Curriculum Vitae Jesper Juul

Born in 1970 in Århus, Denmark.

Current occupation

Associate Professor at The Royal Danish Academy.

Education

PhD in video game studies, IT University of Copenhagen. January 2004.
M.A. in Danish literature, University of Copenhagen, February 1999.
BA in Nordic Language and literature, University of Aarhus, June 1995.

Academic Experience

1999-2000: External Lecturer, IT University of Copenhagen
2000-2003: Ph.D., IT University of Copenhagen.
2004-2007: Assistant professor, IT University of Copenhagen.
2008-July 2009: Lecturer, Comparative Media Studies, MIT
August 2009-July 2010: Visiting Assistant Arts Professor, New York University Game Center
August 2010-March 2011: Researcher at the Danish Design School, Copenhagen on a grant from the Danish Centre for Design Research.
September 2011-August 2013: Visiting Assistant Arts Professor, New York University Game Center.
September 2012-August 2018: Visiting Associate Professor at Comparative Media Studies/Writing, MIT.
September 2013-: Associate Professor at The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts - The School of Design.

Honors

August 2016: Selected as Distinguished Scholar for the Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA).
February 2017: Selected as fellow for the Higher Education Video Game Alliance.

Books

Half-Real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 2005.
A Casual Revolution: Reinventing Video Games and Their Players. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 2010.
캐주얼 게임- 비디오게임과 플레이어의 재창조. Korean translation of A Casual Revolution, 2012.
The Art of Failure: An Essay on the Pain of Playing Video Games. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 2013.
Die Kunst des Scheiterns: Warum wir Videospiele lieben, obwohl wir immer verlieren. German translation of The Art of Failure. Wiesbaden, Germany: Luxbooks 2014.
ハーフリアル ― 虚実のあいだのビデオゲーム. Japanese translation of Half-Real. Tokyo: New Games Order 2016.
しかめっ面にさせるゲームは成功する悔しさをモチベーション. Japanese transation of The Art of Failure. Tokyo: Born Digital 2016.
Sztuka przegrywania. Esej o bólu, jaki wywołują gry wideo. Polish translation of The Art of Failure. Kraków: Korporacja Ha!art 2016.
Handmade Pixels: Independent Video Games and the Quest for Authenticity. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 2019.
Half-Real: Videogames entre regras reais e mundos ficcionais. Brazilian Portuguese translation of Half-Real, translated by Alan Richard da Luz . Blucher 2019.
Too Much Fun: The Five Lives of the Commodore 64 Computer. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 2024.

