Category: games

2010 Nuovo Jury Releases Finalist Statement

I am a little late in posting, but here is the finalist statement from the Independent Games Festival Nuovo Award (on which I served as a juror).

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Alongside the announcement of 2010 Independent Games Festival finalists, the IGF Nuovo Award jury has revealed its finalists for the $2,500 award, which is intended to “honor abstract, shortform, and unconventional game development which advances the medium and the way we think about games.” The Award, which was won (when called the Innovation/Nuovo Award) by Jason Rohrer’s acclaimed abstract multiplayer title Between in 2009, allows more esoteric ‘art games’ to compete on their own terms alongside longer-form indie titles. For the 2010 Independent Games Festival, the IGF Main Competition judges, numbering over 160 in total, recommended games entered into the IGF Main Competition this year to be considered for this award.

But a separate panel of notable game and art world figures — spanning previous IGF winner Rohrer, Area/Code’s Frank Lantz, N+ co-creator Mare Sheppard, EA division head and art-game creator Rod Humble, and more, have decided the finalists (and will decide the winner) for the Nuovo Award in discussion-based, juried form — mirroring similar, artistically important awards in other industries. All five Nuovo finalists will exhibit their games at GDC 2010 in San Francisco in the IGF Pavilion, and a Nuovo Award winner will be revealed at the IGF Awards Ceremony on the evening of March 11th, 2010.

The Nuovo Jury’s finalist statement discussing and justifying their picks – also adding a number of ‘honorable mentions’ for games that were just outside the finalist selection, but had fascinating characteristics – reads as follows:

“To start, we wanted to thank everyone who submitted their games to the Independent Games Festival this year. All of you were in consideration for this award, and there were over one hundred games recommended to the Nuovo Jury by the Main Competition judges as being potentially worthy to be a Nuovo finalist. This shows the breadth of talent out there in independent games right now, and especially those looking to push the boundaries and produce new ideas and new concepts.

The Nuovo Jury has selected games that deliver two kinds of ‘newness’: Firstly, does the game have a new game design mechanic, element, or idea that makes they jury think: ‘Wow, I really haven’t seen that done before in this way’. Secondly, does the game make the jury feel something new — something that a game rarely or never has, emotionally or otherwise?

With this in mind, we discussed the games that were most-recommended by Main Competition judges, as well as putting forward our own picks from IGF entrants. We have decided (via jury voting) on the following finalists for the 2010 IGF Nuovo Award, each of which will receive all-access GDC 2010 tickets and the opportunity to exhibit their game in the IGF Pavilion there:

Finalists

– Today I Die (Daniel Benmergui)
The jury was struck by the evocative game mechanics of of discovery and exploration in Daniel’s experimental Flash game Today I Die. The game uses words and poetry as a gameplay mechanic in striking, emotion-inducing ways, and while short in length, leaves a lasting impression.

– A Slow Year (Ian Bogost)
This newly coded set of mini-game experiences — made for the distinctly retro Atari 2600 console — consists of “slow-moving meditations on time and attention”. And A Slow Year made it to its Nuovo finalist position due to its charmingly retro art and thoughtful, deliberate, determined gameplay, which a number of jurors found relaxing and genuinely evocative.

– Tuning (Cactus)
The jury found praise for Cactus’ platform game thanks to its bold style and its “uncompromising exploration” of almost psychedelic abstraction. Although the title can be frustrating as times, one juror noted that “you have to see the visual distortions and transformations as gameplay”, and under that lens, the game seems even more charming.

– Closure (Closure Team)
Tremendously evocative in its audio and visuals, and with some genuinely new gameplay concepts that come with the complete absence (or presence) of light, Closure was praised by the Nuovo jury for twinning robust gameplay with rarefied atmosphere and a fully realized game world.

– Enviro-Bear 2000 (Justin Smith)
Enviro-Bear 2000 blossomed from its ‘constrained competition’ origins to a Nuovo finalist, thanks to two things that struck the jury. Of course, the first is the joyfully off the wall, grin-inducing concept and art direction. But the second is the genuinely novel gameplay idea of having a ‘time management’ approach to limited player controls (steer or eat fish or attack badger?).

