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.
Ryan Wiancko from IndustryBroadcast has once again been so kind as to provide a podcast for a paper of mine.
This time it’s Introduction to Game Time – An examination of game temporality, which was published in the First Person anthology and subsequently included in Half-Real in revised form. (The paper is also known as “Time to Play”, which I find is the better title.)
Update November 2009: A Casual Revolution is now out. Read more on the book’s web page: http://www.jesperjuul.net/casualrevolution/
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Announcing my next book, A Casual Revolution: Reinventing Video Games and Their Players.
Set for release in November 2009, A Casual Revolution is my take on what is happening with video games right now:
I will post more information about the book as we near the publication date!
Official description
The enormous popularity of the Nintendo Wii, Guitar Hero, and smaller games like Bejeweled or Zuma has turned the stereotype of the obsessed young male gamer on its head. Players of these casual games are not required to possess an intimate knowledge of video game history or to devote weeks or months to play. At the same time, many players of casual games show a dedication and skill that is anything but casual. In A Casual Revolution, Jesper Juul describes this as a reinvention of video games, and of our image of video game players, and explores what this tells us about the players, the games, and their interaction.
With this reinvention of video games, the game industry reconnects with a general audience. Many of today’s casual game players once enjoyed Pac-Man, Tetris, and other early games, only to drop out when video games became more time consuming and complex. For a long time, video games asked players to structure their lives to fit the demands of a game; with casual games, it is the game that is designed to fit into the lives of players. These flexible games make it possible for everyone to be a video game player.
Juul shows that it is only by understanding what a game requires of players, what players bring to a game, how the game industry works, and how video games have developed historically that we can understand what makes video games fun and why we choose to play (or not to play) them.
Endorsements
Links
Ryan Wiancko of Industry Broadcast has been kind enough to create a podcast of my paper Without a Goal: On open and expressive games.
From the paper:
According to a widespread theory, video games are goal-oriented, rule-based activities, where players find enjoyment in working towards the game goal. According to this theory, game goals provide a sense of direction and set up the challenges that the players face.
However, the last few decades have seen many things described as “games” that either do not have goals, or have goals that are optional for the player: Sims 2 (Maxis 2004) has no stated goals, but is nevertheless extremely popular. The also popular Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (Rockstar Games North 2005) is superficially a goal-oriented game, yet the game allows the player to perform a wide range of actions while ignoring the game goal.
Should a good game have an easy interface, but difficult gameplay? How can we tell the difference between the two, between interface and gameplay?
“Easy to Use and Incredibly Difficult: On the Mythical Border between Interface and Gameplay” is a paper I co-wrote with Marleigh Norton and which we presented at the Foundations of Digital Games Conference in April 2009.
The paper is meant as an in-depth examination of the common argument that the interface of a game should be easy-to-use. We argue that this is not necessarily the case.
In the paper we make the case that first of all, there is no way to clearly distinguish between interface and gameplay. Secondly, even when we can identify the interface in a given game, a difficult-to-use interface may very well be part of the core challenge of the game. In other words, no: good game does not equal easy interface + difficult gameplay.
For example, Street Fighter II has an interface that makes it easier to move your character than the interface of Toribash does, but that does not mean that it is a better game. It simply means that Toribash places part of its challenge in the basic movement of the character.
Street Fighter II
Toribash
Paper abstract:
In video game literature and video game reviews, video games are often divided into two distinct parts: interface and gameplay. Good video games, it is assumed, have easy to use interfaces, but they also provide difficult gameplay challenges to the player. But must a good game follow this pattern, and what is the difference between interface and gameplay? When does the easy-to-use interface stop, and when does the challenging gameplay begin? By analyzing a number of games, the paper argues that it is rare to find a clear-cut border between interface and gameplay and that the fluidity of this border characterizes games in general. While this border is unclear, we also analyze a number of games where the challenge is unambiguously located in the interface, thereby demonstrating that “easy interface and challenging gameplay” is neither universal nor a requirement for game quality. Finally, the paper argues, the lack of a clear distinction between easy interface and challenging gameplay is due to the fact that games are fundamentally designed not to accomplish something through an activity, but to provide an activity that is pleasurable in itself.