Book chapters

"Introduction to Game Time / Time to play". In Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan (eds.): First Person, Cambridge: MIT Press 2004.
"Hvad spillet betyder" / "What the Game Means". In Ida Engholm and Lisbeth Klastrup (eds:): Digitale Verdener. Copenhagen: Gyldendal 2005.
"Games telling stories?" In Joost Raessens and Jeffrey Goldstein (eds.): Handbook of Computer Game Studies. MIT Press 2005.
"Tid til at Spille". In Carsten Jessen and Bo Kampmann Walther (eds.): Spillets Verden. Copenhagen: Danmarks Pædagogiske Universitets Forlag 2005.
"Without a Goal: On Open and Expressive Games". In Videogame/Player/Text, edited by Tanya Krzywinska and Barry Atkins. Manchester: Manchester University Press 2007.
"Variation over Time: The Transformation of Space in Single-Screen Action Games". In Friedrich von Borries, Steffen P. Walz, Ulrich Brinkmann, Matthias Böttger (eds): Space Time Play. Basel: Birkhäuser 2007.
"The Game, the Player, the World: Looking for a Heart of Gameness". In Winfred Kaminski and Martin Lorber (eds.): Clash of Realities 2008: Spielen in digitalen Welten. Munich: Kopäd 2008.
"Rules and Fiction". In Juan Antonia and Àlvarez Reyes: Try Again. Madrid: La Case Encendida 2008.
"The Magic Circle and the Puzzle Piece". In Stephan Günzel, Michael Liebe and Dieter Mersch (eds.): Conference Proceedings of the Philosophy of Computer Games 2008. Potsdam: Potsdam University Press 2008.
"Fear of Failing? The Many Meanings of Difficulty in Video Games". In Bernard Perron and Mark J. P. Wolf (eds.): The Video Game Theory Reader 2. New York, NY: Routledge 2009.
Mia Consalvo, John Sharp, Ulrika Bennerstedt, Jesper Juul: "Tweeting GDC" in Dikkers, Steinkuehler, Squire & Zimmerman (eds): Real Time Research: Improvisational Game Scholarship. Pittsburg, PA: ETC Press 2010.
Jesper Juul, Rasmus Keldorff: Depth in one Minute: A Conversation about Bejeweled Blitz. In Davidson, Drew (ed).: Well Played 2.0: Video Games, Value and Meaning. Pittsburg, PA: ETC Press 2010.
"After Game Graphics". Catalogue text for the Press Play exhibition, Permanenten, Bergen, Norway, 2010.
"Narrative" and "Defender" entries in Wolf, Mark J. P. (ed.) Encyclopedia of Video Games: The Culture, Technology, and Art of Gaming. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2012.
“Gameplay.” entry in Marie-Laure Ryan, Lori Emerson, and Benjamin J. Robertson (eds.) The Johns Hopkins Guide to Digital Media. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press 2014.
“On Absent Carrot Sticks: The Level of Abstraction in Video Games”. In Ryan, Marie-Laure, and Jan-Noël Thon (eds): Storyworlds across Media: Toward a Media-Conscious Narratology. University of Nebraska Press, 2014.
"Avatar", with Rune Klevjer in Jensen, Klaus Bruhn (eds.): The International Encyclopedia of Communication Theory and Philosophy. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons 2016.
"Playing". In Lowood, Henry and Raiford Guins (eds.): Debugging Game History: A Critical Lexicon Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 2016.
“The Arts of Failure: Jack Halberstam in Conversation with Jesper Juul” in Ruberg, Bonnie, and Adrienne Shaw, eds.: Queer Game Studies. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press 2017.
“Braid: Indies”. In Nina Huntemann and Matthew Thomas Payne: How to Play Video Games. New York: NYU Press 2019.
"Imagining a New World". In Koven, Bernard De. The Infinite Playground: A Player’s Guide to Imagination. Edited by Celia Pearce and Eric Zimmerman. Cambridge, MA, USA: MIT Press, 2020.
“Narrative.” In Encyclopedia of Video Games: The Culture, Technology, and Art of Gaming, edited by Mark J. P. Wolf, 2nd edition, 683–86. Santa Barbara, California: Greenwood. 2021.
“Failure.” In Encyclopedia of Video Games: The Culture, Technology, and Art of Gaming, edited by Mark J. P. Wolf, 2nd edition, 320–21. Santa Barbara, California: Greenwood. 2021.

