Author: Jesper

Courtesy of the the Taiwanese DigiArts journal, here is a translation my Sailing the endless River of Games paper from DiGRA 2016,
航行於無盡的遊戲之河：以歷史上的設計模式為例.

I have been doing this Thing for Twenty Years: I made my first conference presentation exactly twenty years ago, on November 27, 1998, at the Digital Arts & Culture Conference in Bergen.

My very first paper was A Clash Between Game & Narrative, based on the MA thesis I was finishing at the time.

It is painful to read your own early writings for two opposing reasons:
1) When it’s bad, I cringe that I would ever write like that.
2) If I find it good, I am embarrassed that I haven’t become any wiser.

I can’t say that anything panned out the way I planned in 1998, given that I had no actual plans for something as grown-up as an academic career, let along for academic research fields. But I felt I had a fallback in web/game development/programming, and that gave me the confidence to write academic papers about video games, even though there obviously was no future in this.

One thing that has changed, is that in my early papers I was openly taking on the role of (arrogant) young upstart, railing against the establishment. This was great fun, but I became better at understanding that though other people might be making arguments that I disagreed with, they weren’t necessarily stupid, or deserving of complete dismissal. When young researchers now criticize established academics such as myself, I in turn have to be careful not to dismiss them as simply performing the role of young academic.

But doing research turned out to be surprisingly interesting, and meeting like-minded young researchers was exhilarating, and eventually I was offered a PhD at ITU in Copenhagen.

When I thus first started seeing myself as someone who researched video games, I assumed that an academic career involved starting from a specific framework, making very strong claims, and then spending the rest of your career working with the same tools, sometimes backpedaling, but basically sticking to the same script for whatever decades a career is meant to span.

I saw myself, sitting in the same room but with different consoles, my beard growing longer and my hair growing shorter, expanding on some original point I had made.

Perhaps that is what it would have been like, if video games had continued to be somewhat singular products, always sold in boxes, as they were in the 1990’s?

It’s been my good luck that video games have changed and continue to change in entirely new ways during those twenty years. Tech changed, sure, but there are new interfaces, business models, new ways to play, new voices making video games. For that reason, I seem to (I think) always find new things to write about, but from quite different vantage points and using different theories. Video games change, and the study of video games must be attentive – to realize when video game history has overlooked some parts of the world, or some types of players or developers, and to take it seriously when new games appear, especially when they don’t match our expectations.

To do game studies, I think, is to watch the wheel of history grinding against our theoretical castles. And that’s enough.

Come work with me in Copenhagen!

Assistant/associate professorship in Games/Interaction/Media at KADK in Copenhagen

We have an opening for an associate/assistant professorship in games, interaction, and/or media at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, School of Design (KADK) in Copenhagen.

The vacancy is affiliated with the Institute of Visual Design, where you will be part of a multidisciplinary research environment and help shape our degree programs in the field. The vacant position should ideally be filled as of 1 November 2018 or as soon as possible thereafter.

We are looking for an applicant with experience within one or more of the following fields:

• Game design
• Game studies
• Practical game development
• UI/UX
• Film & media studies, animation
• Art direction for production design

This is a permanent full-time position with dedicated research time.

The Application deadline is August 31st, 2018.

Click here for the full posting – scroll to the bottom for the English version.

We’ve had a long period where mobile platforms (were seen as) dominated by casual games (games flexible towards different use cases, and mostly positive in their fictions), but with the release of Fortnite on iOS, we suddenly have a situation where a more traditional shooter is top grossing.

In an MCV interview, Tim Sweeney argues that this is the future: that “serious” games (sic) will be dominant in the mobile charts.

Well. It’s true that Fortnite is new in this context in terms of being a  top-grossing shooter. But the news is not so much that it is a “serious” game, meaning one that has depth and that players can keep improving their skills at. Candy Crush is an involved game if you try to get far, and so is Clash Royale, and the latter one is about multiplayer competition as well.

The news is really that a traditional “core” game genre, in this case the shooter, has been successfully launched on mobile platforms.

The question of cloning usually leads to great agitation, and I’ve written about the technical issues of what is legal before.

I think I am in the minority for believing that weak copyright protections are preferable to strong ones, but I do believe that strong copyright protections would eventually lead to all game genres effectively being owned by large companies with many lawyers.

So, PLAYERUNKNOWN’S BATTLEGROUNDS: When Fortnite Battle Royale came out (the more successful game as of now), it was widely seen as copying PUBG’s battle royale format – except
a) this wasn’t invented by PUBG
b) a game format like battle royale is not the kind of thing you can copyright (it’s an idea), but you have copyright over the expression of that idea, so legal action has to happen on the grounds that the offending party made too many similar design decisions that were not necessary.

Now Ars Technica reports that PUBG corp is suing Chinese developer Netease. Their legal argument is illustrative of how such lawsuits can be made: the general game structure of PUBG cannot be legally defended, but a developer that makes too many similar choices in game design, level design, and visual design will be legally vulnerable:

The suit individually describes characteristics of the game as “a copyrightable audio-visual work, individually and/or in combination with other elements of Battlegrounds,” and it includes screenshots of the competing game to make a case of infringement. Remarkably, PUBG Corp lists what it believes are 25 copyrightable characteristics about the game…

PUBG Corp’s argument appears to hinge on that “in combination with other elements” label, as both targeted games include examples of each of the 25 elements by way of screenshot or gameplay description. As the lawsuit contends, “The use of cookware as a weapon or armor in a shooter game, the use of certain vehicles and landscapes and combinations thereof, the use of distinctive supply boxes, and the celebratory reference to chicken are elements of ornamental flair that are not functional but have acquired secondary meaning, as shown by their use by players in memes, parodies, skits and other contexts to refer to the Battlegrounds game and to its developer, i.e., PUBG.”