Category: my publications

New paper: High-tech Low-tech Authenticity: The Creation of Independent Style at the Independent Games Festival.

I have posted a new paper, High-tech Low-tech Authenticity: The Creation of Independent Style at the Independent Games Festival.

In which I study the history of visual style in Independent Games. I look particularly at the Grand Prize winners of the Independent Games Festival (IGF) from 2000-2014. I argue that what I call Independent Style is a “representation of a representation”, using contemporary technology to emulate earlier, simpler types of representation. Examples include pixel style graphics, games made with crayons, paper, paint etc…

Interestingly, the 2000-2004 winners do not look like the style we would associate with Independent Games today. Consider Tread Marks, winner at the first IGF.

Year Name Screenshot Visual style Theme / gameplay
2000 Tread Marks 8 3d Tank battle

It is then from 2005 (with Gish) and on that the Independent Style we have come to know begins to dominate the IGF. In the paper I argue that this coincides with an increased focus on non-physical distribution as well as self-publishing.

I also claim that this Independent Style (which is the style by which we recognize independent games) is meant to signal that a small-budget production is small-budget by choice and that small-budget development has a particular authenticity and honesty.

And I also discuss the Arts and Crafts movement, texture settings in Unity, locavore food, Jeff Koons and fake wood.

All comments are welcome!

The paper was presented at the recent Foundations of Digital Games conference.
http://www.jesperjuul.net/text/independentstyle/

My new book: The Art of Failure: An Essay on the Pain of Playing Video Games

artoffailure_cover_180x264[1]My name is Jesper, and I am a sore loser.

And my new book The Art of Failure: An Essay on the Pain of Playing Video Games is fresh out on MIT Press!
(On Amazon.com. UK.)

To wit: I hate to fail in games. I think I enjoy playing video games, but why does this enjoyment contain at its core something that I most certainly do not enjoy?

We tend to talk of video games as being fun, but in The Art of Failure, I claim that this is almost entirely mistaken. When we play video games, we frown, grimace, and shout in frustration. So why do we play video games even though they often make us unhappy?

In the book I compare game failure to tragic literature, theater, and cinema. Where stories concern the inadequacies of others, game failure is special in that it concerns our personal inadequacies

The book covers the philosophy and psychology of failure, as well as the problem of interactive tragedy, and it shows how different types of game design makes failure personal.

Finally, I argue for our right to be just a little angry, and more than a little frustrated, when we fail.

Where to get it

Get The Art of Failure from your neighborhood bookstore, your favorite online retailer, or from the book’s companion website: http://www.jesperjuul.net/artoffailure/

The book is available in both paper and ebook formats.

Official MIT Press page: http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/art-failure

Thanks to everybody who made this book possible!

-Jesper

Endorsements

  • “Frankly, I hadn’t expected to enjoy a book about failure nearly as much as I did. Jesper Juul brings many different fields of study to the table and provides an engaging learning experience.”
    —Brenda Brathwaite Romero, game designer, COO and Co-Founder of Loot Drop
  • “I can think of no other medium that so constantly forces its participant to contemplate their own demise. The act of playing games is one dotted with near-endless failure. Yet we plow on. Jesper Juul’s new book is exactly the sharp examination of failure I need to keep myself from stabbing my eyes out when I get frustrated.”
    —Jamin Warren, Founder, Kill Screen
  • “In The Art of Failure, Jesper Juul explores an interesting idea and asks provocative questions. This book will be of interest to developers, players, scholars, journalists, and readers with related interests, such as chess players or athletes.”
    —Henry Lowood, Curator for History of Science & Technology Collections, Stanford University

On Zero-Player Games

Zero-Player Games. Or: What We Talk about When We Talk about Players is a paper I co-wrote with Staffan Björk for the Philosophy of Computer Games Conference in Madrid earlier this year (Staffan’s idea).

Zero-Player Games is one of my more philosophical papers, and deals with the topic of games without players. This is obviously something of a contradiction in terms, but the paper works by looking at interesting edge cases of what we consider to be a game.

It turns out that each of the edge cases we examine (such as Conway’s Game of Life or StatBuilder) tells us something fundamental about both games and players. In other words: by removing players from the equation, we show what was removed.

The paper thereby also questions seemingly “player-centric” theories of games: it is not uncommon to hear theorists claim that games are  nothing by themselves, but only come into being when played. We show that such arguments overlook the fact that players have preferences about which games they prefer to play.

Here is the abstract:

Do games need people? If so, what is it that makes people important to games? It can seem self-evident that games are artifacts designed to be used by players, but in this paper we will discuss the paradoxical idea of zero-player games. We do not wish to argue against the study of players, but we believe that many common conceptions of players are too vague to be useful. Based on the examination of zero-player games, we provide five subcomponents to help in the understanding of the player concept. Expressed as questions, these are: Is this a human player? Does the player have agency? Does the player play over time? Does the player appear to have intentionality? Does the player exhibit aesthetic preferences?

Read the paper here: http://www.jesperjuul.net/text/zeroplayergames/

 

PS. For more reading, here are all the papers from the Philosophy of Computer Games conference 2012 (scroll down).

游戏抽象度 (A Certain Level of Abstraction in Chinese)

游戏抽象度: This is the Chinese translation of my 2007 paper A Certain Level of Abstraction.

Thanks to Ji Chen for the translation!

电子游戏已经快有五十年历史了，而游戏的历史则长达数千年。无论游戏制作者还是玩家，都深深被已经形成的游戏文化所影响：制作者通过借鉴并发展游戏的传统和旧有类型，开发新的游戏；玩家则借助对游戏传统的理解和玩过的旧游戏更好地上手新游戏。
从事电子游戏研究的学者也同样深受游戏文化的影响，很多游戏传统已经被不自觉地被当作理所当然。恐怕问一些幼稚的问题更利于我们的研究。我将以此开头：为何我不能为所欲为？

http://www.jesperjuul.net/text/acertainlevel_cn/

 

I Like Dying a Lot

Over at Kill Screen, a discussion I had with Jamin Brophy-Warren about failure in video games: I Like Dying a lot.

JBW: Do you think the way that game players deal with failure has relevance to the way that people deal with failure in life?

JJ: It’s very obvious that your personality kind of transfers to a certain extent. If you’re having problems dealing with major challenges in games, you probably also have problems in real life and vice versa. The thing with games is they allow for a kind of plausible deniability.

This is something I first read in Steven Pinker, who talks about how this happens with language typically. So if you say something like, “Nice laptop you’ve got there, it would be a shame if something happened to it,” that has a plausible deniability. Obviously there is a threat, but there’s a small way out that you could deny it’s the threat that it really was.

We have this freedom in games to take it seriously, even though it may not matter financially or whatever to you. But there’s also a freedom to not take it seriously. There’s a freedom in games to deny that the distress you were showing was all that important. In the 2010 World Cup, when the U.S. lost to Ghana, The New York Posthad a front page saying, ‘This sport is stupid anyway.’

The Paradox of Interactive Tragedy: Can a Video Game have an Unhappy Ending?

The conference organizers of the Storyworlds Across Media conference in Mainz have put up the videos from the July 2011 conference.

Here is the video of me talking about The Paradox of Interactive Tragedy: Can a Video Game have an Unhappy Ending?

This a chapter from my upcoming book on Failure, where I revisit a question that I dodged in Half-Real: Can a video game have an unhappy ending? (Answer is yes, in some ways, with modifications, it’s complicated.)

(The video contains a Red Read Redemption spoiler. You have been warned.)