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.
Polygon has kindly published an excerpt from Handmade Pixels.
This is an excerpt from my history chapter, “A selective History of Independent Games”. My concern here is the prehistory of independent games and the central question: is independent game development new or old?
https://www.polygon.com/2019/11/15/20962788/indie-development-history-handmade-pixels
For Handmade Pixels, I did a rather extensive series of interviews with developers and festival organizers.
I was interested in general questions of how they framed their own role and how they saw the history of independent games, as well as in the concrete details of their development or festival-organizing practices.
I am dropping half the interviews now, and will publish the rest during the later months of 2019.
| Anna Anthropy
Game designer known for games such as Dys4ia, author of the Rise of the Videogame Zinesters manifesto. |
Bennett Foddy
Educator and game developer behind punishing games such as QWOP and Getting over it with Bennett Foddy. |
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| Bernie DeKoven
Pioneer in physical and communal games, including with the New Games movement. |
Celia Pearce
Educator, writer and game developer who has worked with games, VR, and multimedia since the late 1980s. |
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| David Kanaga
Composer and game developer of games such as Proteus and Oikospiel. |
Jason Rohrer
Independent game developer of games such as Passage and One Hour One Life. |
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| Jonathan Blow
Independent game developer, best known for Braid and The Witness. |
Kelly Wallick
Chairperson of the Independent Games Festival since 2015, CEO and founder of Indie MEGABOOTH. |
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| Tale of Tales
Belgium-based artist duo—Auriea Harvey and Michaël Samyn—known for their earlier work with experimental and experiential games such as The Path and The Graveyard. |
I am thrilled to announce that my new book, Handmade Pixels: Independent Video Games and the Quest for Authenticity, is out today on MIT Press.
How can a digital, immaterial, and globally distributed video game be authentic?
Video games are often dismissed as mere entertainment products created by faceless corporations. The last twenty years, however, have seen the rise of independent, or “indie,” video games: a wave of small, cheaply developed, experimental, and personal video games that react against mainstream video game development and culture. In Handmade Pixels, I examine the paradoxical ways developers, players, and festivals portray independent games as unique and hand-crafted objects in a globally distributed digital medium.
But where did independent games come from? Are they independent, just like cinema and music? I tell the history of independent video games from 1998-2018, and show the ongoing tensions around what indie games should be: Fun games? Games with political impact? Games representing diversity? Are indie games a movement for more democratic games, or do they speak only to a small audience of connoisseurs?
I describe all of this as a continued quest for authenticity – a quest to distance indie games from big publishers, from traditional game form, and from the lack of diversity in big-budget and casual games.
This is a trade book for a broad audience, but with theoretical underpinnings. It shows many strange new games in detail, it contains stories from my own participation in game jams and conferences, it is lavishly illustrated with more than 100 color pictures, and it features interviews with 21 developers and festival organizers (Jonathan Blow, Anna Anthropy, Bennett Foddy, Simon Carless, Nathalie Lawhead, and more).
The book took a lot of work, but it was also fun to write, as it gave me the chance to play hundreds of fascinating games, and to connect with interesting people in the independent game community. I hope you will enjoy it too.
Upcoming talks
I will be presenting the book at the NYU Game Center on October 10th, and at IndieCade in Los Angeles on October 12th.
Get the book
Handmade Pixels is available from (preferably?) your local independent bookstore, MIT Press, or any number of online retailers.
Official MIT Press site: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/handmade-pixels
My own book site, with the full developer interviews. https://www.jesperjuul.net/handmadepixels/
I will be presenting my new book, Handmade Pixels, on October 10th 2019 at the New York University Game Center.
“Join us to celebrate the launch of Jesper Juul’s latest publication, Handmade Pixels! Handmade Pixels: Independent Video games and the Quest for Authenticity is the new book (MIT Press) from video game researcher Jesper Juul, about the history and idea of independent video games.