Articles and peer-reviewed conference presentations

November 1998: Article in the literary magazine Kritik #135: "En kamp mellem spil og fortælling."
November 1998: Paper presentation at the Digital Arts and Culture conference in Bergen: "A clash between game and narrative".
August 2000: Paper presentation at the Digital Arts and Culture conference in Bergen: "What computer games can and can't do"
March 2001: Computer Games & Digital Textualities conference at the IT University of Copenhagen. Paper presentation, Play time, Event time, Themability.
April 2001: Paper presentation at the Digital Arts and Culture conference in Providence, Rhode Island: Game Time.
June 30th 2001: Paper presentation at the Game Cultures conference in Bristol: Gameplay: What are Games Really?
July 1st 2001: Article, Games Telling Stories? and review, The Repeatedly lost Art of Studying Games in Game Studies.
April 6th 2002: Paper presentation at the Playing with the future conference, Manchester: Protect your resource gathering units at all cost: Sketching a theory of gameplay.
June 8th 2002: Paper presentation at the Computer Games and Digital Cultures conference, Tampere, Finland: The open and the closed: Games of emergence and games of progression.
April 9th 2003: Column for the IGDA [international game developers association] website: Just what is it that makes Computer Games so Different, so Appealing?
May 30-31st 2003: Presentation at the Digital genres Conference Chicago: Transmedial Gaming: Exploring the affinity between computer and games.
November 4th-6th 2003: Keynote speaker at the DiGRA Level Up conference in Utrecht: The Game, the Player, the World: Looking for a Heart of Gameness.
February 2004: "Working with the Player's Repertoire". Imagina Conference, Monaco.
June 2005: "Half-Real: The Interplay between Game Rules and Game Fiction". DiGRA conference, Vancouver, Canada.
June 2005: "Playing Culture" presentation at Games, Learning, and Society conference, Madison, Wisconsin. (With Eric Zimmerman.)
December 2005: Panelist, "Gameplay: The Great Debate", Digital Arts and Culture Conference, IT University of Copenhagen.
"Swap Adjacent Gems to Make Sets of Three: A History of Matching Tile Games". Artifact journal. Volume 2, 2007. London: Routledge.
"A certain Level of Abstraction". Conference paper at the DiGRA conference, Tokyo Japan, September 2007.
Jesper Juul, Albert Dang & Kan Yang Li: "The Suicide Game". Poster at the DiGRA conference, Tokyo Japan, September 2007.
August 2016: Poster, with Jason Begy, "Good Feedback for bad Players? A preliminary Study of ‘juicy’ Interface feedback". 1st International Joint Conference of DiGRA and FDG, Dundee 2016.
"What is the Casual in Casual Games?" Conference paper at the [player] conference, IT University of Copenhagen, August 2008.
"The Value of Goals". Panelist at The [Player] Conference, IT University of Copenhagen, August 2008.
"Beyond Balancing: Using Five Elements of Failure Design to Enhance Player Experiences". Game Developers Conference, San Francisco, March 2009.
"Easy to Use and Incredibly Difficult: On the Mythical Border between Interface and Gameplay". Foundations of Digital Games, Florida, April 2009. With Marleigh Norton.
"The Bad Games Panel". Panel with Jason Begy and Matthew Weise at the DiGRA 2009 conference, Brunel University, September 2009.
June 2010: "In search of Lost Time: on Game Goals and Failure Costs". Conference paper at the Foundations of Digital Games conference, Monterey, CA.
January 2012: Staffan Björk & Jesper Juul: "Zero-Player Games Or: What We Talk about When We Talk about Players". Conference paper presented at the The Philosophy of Computer Games Conference, Madrid.
June 2012: Panelist, You Put Your Right Foot In... with Erica Halverson, Thomas Malaby, Crystle Martin, David Simkins, Eric Zimmerman and Moses Wolfenstein. Games+Learning+Society Conference 8.0, Madison, Wisconsin.
April 2013: Presentation, No Fun: Failure as the true Subject of all Games at the Extending Play conference, Rutgers University.
