Exploration of Single-Player Game Violence.” PhD Thesis, University of Waikato.

Vught, Jasper van, and René Glas. 2018. “Considering Play: From Method to Analysis.”

Transactions of the Digital Games Research Association 4 (2).

Let’s start this book with a brief thought experiment and some probing questions to establish your academic situatedness. Consider the following game:’ Stray (BlueTwelve Studio 2022¢) is a “third-person cat adventure game set amidst the detailed neon-lit alleys ofa decaying cybercity and the murky environments of its seedy underbelly” (BlueTwelve Studio 2022b). Released on the PlayStation 4 and 5 and Windows platforms, Stray is marketed as an adventure game in which you play from the perspective of a stray cat ina “strange city populated only by robots” (BlueTwelve Studio 2022a). Gameplay involves exploring the city, befriending robots, and working together with a “drone” companion to solve environmental puzzles and uncover the mystery of what happened to the human population in the city.

Now think about how you would study this game. What would you focus on? (How) would you play it? On what grounds would you consider the various elements of the game to be important, interesting, or valuable? Should you consider the gameplay? The ways that the framing of the game as an “adventure game” places it within a specific genre and in the context of a long history of previous adventure games? The choice of a cat as protagonist, and the emphasis on the realistic portrayal of the cat’s physical behaviours? The choice of setting the game in a “strange city” which is explicitly modelled after the Kowloon Walled City, a place that the “BlueTwelve Studio co-founders have always been fascinated by” (BlueTwelve Studio 2022a)?

It is safe to assume that the answers to these questions will differ considerably from person to person. That is, of course, because when we think, talk, or write about videogames, we always do so from our own particular social, cultural, and academic situation. For those of us unfamiliar with or new to the academic field of game studies, that situation may largely consist

1 Note that this book presents a proposal for a videogame formalism. As such, when we use the term “game,” we generally mean “videogame” unless we explicitly state otherwise. While acknowledging the complexity of the different uses and (questionable) interchangeability of these two terms (Aarseth 2017; 2019), for simplicity we use the term “videogame,” largely due to its general acceptance both in industry and academia. We will return to the term, and the limitations its use may place on the methodology laid out in this book, in chapter 6.

Mitchell, A. and J. van Vught, Videogame Formalism: On Form, Aesthetic Experience, and Methodology. Amsterdam: Amsterdam UniversityPress, 2024 DOI 10.5117/9789463720663_CHo1 of specific repertoire knowledge (the games we have played), the value we attribute to games in our society (why a game deserves academic scrutiny), and the (oftentimes normative) language we have learned from videogame reviews and videogame culture. For those of us more embedded in the academic field, that situation is likely to also be made up of assumptions about what our reality is and what videogames are like (ontology), what we think the corresponding valid knowledge of videogames consists of (epistemology), and what procedures we think can provide this knowledge when we study them (methodology). Oftentimes, these assumptions are not stated explicitly in academic writings about videogames, but they are always there. In fact, as Silverman and Marvasti have put it, even those researchers trying to grasp reality independent of such guiding assumptions are simply “oblivious to the theory dependent nature of their research” (2008, 106).”

There are of course myriad valid ways to study a videogame, all of them based on their own ontological, epistemological, and methodological assumptions. For example, it could be that you answered the above questions from a (transcendental) phenomenological perspective where the game is considered to be actualized in the player’s consciousness and therefore knowledge of the game can only be gathered from subjective “lived experiences.” For example, in Stray the player takes on the role of an unnamed stray cat. The player views the cat from a third-person perspective, and much of the game involves solving environmental puzzles designed based on the cat’s size and physical abilities. This raises questions such as: What is it like, experientially, to play a game as a cat? Does this impact how much the player feels a connection to the player character? How realistic is the simulation of the cat? Is this something that the player is concerned about, and how does it impact the gameplay experience? These questions may then lead you to use stimulated recall methods on other players (Pitkänen 2015) or to play the game yourself with your actions executed to cue bracketed experiences of characters and the game world, allowing you to then reflect on these issues of embodiment, presence, or player-character identification (Keogh 20158).