Ryan Wiancko of Industry Broadcast has been kind to make a podcast of my paper Fear of Failing? The Many Meanings of Difficulty in Video Games.
I’m a little late to blogging this, but here is the list of the top 10 Game Studies findings, presented at the Game Developers Conference by Ian Bogost, Mia Consalvo and Jane McGonigal.
The audience voted on the papers in order of importance, and my own Fear of Failing came in at #5.
The session slides are here.
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10. Stewart Woods: “(Play) Ground rules: The social contract and the magic circle”.
9. Jose Zagal and Amy Bruckman: “Novices, gamers, and scholars: Exploring the challenges of teaching about games”.
8. Karen Collins: “Game sound: An introduction to the history, theory, and practice of video game music and sound design”.
7. Charlie Breindahl: “Play to win or win to play? The material culture of gaming”.
6. Gareth Schott: “Relating the pleasures of violent game texts”.
5. Jesper Juul: “Fear of failing: The many meanings of difficulty in video games”.
4. Matt Barton: “How’s the weather: Simulating weather in virtual environments”.
3. Betsy James DiSalvo, Kevin Crowley and Roy Norwood: “Learning in context: Digital games and young black men”.
2. Michael Nitsche: “Video game spaces: Image, play, and structure in 3D worlds”.
1. Susana Tosca & Lisbeth Klastrup: “Because it just looks cool!’ Fashion as character performance—the case of WoW”.
Just finished my Game Developers 2009 conference talk, Beyond Balancing: Using Five Elements of Failure Design to Enhance Player Experiences.
Good questions afterward, so it seemed to go well. The slides can be downloaded here.
For your theory pleasure, the Conference Proceedings of The Philosophy of Computer Games 2008 have now been published, edited by Stephan Günzel, Michael Liebe and Dieter Mersch, with the editorial cooperation of Sebastian Möring. Download it here.
I discussed my own contribution in the previous post, here is the table of contents.
Table of contents
Petra Müller: Preface
Patrick Coppock: Introduction
Stephan Günzel, Michael Liebe and Dieter Mersch: Editor’s Note
Keynotes
Ian Bogost: The Phenomenology of Videogames
Richard Bartle: When Openness Closes. The Line between Play and Design
Jesper Juul: The Magic Circle and the Puzzle Piece
Ethics and Politics
Anders Sundnes Løvlie: The Rhetoric of Persuasive Games. Freedom and Discipline in America’s Army
Kirsten Pohl: Ethical Reflection and Emotional Involvement in Computer Games
Niklas Schrape: Playing with Information. How Political Games Encourage the Player to Cross the Magic Circle
Christian Hoffstadt/Michael Nagenborg: The Concept of War in the World of Warcraft
Action | Space
Bjarke Liboriussen: The Landscape Aesthetics of Computer Games
Betty Li Meldgaard: Perception, Action, and Game Space
Stephan Günzel: The Space-Image. Interactivity and Spatiality of Computer Games
Mattias Ljungström: Remarks on Digital Play Spaces
Charlene Jennett/Anna L. Cox/Paul Cairns: Being ‘In The Game’
Souvik Mukherjee: Gameplay in the ‘Zone of Becoming’. Locating Action in the Computer Game
Dan Pinchbeck: Trigens Can’t Swim. Intelligence and Intentionality in First Person Game Worlds
Robert Glashüttner: The Perception of Video Games. From Visual Power to Immersive Interaction
The Magic Circle
Britta Neitzel: Metacommunicative Circles
Yara Mitsuishi: Différance at Play. Unfolding Identities Through Difference in Videogame Play
Eduardo H. Calvillo-Gámez and Paul Cairns: Pulling the Strings.
A Theory of Puppetry for the Gaming Experience
Michael Liebe: There is no Magic Circle. On the Difference
between Computer Games and Traditional Games
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