June 2013: Workshop, Designing for Productive Failure with Cathy Tran, Blair Lehman and David Dockterman. Games+Learning+Society Conference 9.0, Madison, WI.
August 2013: Presentation, The Philosophical Problem of the Sore Loser: Video games as a Paradox of Failure. DiGRA conference, Atlanta, GA.
"High-tech Low-tech Authenticity: The Creation of Independent Style at the Independent Games Festival". In Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games, 2014.
April 2015: Speaker, "The Return of the Big Pixel: The changing Meaning of Graphics in Independent Video Games". What is an Image? conference, University of Copenhagen.
May 2015: "The Counterfactual Nostalgia of Indie Games". Presentation at the Nonlinear histories of independent games panel, DiGRA 2015 conference, Lüneburg.
May 2015: "A Mobile Army of Ontologies". Presentation at the Ludo-ontologies panel, DiGRA 2015 conference, Lüneburg.
January 2016: "The Hopelessly Compromised: Independent Games as a Movement against Mainstream AAA Video Games". Presentation at the Concerns about Video Games and the Video Games of Concern conference, IT University of Copenhagen.
August 2016: "Anti-inspiration in Independent Games". 1st International Joint Conference of DiGRA and FDG, Dundee 2016.
August 2016: Poster, with Jason Begy, "Good Feedback for bad Players? A preliminary Study of ‘juicy’ Interface feedback". 1st International Joint Conference of DiGRA and FDG, Dundee 2016.
August 2016: Panelist,“Speaking intelligently?” What do we understand about narratives in video games (and what not)? panel, 1st International Joint Conference of DiGRA and FDG, Dundee 2016.
August 2016: Sailing the Endless River of Games: The case for Historical Design Patterns. 1st International Joint Conference of DiGRA and FDG, Dundee 2016.
"The Aesthetics of the Aesthetics of the Aesthetics of Video Games: Walking Simulators as Response to the problem of Optimization”. 12th International Conference on the Philosophy of Computer Games Conference, Copenhagen, 2018.
"Doing Good and/or Making Money: A Short History of Independent Game Festival Rhetoric".
History of Games Conference, Copenhagen, 2018. With Dooley Murphy.
"Virtual Reality: Fictional all the Way Down (and that’s OK)". Disputatio journal, 2019.
July 2019: Staffan Björk & Jesper Juul: "Jogos zero-jogador ou: do que falamos quando falamos de jogadores". Portuguese translation of "Zero-Player Games", Intexto journal.
September 2020: "The Independent Mode: A Functionalist Account of Independent Games and Game History". FDG '20: International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games.
Piil, Karin, Helle Holm Gyldenvang, Jeppe Kilberg Møller, Tine Kjoelsen, Jesper Juul, and Helle Pappot. 2021. “Electronic Games for Facilitating Social Interaction Between Parents With Cancer and Their Children During Hospitalization: Interdisciplinary Game Development.” JMIR Serious Games 9 (1): e16029.
“Erzählen Spiele Geschichten? Eine kurze Anmerkung zu Spielen und Erzählungen.”, German translation of “Games Telling Stories”. Spiel|Formen 1 (1): 156–77. 2021.
October 2021: “The Game of Video Game Objects: A Minimal Theory of When We See Pixels as Objects Rather than Pictures.” In Extended Abstracts of the 2021 Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play. CHI PLAY ’21.
Johannes Pfau, Michael Debus, Jesper Juul, Emil Lundedal Hammar, Alessandro Canossa & Magy Seif El-Nasr: “Predicting Success Factors of Video Game Titles and Companies”. In Entertainment Computing – ICEC 2022, ed. Barbara Göbl et al.. Cham, Switzerland: Springer International Publishing, 2022, 269–82, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-20212-4_22.
Juul, Jesper and Carney, Laurel: "Would you like Games with that Computer? Revisiting early Game History & Culture with the Commodore 64". Proceedings of the DiGRA 2023 conference, Seville, Spain. https://www.jesperjuul.net/text/gameswithc64/