On the other hand, a background in cultural studies, feminism or critical theory may have you consider the game to be part of a socially and discursively constructed reality in which certain power structures are reflected, reproduced, or resisted. This may have you adopt the methodology

2 AsSilverman and Marvasti argue, scholars seeking an understanding independent of theoretical assumptions still implicitly (and perhaps unknowingly) adhere to a theory of naturalism.

of discourse analysis to study the meanings in and around the game as text to see how these meanings linguistically, audio-visually, or procedurally reflect these power structures (Ensslin and Balteiro 2019). In the case of Stray, the game is set in a post-apocalyptic version of the Kowloon Walled City in Hong Kong, a historical location that provided much of the visual inspiration for the game’s design. There are also particular choices that the designers made regarding representation, such as the portrayal of robots wearing conical rice hats, which “have a troubled history within the Asian diaspora community. They're used as a racial shorthand to indicate Asian origins, regardless of the actual context” (Jiang 2022). This invites discussion of issues surrounding cultural appropriation, colonialism, and representation. To what extent, for example, did the developers consider the actual cultural history of their source material? Is any of this reflected in the game, or is the “oriental” setting simply used, as is often the case in cyberpunk, simply to create an “exotic” locale? Have these issues been written about in the popular press and online? And how have players responded both to the game and to the discourse surrounding it?

Or finally, to give one more example, you may have answered these questions from a more positivist perspective, assuming that the game and its elements exist outside of our experience of them and that we can only gain knowledge about them from value-free and reproducible sensory data. In that case, you may prefer to employ a quantitative content analysis of the game to study the representation (e.g., screentime or relative number) of something like violent acts or female characters (a kind of Bechdel test)3 in cutscenes or the main questline (Schmierbach 2009). Taking this approach with Stray, you may want to perform a content analysis on the frequency of use of Japanese and Chinese text in locations around the city, or the number of times and in which circumstances the conical rice hats mentioned earlier appear in the game.

These approaches (and many more) all have their merits. Yet, all of them are also bound by their underlying assumptions, which steer the types of insights that can be gained into the game under investigation. So, while phenomenologists can employ a variety of introspective procedures, they cannot rely on observation of play behaviour alone, nor would it make

3 The Bechdel test is a gender diversity measure for a work of fiction that first appeared in a cartoon from Allison Bechdel in 1987. A work of fiction passes the test if it 1) has at least two female characters that 2) talk to each other about 3) something other than a man (see https:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bechdel_test). The test is mostly meant to raise awareness of the poor state of gender equality in popular culture.

much sense to embark on something like a formal analysis of the game’s source code (Willumsen 2018a). These methods simply don’t fit with how phenomenologists assume valid insights into a game can be gained and employing them would make the analysis self-contradicting. So, by laying bare and examining the assumptions of an approach we minimize the risk of a random or self-contradicting analysis and thereby make the analysis more rigorous, consistent, and convincing.

That is exactly what we aim to do in this book. Here, we historicize and further develop one specific set of assumptions which we relate to and file under the label videogame formalism. Drawing from Russian Formalist literature theory and Neoformailist film theory, we understand videogame formalism as an approach to studying videogames as texts or systems with assumptions about how videogames work aesthetically, the types of responses players can have to them, and how they relate to the world around them. By specifically situating videogame formalism in the context of these literary and film criticisms, we aim to separate this videogame formalism from other uses of the term, many of which have been criticized for being too reductive and selective in their approach to games (see below for a discussion on the anti-formalisms in game studies). While this videogame formalism still allows for a variety of methods that can be adjusted according to the game under investigation (we do not provide a recipe that you can follow to the letter), the underlying assumptions are still carefully and thoroughly developed thereby confining the analyses to a clear set of focus points and practical, methodological considerations.

By more explicitly outlining videogame formalism as an approach to doing game analysis, this book targets two types of audiences. On the one hand, this book offers methodological pointers to students and those relatively new to the field of game studies who wish to engage in a textual analysis of games from a formalist perspective. For them, the book shows what insights the formalist approach can generate, it explains the analytical focus points that come with it, and it provides instructions on its methodological considerations. On the other hand, this book invites fellow videogame scholars to reconsider some of their preconceptions about formalisms and engage more in-depth with the heritage and core principles of the approach. For them, this book takes a position in a longer running academic debate about the value or disvalue of a formalist approach to videogames, it points out some common misconceptions about the approach, and it lays the foundations for a formalist approach to videogame analysis by drawing extensively from well-established formalisms in literature studies and film studies.

