Dutch Judith Dormans is bachelor student at the faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the Maastricht University, specialising in game studies. She participated in our Drama Princess Symposium and now she’s written quite an impressive in-depth essay about The Endless Forest. She criticizes Salen & Zimmerman‘s rules-based analysis of games as being limited and argues for broadening the horizons of game studies.
A case study of The Endless Forest shows that the theories about formal systems aren’t sufficient anymore. They give no room for the participatory nature of games and they put too much emphasis on the traditional forms of games. It is required to redefine what the formal system of a game is.