Keynotes and selected invited talks

November 26-28th 2001: Invited speaker at NIK2001 in Tromsø, the annual meeting of the Norwegian association of computer science researchers. Talk title: Fun in theory.
February 3rd 2002: Invited talk at Mediamatic's Interactive Vertellers [interactive narrators] workshop in Amsterdam. Talk title: The art of letting go.
August 27th 2002: Panelist at the Game Developer's Conference Europe academic day.
August 28th 2002: Presentation at Game Developer's Conference Europe, London: Making sense of gameplay and emergence.
March 20th 2003: Panelist at the Fate of Creativity in the Videogame Industry colloquium, Comparative Media Studies, MIT. (With Ken Levine, Irrational Games and Brian Sullivan, Iron Lore.)
April 9th 2003: Presentation for the Scholar Technology Group a Brown University: About the game.
April 23rd 2003: Invited talk at the Liquid Narrative Group, NCSU, Raleigh, North Carolina.
November 4th-6th 2003: Keynote speaker at the DiGRA Level Up conference in Utrecht: The Game, the Player, the World: Looking for a Heart of Gameness.
February 2004: Converging Media, Oslo, Norway.
October 2004: Speaker, Steirische Herbst, Graz, Austria.
June 2005 : Games, Learning and Society conference, Wisconsin, Madison: "Playing Culture". With Eric Zimmerman.
December 2005: Presentation "Without a goal" at Serious Games Summit, Lyon.
March 2006: Keynote speaker at Serious Games Summit, Game Developer's Conference, San José.
March 2006: "A Game in the Hands of a Player". From Gamers to Gaming, Göteborg, Sweden.
October 2006: Invited talk at Georgia Tech.
November 2006: Invited talk at Penn. "The problem with Goals: New ways of motivating players".
November 2006: Invited talk at Comparative Media Studies, MIT, Boston.
November 2006: Online panel arranged by Manifesto Games: "Games As Art" with Henry Jenkins, Santiago Siri, and Eric Zimmerman.
January 2007: Invited talk at NYC Game Salon. New School, New York City: "Actually: What a game means".
February 2007: Invited talk at ENJMIN, France.
March 2007: Panelist at the MetaGame panel, Game Developers Conference, San Francisco.
April 2007: Invited speaker at Theory of the Novel for the 21st Century workshop, Stanford University.
March 2008: Keynote speaker, Clash of Realities conference, Cologne. Talk title: Video Games: The most Emotional of all Media.
March 2008: Invited talk at Georgia Institute of Technology. Talk title: Hardcore Players of Casual Games.
March 2008: Invited talk at Indiana University Bloomington. Talk title: Games for making friends and enemies: A small theory of games in social contexts.
April 2008: Invited talk at Teacher's College, Columbia University. Talk title: What makes Casual Games so Appealing, so Attractive?
May 2008: Keynote speaker, Philosophy of Computer Games Conference, Potsdam. Talk title: Who made the Magic Circle? Seeking the Solvable part of the Game-Player Problem.
November 2008: Invited talk at University at Buffalo. Talk title: Why Study Video Games?
Why Play Video Games?
November 2008: Invited talk at Quinnipiac University. Talk title: Fun in Theory
On the Importance of Studying Video Games.
January 2009: Invited talk at Dartmouth College. Talk title: The Meaning of Video Games
-On Today's Debates in Video Game Studies.
March 2009: Invited talk at Floating Points 6, Emerson College. Talk title:
The Rise of Small Games.
November 2009: Invited talk at Johannes Gutenberg-Universität, Mainz
February 2010: Speaker at the Art History of Games conference, Atlanta, Georgia.
August 2010: Keynote speaker, Nordic DiGRA conference, Stockholm.
May 2011: Speaker at the Unfortunate Game Events seminar, Danish Design School, Copenhagen. Talk title: Video Games, the Art of Failure.
June 30-July 2nd 2011: Invited speaker, Storyworlds Across Media conference, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität, Mainz. Talk title: The Paradox of Interactive Tragedy: Can a Video Game have an Unhappy Ending?
November 2011: Keynote speaker, SBGames 2011 conference, Salvador, Brazil. Talk title: No Fun: Failure as the True Subject of All Games.
March 2012: Panelist at Game Developers Conference, San Francisco on Teaching Game History. Talk title: No Game Natives
March 2012: Panelist at Game Developers Conference, San Francisco Game Educator's Rant. Talk title: Against the Tyranny of Pixelated Platformers.
May 2012: Panelist at ROLFCon III, Cambridge, MA on WHY THE %&*# IS THIS SO %&#ING IMPOSSIBLE??. Talk title: Confessions of a Sore Loser
October 2012: Invited speaker at the World Knowledge Forum, Seoul, Korea. Talk title: Video Games and the Art of Failure - On the Dangers of Game Design in Education, Business, and Policy.
Feburary 2013: Speaker at Indiecade East, You don't seem happy! Video Games and the Philosophical Problem of being a sore Loser.
September 2013: Keynote speaker, Future and Reality of Gaming conference, Vienna.
October 2013: Panel, "The Arts of Failure", with Judith Halberstam. Queer games Conference, University of California, Berkeley.
March 2014: Speaker, Game Studies on the Edge conference, Ritsumeikan University, Kyoto, Japan.
October 2015: Invited keynote speaker, Gamez & Rules conference, Zurich University of the Arts, Zürich. Talk title: "The Art of Failure in Games".
October 2015: Invited speaker at Northeastern University, Boston. Talk title: "New Sincerity with Old Visuals: The Search for Authenticity in Independent Video Games".
October 2016: Invited keynote speaker, Extending Play Conference, Rutgers University. Talk: "The Future of Play (Studies).
October 2018: Keynote speaker at the Central and Eastern European Game Studies conference, Prague. Talk title: "The Plague of Optimization: Art and the Problem of the Rational Video Game Player".
November 2018: Keynote speaker at Clash of Realities, Cologne.
September 2020: Speaker at SUBOTRON, Vienna.
October 2020: Speaker at IndieCade, Los Angeles.
May 2020: Invited speaker at the DEVGAMM game industry conference, Moscow.