INTRODUCTION 23 A Hotchpotch of (Videogame) Formalisms

If you're new to the field of game studies, this may be the first time you come across formalism as a critical approach. But many others reading this book will have at least a cursory understanding of what formalism is. Chances are, however, that those understandings will be widely different once we move beyond formalism’s central principle of focusing on the work’s formal elements (rather than authorial intent or the reception process). This is because, as Medvedev already noted in the 1920s: “there are as many Formalisms as there are Formalists” (1928, 97, quoted in Steiner 2014, 18). For some, formalism consists of a set of shared artistic principles to strive for when creating modern art (Seiferle 2012; Greenberg 1971) or poetry (Academy of American Poets 2014; Gioia 1987). Here, formalism is considered an art movement, a shared practitioners’ mantra that, for instance, emphasizes and values interesting relationships of a work’s compositional elements (colour, line, and textures) over its subject matter. For others, formalism looks for the nature of an artwork, sometimes judging its artistic merits in line with some core artistic principles (Dowling n.d.). Here, formalism is a philosophy of art or aesthetics that functions as an analytical directive for defining (and sometimes evaluating) the artfulness of a work on the basis of its intrinsic values alone (cf, l'art pour l’art) (see Dowling n.d.). For yet others, formalism is a set of analytical procedures and focus points for the study of literature (New Criticism, Russian Formalism) or film (Neoformalism). Here, formalism is a methodology or research approach that provides a range of close reading techniques and considerations to analyse a work without having to rely on the fallacies of authorial intent (Wimsatt and Beardsley 1946) or a work’s affective results (Wimsatt and Beardsley 1949).

These three broad strands or schools of formalism (formalism as an art movement, aesthetic formalism, and analytical formalism), identified here for categorical convenience, of course fail to do justice to the many different types of formalism out there.‘ In fact, we can identify fickle nuances within and between these three. For example, while abstract expressionist painters like Pollock (who is generally associated with a formalist approach — see Seiferle 2012) shunned subject matter to focus on experimentation with form,> the New Formalist movement in poetry also

4 Fora much more thorough disentangling of the many types of formalism out there, see Brinkema’s chapter on form in Wiley Blackwell Concise Companion to Visual Culture (2020).

5 Pollock famously went from naming his paintings to numbering them to do away with any potential references to subject matter.

emphasized the importance of narrative, next to elements like rhyme and metre (Academy of American Poets 2014). Also, while certain strands of aesthetic formalism like Zangwill’s moderate formalism (Dowling n.d.), were mostly interested in categorizing the aesthetic properties of an artwork (as formal or non-formal), other strands, like Bell’s more extreme formalism (ibidem) grew much closer to art criticism, using ontological claims on the formal nature of art for a normative judgement of beauty or artfulness.® And finally, while for instance some analytical strands of formalism like New Criticism remained firmly committed to close reading the artwork divorced from its context, Neoformalist film theory and late Russian Formalist works do away with this strict separation and have the critic study the work within its social-historical context and in relationship to a changing system of norms (Thompson 1981, 16-17).

We can also find this range of different formalisms within game studies. Willumsen (2018b), for example, identifies three broad schools of game formalisms: an aesthetic game formalism identified with those scholars looking for a “narrativeness” in games (Murray 1998); a game essentialism identified with those scholars interested in finding the “gameness” in games (e.g., Juul 2003); and finally a formalism as a level of abstraction identified with design scholars or content analysts interested in mapping the constituting elements in games (e.g., Lankoski and Bjork 2015). Roughly speaking, these schools map onto the second and third category of formalism we identified above. Here, Lankoski and Bjérk’s work (2015) corresponds to our category of analytical formalisms and, while Willumsen is of course completely right in identifying the differences between Murray (1998) and Juul’s work (2003), the two would correspond to our aesthetic formalism since they are both looking for defining properties of the work, or, as Willumsen puts it, the “x-essence or x-ness” (gameness or narrativeness) in games (2018b, 141).

