Category: my publications

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/

Back 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/

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).