Author: Jesper

Apple’s App Store: The Paranoid Theory

As discussed here before, I think video games are often treated with the faulty assumption that they should somehow be the only art form in existence to only have nice unobjectionable content that offends no one.

With the seemingly arbitrary rejection policies of the iPhone App Store continuing and no end in sight, it occurs to me that there is a theory that could explain Apple’s behavior as rational, if morally dubious. While the App Store policy is obviously horrible from an end-user and developer point of view, there may be some method to the apparent madness.

Look at it from Apple’s point of view. Here is what they get from having an opaque and inconsistent policy:

  • Apple avoids having to formulate a policy that works for all cultures across the globe. After all, standards for nudity, profanity and violence are completely inconsistent between the countries of the world.
  • Apple thereby avoids having to defend and argue about the policy.
  • The arbitrariness of the current situation has an intended chilling effect, by which developers self-censor in order to avoid having their applications blocked.

Anyway, that’s a theory that explains the seemingly arbitrary App Store policy as rational and deliberate. It’s either that, or Apple aren’t thinking clearly.

A Casual Revolution and the Future of Video Games

If you are in New York City, please join me for the book launch and panel debate for A Casual Revolution: Reinventing Video Games and Their Players.

Thursday, December 17, 2009
6:00pm – 8:30pm
Tisch school of the Arts, room 006
721 Broadway
New York, NY

In this evening of debate, Jesper Juul (New York University Game Center) will introduce the new book, followed by a panel discussion on the rise of casual games and the future of video games. The panel consisting of Mia Consalvo (MIT, author of Cheating), Nick Fortugno (Playmatics, formerly Gamelab) and Wade Tinney (Large Animal) will discuss topics such as:

  • What are casual games, and where did they come from?
  • Are casual games saving video games from cultural ghettoization, or are they preventing video games from dealing with serious themes?
  • Are traditional gamers right to feel threatened by casual games?
  • Do game developers have an obligation to make games for everybody?
  • How should video game studies deal with new game forms and different types of players?

Refreshments will be served. Hope you can make it!

[Update: The event podcast can be downloaded here.]

Three Ways of Playing

Jamin Brophy-Warren writes about New Super Mario Bros for the Wii.

And refers to some of my thoughts from A Casual Revolution, on playing to win vs. playing to keep the game interesting vs. playing to manage the social consequences:

“Jesper Juul, a video-game researcher and professor at NYU’s newly minted Game Center, argues that multiplayer games give us three things to balance. Players want to win and they want the game to be fair, but they also need to navigate whatever relationships they have outside the game – that is, if you shoot your friend in the head in Call of Duty, you’ll have to answer for that in the offline world. My brother and the jerk from E3 were solely concerned with winning. I mostly cared about the game being fair. None of us, though, sat down and talked about the third factor – what we were planning to do during our journey as in-game teammates.”

http://www.slate.com/id/2235587/pagenum/all/

Podcast Interview in the Another Castle Series

Game Design Advance has posted a podcast interview with me as part of the Another Castle series.

The interview, here, is about the state and history of video game studies as well as a dive into some of the concepts from Half-Real.

Other interviewees in the Another Castle series include Frank Lantz, Anna Anthropy, Greg Trefry and Richard Rouse III.

The Art History of Games Conference

The Art History of Games is a three-day public symposium in which members of the fields of game studies, art history and related areas of cultural studies gather to investigate games as an art form. Speakers include Ian Bogost, Brenda Brathwaite, Jesper Juul, Frank Lantz, Henry Lowood, Christiane Paul, John Romero, and more.

Also featured in the conference is the premiere of three commissioned art games, from Jason Rohrer, Tale of Tales, and Eric Zimmerman. The designers will exhibit their work and participate in the symposium.

Organized by Georgia Tech Digital Media and SCAD Atlanta, the symposium will be held Feb. 4-6 in the High Museum of Art’s Rich Auditorium on the campus of the Woodruff Arts Center, 1280 Peachtree St. N.E., in midtown Atlanta.

Register by January 5 for reduced rates.

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The flyer:

art history of games

The High Def Illusion

I continue to feel that the focus on High-Definition graphics in some newer consoles (PS3/360) is a little misguided for a simple reason: Many people cannot tell the difference between standard and high definition. Anecdotally, I have seen video game designers with 360 consoles running in standard definition, and I find that few viewers can accurately tell whether a given console or television channel is in high-def or not.

In the paper The emperor’s clothes in high resolution: An experimental study of the framing effect and the diffusion of HDTV, a group of Dutch researchers demonstrate that users will experience a standard definition signal as being of higher quality if they are told that it is high definition. Hence the idea of high definition will apparently override the quality of the television signal itself.

I also discuss the role of graphics and high definition in A Casual Revolution, noting that while graphical quality matters, and while all consoles will eventually be high-def, technical graphical quality just doesn’t translate directly into improved user experience…