Teaching

Autumn 1995: A series of workshops in the new children's house at the Louisiana Art Museum, Copenhagen. (With Jonas Iversen, MouseHouse).
1996: Teaches Java and JavaScript programming at NetJob, Aarhus, Denmark.
Spring 1999: Develops and teaches the course Digital Aesthetics at the IT University of Copenhagen..
Fall 2001: Developed and taught the course Computer Games at the IT University of Copenhagen. (Covering theory and practice.)
Fall 2002: Developed and taught the course on Designing an online computer game at the IT University of Copenhagen. (With Susana Tosca).
2004-2006: Developed and taught the course Computer Game Design at the IT University of Copenhagen.
April 2006: 3-day workshop on game design and theory, IO Interactive.
Spring 2007: Co-taught the course Game Development at the IT University of Copenhagen.
Spring 2008: Co-taught the course Game Design at Comparative Media Studies, MIT.
Spring 2009: Developed and taught the course Casual Games and Casual Players at Comparative Media Studies, MIT.
Fall 2009-2013: Developed and taught the courses Introduction to Video Games, Game Studies and Advanced Game Studies at the New York University Game Center, NYU.
Fall 2010-2013: Co-developed and co-taught the video game history course Games 101 at the New York University Game Center, NYU.
Fall 2013- : Developing and teaching BA in Game Design, Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts - School of Design, Copenhagen.

Professional experience (non-academic)

June 1995-: Company, Soup Games.
1992-1993: Develops the fractal program Lyapunovia for the Commodore Amiga. (http://soupgames.net/lyapunovia)
April 1994-August 1995: Work at the multimedia company MouseHouse.
August 1996: Project manager, concept developer and programmer on the children's game "Kampen om Kagen" ["The battle for the cake"] for MouseHouse and the Silkeborg public library.
January-March 1997: Programs the Macintosh version of the triple CD-ROM game "Blackout" at Deadline Media.
April 1997: Develops the game "Puls in Space" for Netwave. (http://soupgames.net/pspace)
June 1997 - August 1998: Works with Brennan Young, Xavier Pianet, and Mads Rydahl under the name "The Planet".
July 1997: Develops the game "Slimebusters" for Egmont Online.
September 1997: Develops the graphical chat system "Højhuset" for Netwave. (http://www.n.dk)
Marts 1998: Develops the game "Euro-Space" for JuniBevægelsen. (http://soupgames.net/eurospace)
December 1998-January 1999: Develops the game "PingPong" for TV2 Interactive.
January 1999: Text chat for the music site g.dk and Scandinavian Online.
July-September 1999: Develops the game Flag Rally for Tele Danmark Internet. (With Rasmus Keldorff.)
November-December 1999: Develops a game engine for a series of promotional games for Lego in collaboration with Cite.
September 2000: Finished the graphical chat Højhuset 2 for Netstationen/Scandinavia Online.
January 2001: Develops the game Detonator for TV2 Interactive (with Rasmus Keldorff.)
2007: Develops the casual game High Seas for GameTrust.
2007: Sheep! Audience prize, 2nd Nordic Game Jam.
2010: 4:32 "Most innovative game", Global Game at Jam New York University.

Visiting scholar appointments

February-July 2003: Comparative Media Studies, MIT, Boston.
August-December 2006: Parsons New School of Design, New York City.
Summer 2018: Visiting scholar, Ritsumeikan University, Kyoto.
January-June 2022: The Trope Tank at Comparative Media Studies/Writing, MIT, Boston.

Obtained Funding

2010: Research project "The Meaning of Failure in Video Games" funded by Danish Center for Design Research. 6-month project August 2010-January 2011. Results published in Art of Failure book, MIT Press.
2018-2020: Collaborator, Imaging the Impossible project, Independent Research Fund Denmark.
2019-2021: Advisory panel member, National Endowment of the Humanities grant, Digital Worlds: The History and Cultural Impact of Video Games. The Strong Museum of Play, Rochester, New York.
2021-2022: PI, Game Hub Denmark public tender for study of the Danish Game Industry.

Editing, Reviewing, and Judging

2010-: Co-editor with Geoffrey Long, William Uricchio, and Mia Consalvo of thePlayful Thinking book series, MIT Press.

