Author: Jesper

Time: Wednesday, January 13, 6-8 pm
Location: USC’s Robert Zemeckis Center for Digital Arts (RZC)
Room 201 Zemeckis Media Lab (ZML)

The Rise of Casual Games

It seems like only yesterday that video games were considered the province of males between 12 and 35. Yet with the launch of the Nintendo Wii, with the proliferation of casual games in browsers, with music games and cell phone games, video games seem to have broken out of their cultural niche. In this talk I will present a short history of the rise of casual games, and discuss its implications for game developers, player, and for the future of video games.

I will start blogging about something else than the book soon, promise!

• “Phenomenal”.
  –Jamin Brophy Warren in Slate.
• “Crowds mobbed Nintendo’s booth, clamoring to play it, rushing passed the fancier Xbox and Playstation demonstrations. It was the first sign that something was fundamentally shifting in the videogame industry. Jesper Juul’s “A Casual Revolution” explains what happened, and why.”
  –Jonathan V. Last, Wall Street Journal.
• “A trenchant look at the rise of casual gaming”.
  -Keith Stuart, The Guardian Gamesblog.
• “A Casual Revolution will be valuable for academics and those in industry, and will help keep the sun shining on games.”
  –Nick Montfort, author of Twisty Little Passages and Racing the Beam.

Edge magazine reviewed A Casual Revolution in their Christmas 2009 issue. Here are my comments on the review.

***

First, I’d like to thank Edge for an in-depth review of my book A Casual Revolution in the 2009 Christmas issue [E209]. Apart from pointing out some errors that I should have caught when proofreading and which are duly noted on the book’s website, Edge raises the important question about whether we should discuss the stereotypes of “casual” and “hardcore” at all. As I read it, Edge resents the terms “casual” and “hardcore” as such, maybe making the point that more simplistic stereotypes are not what we need at this point. If that’s the case, then we are clearly on the same page. In the book I trace the history of the hardcore/casual terms in order to build a more detailed framework for discussing the interplay between games, players and developers.

In this framework, casual/hardcore is not an either/or question but consists of the four subcomponents of fiction, game knowledge required, time investment, and difficulty. This allows me to talk about how a game design can be more or less open to different types of playing. You cannot, of course, reduce all of game design to four components, but the challenge of this book was to hit a sweet spot between oversimplifying and making a model so complex that no one could remember it. In short this was my choice for how to structure the book.

As the Edge review seems to show, and as is documented in the developer interviews in the book, no one really likes the casual/hardcore categories. The challenge then is that these categories play a very real role in the development and consumption of video games, meaning that even if we accept a more nuanced framework for talking about games and players, we still need to refer to casual/hardcore to be able to talk about current developments. For example, I compare the box art of Gears of War and Wii Sports (not Bejeweled as stated in the review) to show that the games called “casual” tend to have positive fictions. This is a generalization that makes it possible to talk about casual games and players. As noted, fiction does not apply to an abstract game like Solitaire. The point is that once we have a framework for talking about such issues, we get the opportunity to discuss why a given game doesn’t cleanly match the categories.

Another choice I made was to use the personal stories of players and developers to build the arguments in the book. I think this adds some readability and perspectives that would have been missing if the book was entirely driven by statistics (which would have created text like this: “during the 1990’s there was an 84% increase in funds allocated to playtesting”).

The review taught me that I may have underestimated the extent to which referencing common terms like casual and hardcore has the downside of bringing all their problematic meanings right back into the reading. That’s a valuable insight, but I still think it is worthwhile to bring the stereotypes into play and to examine what is behind the stereotypes. My aim from the start was to make the book readable by telling the history of casual games by way of concrete player and developer stories, and to propose a way of talking about those pesky terms, casual and hardcore, without oversimplifying and without ignoring the ongoing discussions by players and developers, and by publications such as Edge.

Sincerely,

-Jesper Juul

Kotaku is running some excerpts from the interview section of A Casual Revolution. In the book I interviewed players about how their playing habits had changed over time.

One of the player types I identified was the ex-hardcore player, whose life has become conducive to playing shorter-form casual games.

The excerpt also features interviews showing how new players came to play casual games.

——————

Type 2: These are the stories of players who used to intensely play video games and now have switched to more casual video games.

Survey response from a 40-year-old female player.

Q: Have your game-playing habits changed over the years?

A: I used to only play RPGs like Guild Wars but you can start and stop casual games easier during the day.

Survey response from a 42-year-old female player.

Q: Have your game-playing habits changed over the years?

A: Started with text-only adventure games, moved toward RPG video-games & simulations, most recently I stick with time management-type casual games.

Survey response from a 30-year-old female player.

Q: Have your game-playing habits changed over the years?

A: Having a baby really changed my game playing habits. When she needs my attention the game must stop. This is why World of Warcraft has been hard to play as of late.

Read more here.