My name is Jesper Juul, and I am a Ludologist [researcher of the design, meaning, culture, and politics of games]. This is my blog on game research and other important things.
This is for the program I run in Copenhagen. Join us!
Apply to the Visual Game and Media Design Master’s program at KADK in Copenhagen. The Application deadline for the 2019-2021 class is March 1st.
The application process is now open for the two-year Visual Game And Media Design master’s program at KADK – the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, School of Design in Copenhagen.
Visual Game and Media Design is an intensive two-year program for students wishing to do creative work in game design, visual media, and beyond. During the program, you will continually combine the hands-on creation of digital games, animations, motion graphics and visual designs with innovative conceptual approaches to game design and storyworld design.
Who can apply?
The master’s program in Visual Game and Media Design is in English, and is open to all students, Danish and International, with a relevant bachelor’s degree in fields such as graphic design, game design, animation, or 3D modeling. We encourage students with nontraditional backgrounds to apply.
We have frequent lectures by industry luminaries. We have recently had talks by designers such as Richard Lemarchand, Mary Flanagan, Nathalie Pozzi, Eric Zimmerman, Robert Yang, Henrike Lode, Alfred Nguyen (Forgotten Anne), Trine Laier (Cosmic Top Secret), Mikkel Pedersen (Deep Rock Galactic), and Petter Henriksen (Landfall Games).
We also organize game jams in collaboration with the local industry, including the 2019 Nordic Game Jam.
Why study at KADK in Copenhagen? KADK is a leading academy in Scandinavia in the fields of architecture, design and conservation. It is located centrally by the Copenhagen harbor.
Copenhagen is a hub for video game development, with a vibrant English-language game development community, and home to both small and large companies such as Sybo games, IO Interactive, Playdead and Unity3D.
KADK works closely with (and is situated next to) the National Film School of Denmark, and with the professional TV and Film community in Denmark.
The place where queerness meets games is a site of radical potential. This introduction, and this issue, ask how we can push queer game studies beyond desires for inclusion and representation and instead embrace a queer tradition of rejecting the status quo.[more]
This article re-contextualizes debate in queer game studies over “empathy games,” represented by the games EMPATHY MACHINE (merritt k, 2014), Empathy Game (Anna Anthropy, 2015), and empathy machine (Mattie Brice, 2016), within debates over empathy in feminist theory. New terms for haptic game design aesthetics such as consent, cuteness, and the rad[more]
This essay uses a personal account of the process of creating a videogame to explore themes of queerness, disability, and labour. It intermixes theories of queer time with crip time to detail possible approaches to a queer, accessible art practice that takes seriously social inequalities yet moves towards healing.[more]
This paper examines how two BioWare-developed titles–2010’s Mass Effect 2 and 2012’s Mass Effect 3– integrate various depictions of LGBTQ-affiliated characters into a larger systemic process of thinking about populations as “war assets” to be expended, rendering queer identity as useful only when considered as a “positive” resource in the fight.[more]
Video game fans use fan fiction to critique video game narratives that exclude or misrepresent diverse gender identities in their design. Fans also recraft the video game narrative to include the representation they want to see, providing insight into how marginalized and minority players respond to diversity in games.[more]
In this article, I make the case that control and controllers — the peripherals which players use as extensions of their bodies and minds to operate videogames — are a key entry point into the project of altering the hegemonic status quo of mainstream game design. Concepts from queer game studies, intersectional feminist theory, and critical design practices (particularly, the reflective game design framework) are brought together in order to analyze and subsequently queer five core aspects of control and controllers in videogames. I make use of examples from the work of queer creators, including my own, in order to queer each aspect.[more]
This essay explores gaming’s “queer economy,” joining intimate frameworks based on the study of affect and individual psychology with wider, systemic and economic analyses of the cultural and economic meaning of videogame play.[more]
This article argues that the popular indie game Dream Daddy renormalizes the subversive gay daddy figure by replacing boundary-pushing depictions of sex with the positivity, joy, and optimism of the suburban upper- middle class. Attending to negative feelings, or “bad dreams,” in the game can wake players up to messier, kinkier, and queerer worlds.[more]
Applying Elizabeth Freeman’s concept of chrononormativity to play, this article examines time in high-stakes, professional play as a normative structure against which to recognize a set of queer temporalities, including backtracking, rewinding and resetting. A discussion of Life Is Strange illustrates both queer content and queered time in games.[more]
This article examines queer videogame modifications as a specific form of free and affective labour. Drawing on multiple modders, I describe the varying relationships between queer players, developers, and the game object through mods.[more]
Some of the earliest queer representations in mass-market games are Easter eggs, hidden artifacts that often present queer experiences as zany and noncanonical. Contrasting Easter eggs with representational politics that emphasize player choice, this article instead advocates for ambivalent design that confronts players with queer irresolvability.[more]
With its focus on video game engines, this essay proposes how a queer analysis of the labors and technologies that undergird the work in progress might strengthen more generalized discussions of the representational politics of video games, their audiences, and their production communities.[more]
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.
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.
In the background at my first conference
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.
For your theoretical scrutiny: Game Studies: The International Journal of Computer Game Research has just published its latest issue (Volume 18, Issue 2, September 2018). All articles are available at http://www.gamestudies.org/1802
This paper investigates non-monogamy in videogame narratives with a focus on games that include scripted non- monogamous gameplay options, such as Mass Effect (BioWare, 2007), and The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt (CD Projekt RED, 2007), along with the current limitations on this form of representation in mainstream games.
This article analyses Hearthstone players’ forum discussions. The analysis illustrates how forum participants interpret the game’s limited emote system and talk about ways of misusing the emotes for negatively loaded purposes, despite the designers’ intention of making player-to-player interaction positive.
How the video game experience can be characterized is an important question in video game research. I argue that the video game controller has a crucial role for the interactive experience. This paper presents a semiotic analysis of the relation between player, video game, and controller.
by Ahmed Elmezeny, Jeffrey Wimmer, Manoella Oliveira dos Santos, Ekaterina Orlova, Irina Tribusean, Anna Antonova
Using a qualitative content analysis, this study analyses the differences between trolling strategies and reactions to trolling in two nationally distinct gaming image boards (Russia and Brazil). The research shows that while there are differences in both samples, overall trolling is somewhat homogenous, indicating a transcultural standard.
Narrated by a father who bonds with his autistic son via Minecraft, Keith Stuart’s novel A Boy Made of Blocks highlights the important role videogames now play in discourses of gender, ability, education and parenting. This article draws on Stockton’s work on ‘queer childhood’ to assess the book’s implications for conceptions of gamer masculinity.
The story, mechanics and genre of Firewatch subvert traditional, hypermasculine videogame norms and encourage players to perform a care-oriented masculinity.
This article discusses the ludic and narrative presentation of non-hegemonic masculinities in BioWare’s Mass Effect trilogy from an intersectional queer game studies perspective. In-depth and multidimensional character analyses reveal the complex power structures permeating the game and regulating its identity politics.
This article discusses how the intersection of fictional worlds, game rules, and narratives in videogames challenges the creation and ideological employment of Baudrillard’s simulacra through an examination of the Fallout franchise’s engagement with Cold War nostalgia and computer technology.
Designers strive to create games conducive to flow, “the optimal experience.” This study demonstrates that a generative music system in place of a traditional game soundtrack can help players reach flow, even when they are unaware of the novel music system. The benefits of a generative system were most apparent in the first minutes of gameplay.