Editorial board member, Games & Culture Journal 2007-
Webby Awards judge 2004-
IndieCade
Independent Games Festival
Editorial board member, Game Studies journal 2001-2022.
Values at Play advisory board member 2008-2012.
Digital Arts and Culture conference, Brown University, 2001.
Computer Games and Digital Culture conference, Tampere University, 2002.
Digital Arts and Culture conference, Melbourne, 2003.
Imagina conference, Monaco, 2005.
Digital Arts and Culture conference, Perth, 2007.
Mobile Media conference. University of Sydney, 2007.
Head of game design reviewing, DiGRA conference, Tokyo 2007.
Head of game design reviewing, DiGRA conference, London 2009.
Journal of Design History
MIT Press
Morgan Kaufman
Norsk Medietidsskrift
Information Communication & Society
Instructional Science
American Journal of Play
Poetics Today
International Journal of Learning and Media

Conference organisation

Co-organizer, Computer Games and Digital Textualities conference, IT University of Copenhagen 2001.
January 24th 2003: Organizer of the computer game seminar Spillere og Spillerpositioner [Players and player positions] at the IT University of Copenhagen.
Co-organizer, first Nordic Game Jam, Copenhagen 2006.
Advisory board member, DAC conference, Perth 2007.
Advisory board member, DiGRA conference, Tokyo 2007.
Co-organizer, Global Game Jam at New York University, January 2010.
Organizer, Unfortunate Game Events seminar, Danish Design School, Copenhagen, May 2011.

Miscellaneous

November 1996: Winner, Danish Java Cup programming competition (arranged by Sun Microsystems)
February 4th 2004: Winner, young researcher award, Imagina 2004, Monaco.
October 2006: Half-Real listed as one of "50 Books For Everyone In the Game Industry".
December 2006: Half-Real finalist for book of the year in Game Developer Magazine's Frontline Awards.
2003- video game research blog, The Ludologist.
February 2007: Winner, audience award at the Nordic Game Jam 2007, Copenhagen, Denmark.
February 2010: Winner, audience award for most innovative game at Global Game Jam, New York University.
April 2010: A Casual Revolution named as "one of the Five Essential Books on Video Games" by the New Yorker Magazine.
2010-: Co-editor with Geoffrey Long and William Uricchio, Playful Thinking book series, MIT Press.
2015: Edge Magazine names Half-Real and The Art of Failure as two of the must-read books on video games.
2017: "Video Games, Studies, Design, and Culture: An Interview with Jesper Juul", by Alejandro Lozano. Computers in Entertainment.

Art & media projects

Summer 1994: The installation "Gaston" for Electronic Café. (With Charlie Gaugler.)
April 1995: The art installation "Receptionsmaskinen" for the Danish minister of culture's conference on information technology, the international film school in Ebeltoft. (With Mads Rydahl.)
June 1995-May 1996: The art installation "Men vi forstår jo hinanden" ["we do understand each other"] as part of the TIEA at MouseHouse, Vestergade, Copenhagen. (With Mads Rydahl.)
April 1996: Creates the spoof web page "Your own virtual hamster". (http://www.jesperjuul.net/hamster) (with Brennan Young).
September-November 1996: Develops the computer part of Lars von Trier's exhibition "Verdensuret" ["World clock"], Kunstforeningen, Copenhagen.
February 1997: Exhibits the poetic art installation "Ord & Stol" ["Word and chair"] at gallery Eat Me, Sortedams Dossering, Copenhagen. '
April 1998: Exhibits the graphical and musical installation "Loop in A Minor" at the Art Crash conference, Århus.
August 31st 1998: Exhibits "Loop in A Minor" at the opening of Malmö Högskola.
June 2013: Erasure-based poetry generator, The Deletionist, with Nick Montfort and Amaranth Borsuk.
July 2016: 4:32 game exhibited at the Electronic Literature Conference, Porto, Portugal.
December 2018-Jan 2019: The Deletionist exhibited at the Under Erasure exhibition, Pierogi gallery, Brooklyn.
March 2020. Petscii Jetski, game and visual poem for the Commodore 64 co-developed with Nick Montfort for the Basic 10 liner contest 2020.
May 2021. Lyapunovia '21. Fractal program rendering Lyapunov Space fractal in real time using WebGL.

Selected Student Projects Supervised

Marie Vardal: Bikss. Selection, Indiecade Paris 2016.
Angelos Efstathopoulos and Andrés Cabrero: BORE DOME. Winner, Best Student Game, Independent Games Festival 2020.
Shalev Moran: Archipelago. Honorable Mention, A MAZE. 2021. Nominee, CHI Play 2020 Student Game Design Competition.