Category: games

Five years of The Ludologist

Today marks the fifth anniversary of this blog. Who would have thought?

Some little known information:

  • Blogging continues to be fun. I never had the kind of blog crisis that I hear about. The frequency varies, but there are always more things to blog.
  • The blog title is somewhat tongue in cheek, and perhaps always a little too close to Gonzalo Frasca’s Ludology.org blog.
  • The title should suggest a magazine for “ludologists” the same way there is a magazine called The Economist. It was not to suggest that I am the ludologist.
  • The most popular post ever was the one with Spore screenshots.
  • The description “My name is Jesper Juul, and I am a ludologist” is supposed to sound like Alcoholics Anonymous. I liked the idea that it would be something you would be somewhat embarrassed to admit to being, but also something you could never quite escape from.
  • Until October 2007 I was running the blog on a Linux server of which I was the administrator. Now I can’t be bothered with that sort of thing.
  • I am blogging this in Singapore.
  • Video game studies are progressing nicely in my opinion, but the long tradition of play research seems to be constantly ignored.
  • It’s official: The new conflict in video game studies is between those who study players and those who study games.
  • The magic circle is for real.

Thanks for listening!

Here is the first post.

Ball Games are Dangerous

Especially in the US there is a trend towards banning school recess or at least strongly controlling what games children are allowed to play (NY Times article.) Perhaps because I am Scandinavian I find it horrifying that somebody would prevent children from playing. At the same time, the argument is complicated to make: Children are sometimes physically and emotionally hurt during play, try arguing against this with the big-picture viewpoint that it is good for their development and happiness in the long term (though I am pretty sure this is the case).

MONTVILLE, Conn. — Children at the Oakdale School here in southeastern Connecticut returned this fall to learn that their traditional recess had gone the way of the peanut butter sandwich and the Gumby lunchbox.

No longer could they let off their youthful energy — pent up from hours of long division — by cavorting outside for 22 minutes of unstructured play, or perhaps with a vigorous game of tag or dodgeball. Such games had been virtually banned by the principal, Mark S. Johnson, along with kickball, soccer and other “body-banging” activities, as he put it, where knees — and feelings — might get bruised.

Instead, children are encouraged to jump rope, play with Hula Hoops or gently fling a Frisbee. Balls are practically controlled substances, parceled out under close supervision by playground monitors.

The article does not mention the obvious gender perspective – it is usually the play activities of boys that are controlled.

For further reading – Helen B. Schwartzman’s article “Child-structured play” in The World of Play (1983) is an overview of studies of children’s unsupervised play.

Keynoting at the Game Philosophy Conference in Potsdam

This week I am keynoting at the Philosophy of Computer Games conference in Potsdam, May 8-10.

My talk is Who Made the Magic Circle? Seeking the Solvable Part of the Game-Player Problem.

If the early days of game studies concerned the issue of games and stories, recent discussions appear to be focused on the issue of games and players. This is a discussion of methods and of the object of study: Should we discuss players or should we discuss games? There are two possible perspectives on this: The common “segregationist” perspective implies that games are structures separate from players, structures that players can subsequently subvert. In this talk, I will make the case for an alternative “integrationist” perspective wherein games are chosen and upheld by players, and where players will happily create formal rule systems and boundaries around the playing activity.
I will argue that the question of games and players must therefore be decomposed into a set of smaller problems, each of which must be answered with different methods.

It’s a meta-talk! Looking forwards to the conference.

The use of video game metaphors in contemporary fiction

Not a survey of the question, but I have been reading Junot Díaz‘ The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, whose title character is, of course, a geek in every way. What is special is how this matter-of-factly spills into the narrator’s use of video game (and role-playing game)  references for illustration:

When the young Beli meets the man later known as The Gangster, she:

Shrieked: No. Me. Toques. … Then let him have it with a stack of cocktail napkins and almost a hundred plastic olive rapiers, and when those were done dancing on the tile she unleashed on of the great Street Fighter chain attacks of all time.

Later, when Trujillo is assasinated we hear:

Shot at twenty-seven times – what a Dominican Number – and suffering from four hundred hit points of damage, a mortally wounded Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina is said to have taken two steps towards his birthplace, San Cristóbal, for, as we know, all children, whether good or bad, eventually find their way home, but thinking better of it he turned back toward La Capital, to his beloved city, and fell for the last time.

We’ve won: get over it

Richard Bartle has a really amazingly wonderful opinion piece in the Guardian with the above title: We’ve won: get over it

I’m talking to you, you self-righteous politicians and newspaper columnists, you relics who beat on computer games: you’ve already lost. Enjoy your carping while you can, because tomorrow you’re gone.

According to the UK Statistics Authority, the median age of the UK population is 39. Half the people who live here were born in 1969 or later. The BBC microcomputer was released in 1981, when those 1969ers were 12. It was ubiquitous in schools; it introduced a generation to computers. It introduced a generation to computer games.

Half the UK population has grown up playing computer games. They aren’t addicted, they aren’t psychopathic killers, and they resent those boneheads – that’s you – who imply that they are addicted and are psychopathic killers.

Next year, that 1969 will be 1970; the year after, it’ll be 1971.

Dwell on this, you smug, out-of-touch, proud-to-be-innumerate fossils: half the UK population thinks games are fun and cool, and you don’t. Those born in 1990 get the vote this year.

(Via the Gamesnetwork list.)

Why Make Games That Make Stories?

I have just had a “riposte” published on EBR for the Second Person anthology.

In response to James Wallis’ article “Making Games That Make Stories”, my short piece is “Why Make Games That Make Stories?“:

Wallis makes a number of excellent observations about story-making games, the type of story-game where players explicitly create or co-create a story. He discusses story games that make only very broken stories and shows how the genre knowledge of players can be instrumental for actual game play.

So let me ask the “ludological” question: Why?

More

The Unreleased Hitchhiker’s Sequel – Released

Waxy.org has unexpectedly posted the story of the unknown sequel to the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy text adventure – Milliways.

You can even play it.

Hitchhiker’s is probably my favorite text adventure of all time and the blog post has comments from a large number of old Infocom employees. This is a special occasion.

Things you don’t see because you weren’t looking for them

It’s one of those things I have seen so many times in game designs, my own, those of students, or anybody else: In the middle of the screen, right in the players’ field of vision, you have placed a giant GUI element communicating something really important such as time left. And players don’t see it.

They don’t understand how much time is left, they are confused when time runs out. You ask them afterwards and they don’t quite believe that there even was a timer there.

This is a good example of that effect:


(Via Free Williamsburg.)