However, on top of these academic formalisms, you will not be hardpressed to also find the practitioners’ formalist perspective uttered by game scholars (since many game scholars are also practitioners, after all). For example, in (online) discussions on the pros and cons of formalism, the term has been used for a design philosophy which values (experimentation with) interactive form over attention given to audio-visual “content” (Lantz 2015c; 2015b). Here we also find different crossovers between these strands of formalism, when for instance Keogh (2015b) and others respond to Lantz’s practitioner stance from a more aesthetic formalist perspective,

6 E.g. Bell’s claim that an artwork’s aesthetic properties were solely formal — lines, colours, relations — has him value abstract art over other forms of art (Dowling n.d.).

outlining how such design preferences also feed into (and are in fact often articulated as) value judgements on what constitutes the gameness of games (see below for a more elaborate discussion on (the criticism voiced against) this perspective).

This brief overview makes clear that this book comes in amongst a hotchpotch of different formalisms both inside and outside of game studies. So, to prevent confusion, it is imperative that we find a focus. We need to explain what academic tradition we draw from and for what purpose we are advancing the videogame formalism presented in this book. These three strands of formalism, however reductive, offer a preliminary framework for positioning our formalism. In line with these strands, our videogame formalism is best grouped amongst the analytical types of formalism in the tradition of Russian Formalism and Neoformalist film theory.” While there is certainly overlap between this formalism and many other types of formalism in game studies, this heritage also helps to distinguish our videogame formalism in terms of some core assumptions (e.g., on the role of the critic) and analytical procedures (e.g., focus on form and content). Furthermore, we purposefully position our formalism as an analytical formalism, so as not to confuse analytical focus with practitioner’s preferences or prescriptive claims on what counts as proper form and thereby as “real games” (cf., Consalvo and Paul 2019). This should also go some way towards tackling many of the anti-formalist sentiments in game studies, which is what we will delve into now.

Anti-formalisms in Game Studies and Beyond

Over the years, formalisms have been at the receiving end of much criticism in game studies. In the wake of the 2015 online discussion, alluded to above, between academics, critics and developers,® in which the exclusionary foci and politics of certain formalisms were even associated by some commentators with the horrors of #GamerGate (most vehemently by Howe (2015)), Juul (2015a) wrote a blog post identifying a total of eight(!) different

7 Werealize that Willumsen aligns ludology’s game essentialism with Russian Formalism due to Russian Formalism’s focus on the literariness or essence of the work. However, as we'll discuss in the next chapter, Russian formalists used the concept of literariness as a methodological starting point rather than as the result of an ontological enquiry.

8 Most ofthe discussion is summarized in (Howe 2015), which is a response to (Lantz 2015¢), which generated a lot of backlash (kunzelman 2015; Keogh 2015b; Errant Signal 2015), to which Lantz (2015a) responded again.

anti-formalisms in popular and academic discourse. While some of those anti-formalisms have existed for close to a century (more on that below), many of the ones identified by Juul are exclusive to our field and related areas like game design and game criticism. When we zoom in on those specifically, a couple of core sentiments can be distinguished.9 These anti-formalisms accuse formalism of 1) preventing experimentation by erecting stifling definitions of games, 2) looking at game rules to the detriment of story or representational elements, and 3) focusing on game design and excluding a consideration of players and player experiences (Juul 2015a). We will unpack these sentiments here to help understand which (preconceived) formalist ideas they are based on, we will identify the ideological underpinnings of many of the charges brought against formalism, and we will acknowledge the long tradition of anti-formalist sentiments that they are part of. This not only further advances our idea of what a formalist approach has meant in game studies, it also allows us to steer clear of the apparent pitfalls of the approach when constructing the videogame formalism that we present in this book. We will follow up on these sentiments in the next chapter once we start historicizing and outlining the core principles of our videogame formalism.

