Category: my publications

In the wake of Jane McGonigal’s Reality is Broken, I participated this week in a round table at Zócalo Public Square on the subject of “How Will Video Games Change the Way We Work?” The other participants were Mark Deuze, Paul Dourish, Nick Yee, and David Rejeski.

Here is my contribution.

Games can be a huge help—but have huge limitations

Reality is Broken makes a strong case for applying the lessons of video games to work, and to the rest of the world. While I am very sympathetic to this idea, I would like to add a caveat: Games work well in part because they provide clear goals and feedback, but the application of clear goals and feedback to work environments has in many cases proved disastrous. The employees of (for example) Washington Mutual have explained how they were being measured exclusively on the number of loans they were approving (clear goals), and how they were threatened with sanctions if they asked too many questions about a customer’s ability to pay (feedback). In fact, much of the financial crisis was due to the application of game-like design principles to work, where employees were forced to work toward short-term goals that were detrimental to the health of their company and the economy at large. In the Eastern Bloc, Polish furniture factories used to be rewarded on the basis of the weight of their total output, and consequently made the heaviest furniture in the world.

The key is to recognize that it is fine to set up goals and feedback in work environments only as long as everybody – from CEO to temp employee – understands that performance measures only give a partial image of reality. Clear goals and feedback are only inspiring in work situations when we have the discretion to decide how seriously we want to take them, and as long as there is no higher-level manager that takes the performance measure literally anyway. Games are also enjoyable because they give us wiggle room. If we are to use game design principles outside games, we need to make sure that the wiggle room is still there; we need to make sure that we are still allowed to use our sound judgment when faced with a performance goal.

I am probably coming out as a skeptic of gamification here, but the point really is that game conventions should not be blindly applied everywhere.

My argument is more fully developed in the book on Failure that I am currently working on.

I have posted an essay called Depth in one Minute: A Conversation about Bejeweled Blitz, which I co-wrote with Rasmus Keldorff for the new Well Played 2.0 anthology.

This is a conversation about the design and merits of the Blitz format, about how we develop strategies, about chance, about the danger of burning out on a specific game, and about the difference between younger and older players.

Incidentally, this is the fourth time I have written about Bejeweled (first time about matching tile games, second time about casual games, third time as game of the decade). It’s a bit like writing about haiku or minimalism – because there is so little to see, there is so much to say.

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

Over at Htlit.com, I have a short text arguing that Bejeweled is the most important game of the 2000’s (the decade, that is). (Waiting for the protests from a crowd of angry gamers.)

Viewed strictly as a game design, this probably isn’t the most enjoyable game of the decade. Neither is it the most innovative, being rather an incremental development based of a number of existing designs.What makes Bejeweled the game of the decade is its central role in the casual revolution: This game was instrumental in creating the first video game distribution channel aimed at an older and predominantly female audience (downloadable casual games), hence redefining our ideas of what a video game could be and who could play video games. Furthermore, its basic gameplay of swapping tiles to make colored matches has taken on a life of its own, now playable on cell phones and aeroplanes; as relaxed game sessions without any time pressure; packaged as a role-playing game set in a fantasy world (Puzzle Quest); as a one-minute intensive game for competing against friends (Bejeweled Blitz). That is the importance of Bejeweled: showing us how many different things video games can be, showing us that there are many ways to play, use, and enjoy video games.

Here is a paper I wrote a few years ago but never posted: Variation over Time – The Transformation of Space in Single-Screen Action Games was published in the Space Time Play anthology in 2007.

At that time, I was becoming interested in doing detailed analyses of specific video game designs. (Also evident in my Swap Adjacent paper.) I think it is important to paint the big picture, but I find it interesting to supplement this with more specific examinations of very focused topics. The big and the small pictures are then meant to supplement each other.

Variation over Time concerns the kind of early video game design where variation was provided by opening the playing field during the course of a level. Examples include Space Invaders, (Ms.) Pac-Man, Pengo, and Super Bomberman. From the paper:

My interest here is in a specific way of providing variation, the qualitative change of difficulty that is created by opening the playing field during a game level. This is a type of design where obstacles are gradually removed and the playing field becomes more open as a result. We can see this design in a number of board games (e.g. backgammon, chess, checkers), and it was a popular design in the non-scrolling action video game, most prominently in the 1980s. But for reasons I will discuss later, this design has become unusual in contemporary video games. Consider the early video game Space Invaders (Taito 1977) as a first example. (Figure 1.)

Figure 1. Space Invaders (Taito 1977)

More.

Guan Pingping of Zhejiang University has been so kind as to translate my paper The Game, the Player, the World: Looking for a Heart of Gameness into Chinese.

Get it here: 游戏、玩家、世界: 对游戏本质的探讨.