Honorable Mentions

There were a number of titles that were recommended or advocated for by judges and received multiple votes in our final tally, but did not make the Finalist list due to insufficient votes. Nonetheless, we’re happy to mention and recommend these titles as Nuovo ‘honorable mentions’, that those interested in alternative independent games should certainly check out:

– Hazard: The Journey Of Life – a genuinely interesting philosophy-based abstract first-person action game mod.
– Trauma – an atmospheric photo-based evolution of the adventure game with gestural elements.
– Fig. 8 – in which you ride a bike through technical diagrams, with clever wheel-based gameplay elements.
– Lose/Lose – as you destroy aliens, you destroy files on your hard drive. Controversial, but still thought-provoking?
– Flywrench – extremely tricky, rewarding vector-ish art game with a cunning central gameplay mechanic.
– Art Of Crime – a semi-procedural detection game with an interesting, alternative illustrative style.

Clint Hocking, Eric Zimmerman, Eddo Stern, Frank Lantz, Rod Humble, Jason Rohrer, Carl Goodman, Marcin Ramocki, Mare Sheppard, Jesper Juul, Simon Carless. [IGF 2010 Nuovo jury]

游戏、玩家、世界: 对游戏本质的探讨 (The Game, the Player, the World translated to Chinese)

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.

Speaking at USC, Los Angeles January 13

Time: Wednesday, January 13, 6-8 pm
Location: USC’s Robert Zemeckis Center for Digital Arts (RZC)
Room 201 Zemeckis Media Lab (ZML)

The Rise of Casual Games

It seems like only yesterday that video games were considered the province of males between 12 and 35. Yet with the launch of the Nintendo Wii, with the proliferation of casual games in browsers, with music games and cell phone games, video games seem to have broken out of their cultural niche. In this talk I will present a short history of the rise of casual games, and discuss its implications for game developers, player, and for the future of video games.

The Art History of Games Symposium

Register now for The Art History of Games, a symposium and exhibition jointly organized by SCAD-Atlanta and the Georgia Institute of Technology
February 4-6, 2010
Rich Auditorium at the High Museum of Art
1280 Peachtree St N.E., Atlanta GA 30308
The Art History of Games is a three-day public symposium in which members of the fields of game studies, art history and related areas of cultural studies gather to investigate games as an art form.
Speakers include:
  • John Romero, designer of Doom and co-founder of Gazillion Entertainment
  • Christiane Paul, New School professor and Whitney Museum adjunct curator
  • Jesper Juul, author of A Casual Revolution
  • Brenda Brathwaite, creator of Vanguard Award-winning Train
  • Frank Lantz, designer of Drop7 and Parking Wars
  • And more…
Attendees are also invited to attend the premiere of three commissioned art games by Jason Rohrer, Tale of Tales, and Nathalie Pozzi and Eric Zimmerman, at Kai Lin Art (800 Peachtree St. N.E.).
Early registration ends Thusday, January 14: $15 for SCAD and Georgia Tech students, $25 for academics and students from other institutions, and $40 for the general public.
For more information, please visit http://www.arthistoryofgames.com or contact arthistoryofgames@scad.edu.

Casual Revolution Review Collection

I will start blogging about something else than the book soon, promise!

  • “Phenomenal”.
    –Jamin Brophy Warren in Slate.
  • “Crowds mobbed Nintendo’s booth, clamoring to play it, rushing passed the fancier Xbox and Playstation demonstrations. It was the first sign that something was fundamentally shifting in the videogame industry. Jesper Juul’s “A Casual Revolution” explains what happened, and why.”
    –Jonathan V. Last, Wall Street Journal.
  • “A trenchant look at the rise of casual gaming”.
    -Keith Stuart, The Guardian Gamesblog.
  • “A Casual Revolution will be valuable for academics and those in industry, and will help keep the sun shining on games.”
    –Nick Montfort, author of Twisty Little Passages and Racing the Beam.

