Category: my publications

My keynote presentation from the 2008 Philosophy of Computer Games conference can now be downloaded here: The Magic Circle and the Puzzle Piece.

This is my attempt at giving some nuance to recent discussions about the magic circle of games. Abstract:

In a common description, to play a game is to step inside a concrete or metaphorical magic circle where special rules apply. In video game studies, this description has received an inordinate amount of criticism which the paper argues has two primary sources: 1. a misreading of the basic concept of the magic circle and 2. a somewhat rushed application of traditional theoretical concerns onto games. The paper argues that games studies must move beyond conventional criticisms of binary distinctions and rather look at the details of how games are played. Finally, the paper proposes an alternative metaphor for game-playing, the puzzle piece.

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Postscript

With The Magic Circle and the Puzzle Piece I had been hoping to create a paper as balanced as my old Games Telling Stories? paper, wherein I would elaborate the merits of pro and con arguments concerning the magic circle.

What I found was that in hindsight, the games vs. stories discussion was the easy one: The participants agree that there exists something called games, and that we can discuss whether or not these can be considered stories.

The discussion of the magic circle is much harder because the participants fundamentally disagree about the terms of the discussion: Proponents of the magic circle metaphor consider it interesting to examine to what extent a game session is or isn’t separate from something outside that game session. Critics of the magic circle, on the other hand, have objections to the question itself because they assume that the metaphor is fundamentally problematic for various historical and theoretical reasons that I mention in the paper.

In other words, the magic circle discussion has not happened so far. In the paper, I hope to have opened a tiny hole in the wall through which future conversations can take place.

My article Swap Adjacent Gems to Make Sets of Three: A History of Matching Tile Games made it to the “shadow list” of this year’s Game Studies Download session at the Game Developers Conference.

I’ll quote the shadow list description of the paper:

Juul, Jesper. “Swap Adjacent Gems to Make Sets of Three: A History of Matching Tile Games.” Artifact journal, Volume 2, 2007. Also available at http://www.jesperjuul.net/text/swapadjacent/.

Games discussed: Tetris, Centipede, Puzzle Bobble, Zuma, Luxor, many others

Country: Denmark

The casual games marketplace puts conflicting pressures on game developers: Innovate enough to differentiate, but make the game sufficiently like other games that players find it easy to pick up and play. When player picks up a game, they are also using their conception of video game history to understand the new game.

The article presents a history of matching tiles games, including a complex family tree of influence and innovation. Categories in the family tree include timed vs. non-timed, methods of tile manipulation, and criteria for matching.

Innovation in casual games is incremental, and based on combinations of mechanics from existing games. This creates a somewhat schizophrenic environment of cutthroat competition between developers simultaneously trying to out-innovate and out-clone each other.

The basic development method has been analyzing existing games, identifying their basic components, and then creating prototypes that combined elements in new ways in order to create a moderately innovative matching tile game.

Takeaway: The key finding here for our audience is that the actual historical origins and influences of casual games developers are less important than the ones that the players come to the game with. The innovations that will be legible to these players depend strongly on their experience with specific previous games.