Formalism as Preventing Experimentation through Stifling Definitions of Games

The first anti-formalism listed above identifies one of the most common concerns people have with the approach. Here, formalisms are put on par with game definitions and thereby cue concerns that come with the inherent limitations of any definition. Especially in the first decade of the twenty-first century, during a period in which Aarseth (2001) famously declared the emergence of the new academic field of game studies, several attempts were made to identify the constituting elements that define games (Wolf 2002; Costikyan 2002; Salen and Zimmerman 2004; Juul 2005; Frasca 2007; Myers 2009; Waern 2012) or videogames specifically (Tavinor 2008; Karhulahti 2015). These definitions served important analytical, explanatory, and institutional purposes by building a shared terminology, and exploring the boundaries of g While Juul finds some more nuances in the different anti-formalisms, connecting each to one or two key sources, we decide here to group several of those arguments and (accompanying sources) together in these three strands of anti-formalism due to their overlapping themes (e.g., Juul’s anti-formalisms #4 and #8 both deal with the problem with definitions, and #6 and #7 both focus on an insufficient acknowledgement of an active player).

our objects of study and by extension our field. However, in their function as boundary-work, definitions are always exclusionary, fitting specific phenomena and unfitting other ones. As such, any definition is always going to fall short of accounting for the great variety of entertainment phenomena that the videogame industry has been squeezing out of a rapidly developing new digital technology, thereby inherently generating more and more borderline cases (Juul 2015b).

Although the shortcomings of definitions are not necessarily problematic in themselves (Juul 2015b), they become problematic once these definitions are taken as normative or prescriptive. In other words, once definitions start to dictate what phenomena count as “good” or “real” games, they are inherently going to cause backlash. It is this backlash to the (implicit or explicit) value judgement that comes with what counts as games and what not, that Juul identifies as an anti-formalism. For Juul, this anti-formalism mostly centres around Koster’s (2012) polemically voiced ideas about what a game is, especially the backlash that came from his statement that Dysgia (Anthropy 2012), an autobiographical game about gender dysphoria and feminizing hormone therapy, “could be built in PowerPoint and isn’t a game” (emphasis in original). Although Koster explicitly states this is not a value judgement (implying this is more a matter of taxonomy for him), his hostile, dismissive phrasing still contributes to, as Consalvo and Paul put it, “which games get centred as real and which get marginalized as something else [...] [which in turn] shapes what games we are likely to see more of” (2019, 125). This is the prevention of experimentation that Juul’s anti-formalism pushes back against, but the spill over of this boundary work is arguably much greater. Consalvo and Paul also show how legitimizing some phenomena as games and marginalizing others, contributes to “who gets imagined as a player and is welcomed into a community of fellow players’ (125), and which scholarship is valorized (xxv—xxvi). Many of these sentiments can indeed be read in the arguments against this formalism online (e.g., Howe 2015).

Formalism as Focusing on Rules to the Detriment of Story or Representation

The second anti-formalism outlined above does not criticize formalism on matters of ontology (what are the essential existing properties of games) but on matters of epistemology (what counts as valuable knowledge) and design focus (see Fernandez-Vara 2019; Fullerton 2019). Here, formalism

10 For backlash against (Koster 2012) see (Hernandez 2013; Howe 2015).

is denounced for valuing and focusing on games as rule-based systems first and representations second. As Lantz, who is considered to be one of these formalists, puts it, a formalist is “someone who tends to be primarily interested in a game’s underlying structure of choice and action |...] [and is] less focused on things that could be considered ‘content’ — audiovisual components, narrative, theme and setting, etc.” (Lantz 2015c). Lantz (2015¢), like Koster (2014), enters this discourse with a focus on practice rather than analysis, advocating a specific type of “deep games, games that have surprising emergent properties, games that allow for player learning and mastery” (Lantz 2015c). As such, the formalism that these scholars-practitioners support is best grouped under the formalism as an art movement identified above. However, a similar argument has also been made from an aesthetic or analytical formalist perspective, propagating a specific understanding of what games are, resulting in a specific analytical focus. This, of course, takes us back to one of the founding (and more frustrating) debates in our field: the ludology vs. narratology debate (Frasca 2003). Without wanting to dig up those old demons, it is fair to say that early ludologists saw the gameness of games in their configurative components and consequently viewed a game’s audio-visual output in the form of stories or fictional worlds as “secondary” (Konzack 2002, 95) or “coincidental” (Aarseth 2004, 48) in the process of analysing games. Or even, as Eskelinen (2001) famously put it, as “just a waste of time and energy.” Instead of favouring specific types of games, which Lantz and Koster do, this formalism makes claims about the nature of games and favours a specific type of game scholarship.