Comments on Edge Review of A Casual Revolution

Edge magazine reviewed A Casual Revolution in their Christmas 2009 issue. Here are my comments on the review.

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First, I’d like to thank Edge for an in-depth review of my book A Casual Revolution in the 2009 Christmas issue [E209]. Apart from pointing out some errors that I should have caught when proofreading and which are duly noted on the book’s website, Edge raises the important question about whether we should discuss the stereotypes of “casual” and “hardcore” at all. As I read it, Edge resents the terms “casual” and “hardcore” as such, maybe making the point that more simplistic stereotypes are not what we need at this point. If that’s the case, then we are clearly on the same page. In the book I trace the history of the hardcore/casual terms in order to build a more detailed framework for discussing the interplay between games, players and developers.

In this framework, casual/hardcore is not an either/or question but consists of the four subcomponents of fiction, game knowledge required, time investment, and difficulty. This allows me to talk about how a game design can be more or less open to different types of playing. You cannot, of course, reduce all of game design to four components, but the challenge of this book was to hit a sweet spot between oversimplifying and making a model so complex that no one could remember it. In short this was my choice for how to structure the book.

As the Edge review seems to show, and as is documented in the developer interviews in the book, no one really likes the casual/hardcore categories. The challenge then is that these categories play a very real role in the development and consumption of video games, meaning that even if we accept a more nuanced framework for talking about games and players, we still need to refer to casual/hardcore to be able to talk about current developments. For example, I compare the box art of Gears of War and Wii Sports (not Bejeweled as stated in the review) to show that the games called “casual” tend to have positive fictions. This is a generalization that makes it possible to talk about casual games and players. As noted, fiction does not apply to an abstract game like Solitaire. The point is that once we have a framework for talking about such issues, we get the opportunity to discuss why a given game doesn’t cleanly match the categories.

Another choice I made was to use the personal stories of players and developers to build the arguments in the book. I think this adds some readability and perspectives that would have been missing if the book was entirely driven by statistics (which would have created text like this: “during the 1990’s there was an 84% increase in funds allocated to playtesting”).

The review taught me that I may have underestimated the extent to which referencing common terms like casual and hardcore has the downside of bringing all their problematic meanings right back into the reading. That’s a valuable insight, but I still think it is worthwhile to bring the stereotypes into play and to examine what is behind the stereotypes. My aim from the start was to make the book readable by telling the history of casual games by way of concrete player and developer stories, and to propose a way of talking about those pesky terms, casual and hardcore, without oversimplifying and without ignoring the ongoing discussions by players and developers, and by publications such as Edge.

Sincerely,

-Jesper Juul

Video Games are becoming more like Movies

No, not in the way you think. The point concerns the relation between the connoisseur and the broader audience. My comment in Mike Snider’s USA Today review of 2009 in video games:

“You are getting more of a rift between traditional (console) games and what people are actually playing in broad numbers,” Juul says, with tens of millions playing casual online games.

“Video games are becoming normal and more like literature and film. You might have these connoisseurs who favor certain ‘novels,’ and they may be out of tune with what the broad population plays.”

Interviews with ex-hardcore Gamers

Kotaku is running some excerpts from the interview section of A Casual Revolution. In the book I interviewed players about how their playing habits had changed over time.

One of the player types I identified was the ex-hardcore player, whose life has become conducive to playing shorter-form casual games.

The excerpt also features interviews showing how new players came to play casual games.

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Type 2: These are the stories of players who used to intensely play video games and now have switched to more casual video games.

Survey response from a 40-year-old female player.

Q: Have your game-playing habits changed over the years?

A: I used to only play RPGs like Guild Wars but you can start and stop casual games easier during the day.

Survey response from a 42-year-old female player.

Q: Have your game-playing habits changed over the years?

A: Started with text-only adventure games, moved toward RPG video-games & simulations, most recently I stick with time management-type casual games.

Survey response from a 30-year-old female player.

Q: Have your game-playing habits changed over the years?

A: Having a baby really changed my game playing habits. When she needs my attention the game must stop. This is why World of Warcraft has been hard to play as of late.

Read more here.