In The New Yorker, Jamin Brophy-Warren lists A Casual Revolution as one of the five essential books on video games. In good company with Huizinga, Caillois, James Paul Gee and Tom Bissell.
To combat the idea that the only people who play games are teenage males and housemothers, Jesper Juul’s “A Casual Revolution” is a deftly argued and thoroughly researched recommendation. With the advent of the Nintendo’s Wii and social games like FarmVille on Facebook, video games of many shapes and sizes have become standard fare as swaths of previously ignored players now find themselves with controllers in hand. The result has been a muddling of the archetypes of “hardcore” and “casual” players. Juul, the visiting professor at New York University’s Game Center, paints a world of middle-aged women trying to kick fifty-hour-a-week-video-game habits and young professional men only clocking a few hours a week on their Xbox 360s before shuttling off to their cubicles.