Through examples of many interesting and strange games, and through audience participation, I will tell the history of independent games, and point to their ongoing challenges: What happens when players deny that an experimental independent game is a “real game”? Are experimental independent video games for everyone, or only for a small group of connoisseurs? Can we continue to make new video games by referring to older analog or digital visual styles? How can we create authenticity in a thoroughly digital world?”
Get your tickets here.
Are virtual reality objects real? I have a new paper out in the Disputatio journal, titled Virtual Reality: Fictional all the Way Down (and that’s OK) .
The paper came about as a response to David Chalmer’s 2017 paper The Virtual and the Real, about which Pawel Grabarczyk organized a seminar in Copenhagen in the summer of 2018.
TL;DR: Chalmers uses virtual reality to argue that there are structures (such as calculators) that exist regardless of their physical or non-physical implementation, and as such virtual reality objects can be perfectly real.
I argue, orthogonally, that virtual reality is not becoming “just-like-the-real-thing” based on any fidelity to the physical world. VR is not just technology, but art; a human act of communication and selective implementation. I also argue that VR is half-real: we are not magically transported to another world, as VR is only selectively implemented (it rarely has the photons that make up light, for example), and as users we we are conscious of how the world is a limited implementation made for the purpose of a particular experience.
It’s real: My new book, Handmade Pixels: Independent Video Games and the Quest for Authenticity is now in the MIT Press fall catalog, and will be out in September 2019.
For the book I interviewed 21 developers, artists, and festival organizers, and I will be posting interviews as we get closer.
Interviewees: Celia Pearce, David Kanaga, Jason Rohrer, Jonathan Blow, Kelly Wallick, Mattie Brice, Naomi Clark, Nathalie Lawhead, Pippin Barr, Rami Ismail, Robin Hunicke, Sam Roberts, Simon Carless, Tale of Tales, Thorsten Wiedemann, Tracy Fullerton, Zach gage, Anna Anthropy, Bennett Foddy, Paolo Pedercini, Bernie Dekoven.
Thanks to all who helped, made the games, or let themselves be interviewed!
I keep returning to this question: When we play a game, are we free – or are we prisoners of the game rules?
Here is Playing, my contribution to Henry Lowood and Raiford Guins’ wonderful Debugging Game History collection.
In the piece I argue that there are four main conceptions of the act of game-playing, going from playing as submission to playing as creation.
1. Playing as submission, where the player is bound by the limits set forth by the game rules.
2. Playing as constrained freedom, where the game creates a space in which players acquire a certain amount of freedom and the opportunity to perform particular acts.
3. Playing as subversion, where the player works around both the designer’s intentions and the game object’s apparent limitations.
4. Playing as creation, where the game is ultimately irrelevant for (or at least secondary to) the actual playing.
Read the full text here: http://www.jesperjuul.net/text/playing/
Bac
k from the 2016 DiGRA/FDG conference in Dundee, here is the paper I gave on using design patterns to understand video game history: Sailing the Endless River of Games: The case for Historical Design Patterns.
The Pay Once & Play category was introduced in the Apple App Store in early 2015. Though video games were for a long time, at least from 1985 to 2015, mostly sold in boxes for upfront payment, this business model was not actually named as “Pay once & Play” until after the emergence of the free-to-play or freemium business model. Why not? Because it was obvious that all video games were sold in boxes, so why would you mention it when talking about video games, or video game history?
This is the topic of the paper: The problem isn’t just that games change, but that games change in ways we haven’t predicted. The major events in video game history concern things that had previously been taken for granted: MMOs like World of Warcraft moved the role of the player community to the forefront; casual games reconfigured the audience; mobile games reconfigured distribution and business models; independent games set up a new relation between developer and audience. Video game history continually forces us to reconsider what it is we are studying, when we study video games.
In the paper I then propose that we can redefine game design patterns to help us to talk about video game change. I return to matching tile games as an example of how to write history using design patterns.
http://www.jesperjuul.net/text/endlessriverofgames/