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.
As of January 1st 2008, I have started in my new job as a video game researcher and lecturer at the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab at MIT.
I am really looking forwards to working here with a great group of new colleagues and students.
Here is my new office sign:
From Magical Wasteland via GameSetWatch, this funnily and unfairly entirely sums up all game industry keynotes of 2007:
*
1. Let’s think about the future for a second. You probably don’t understand the kids that make up the bulk of our audience, but I do. I call them the network MySpace remix 3.0 social generation. Unlike any other people before them, young people today like to interact with each other. They also like music. YouTube is the perfect example of whatever point it is I’m making. Everything should be online and customizable.
2. Iteration is the key. Everything is about iteration. How many times can I use iteration in this talk? Iteration, iteration, iteration. This is how you make good games: by iterating.
The more you iterate, it doesn’t matter what direction you’re going in or what you actually do, as long as you get the number of iterations up. This process (iteration) is what turns all the bad stuff into the good stuff. Here’s a graph showing game quality and number of iterations approaching infinity together. This graph proves my point.
3. For our last project we used Scrum, and boy, are we glad we did. There is no way anything we did would have been possible without it. What is Scrum, you ask? It’s a set of new terminology for things that already happen when groups of people work together. For example, instead of a “meeting,” you have a “Scrum,” and so on.
You should use Scrum too, since it will solve all your problems. If I’ve piqued your interest, sign-up sheets for my specially discounted seminars on Scrum can be found clipped to the bottom of your conference program.
4. The game we made was great – because we’re great. We are just a group of awesome people. We never crunch, and we go to the beach every other Friday to play volleyball. Even those times when we did crunch, we had delicious catered meals. And there was one time we got a masseuse in the office. Awesome. Yes, our studio’s amazing array of perks and benefits keep us happy and doing our best work all the time.
We have a ton of open positions we need to fill very quickly so please send us your resume as soon as you can.
5. The game industry is in trouble. We can’t keep doing what we’ve been doing before. We need to do this other thing, which is the thing that I’m doing. I said this last year but none of you came with me. Well, this time I really mean it.
The Hypermedialab in Tampere, Finland has put out an amazingly thorough report on Finnish gaming habits.
And lots more.
I guess the cliché is that winter is so dark in the Nordic region that we have nothing to do but play games or code. I would really love to see comparable data from other countries.
The Danish Poker Association is quite disappointed: A lower court had decided that Poker was a game of skill, and hence not subject to gambling laws, but a higher court has now overturned the ruling, deciding that poker is a game of chance (article in Danish). The ruling is likely to continue upwards into the judicial system.
The upshot is that it is illegal to arrange Poker tournaments involving money in Denmark. The underlying legal issue, to the extent of my understanding, is that it is illegal (outside casinos) to play non-skill games for money, so whether a game is considered a game skill is pretty important.
The court even had a mathematician testify that skill is important in Poker, making the ruling even more absurd. I also severely doubt anyone who has actually played poker believes that skill plays no role.
It seems to me that much confusion comes from the dichotomy I used in the headline – skill or chance. In actuality, those are not opposites, but a game can have smaller or bigger amounts of chance, and involve smaller or bigger amounts of skill.
Roger Caillois (who I like to blame) is partially guilty of the same confusion since he has separate categories for agon (contest) and alea (chance).
Here is the interesting logical mind-trick: Chance and skill do not in any way preclude each other, but their absences preclude each other. Games can have any amount of skill and chance at the same time, but you cannot imagine a game with neither skill nor chance, as that would mean the outcome was always the same and hence it would not be a game in any meaningful sense.
*Update.
The Economist has an article on the rise of Poker, including its status as skill/chance in the US.
The skill-versus-luck debate has crackled back to life because of the passage of a law last year, sneakily tacked on to a port-security bill, which sought to bolster existing legislation against internet wagering by blocking Americans’ access to accounts that can be used to gamble online. All games that are “predominantly” subject to chance were covered by the ban. Poker was included. For reasons best explained by lobbyists, horse racing, fantasy sports and lotteries were exempted. This discrepancy had already landed America in hot water at the World Trade Organisation, thanks to a case brought by tiny Antigua, home to several online gambling sites.
America’s Department of Labour has given a nod to the element of skill, in some eyes, by last year recognising “professional poker player” as an official occupation. Courts, however, tend to view poker as a game of chance. That, Mr Lederer is convinced, is only because the opposing arguments have been botched at the bench.
With the announcement of XNA 2.0, Microsoft is hinting that they will, eventually, in some form, open the 360 to allow developers to distribute their XNA games. (Currently you can only share developments with other subscribers to the creator’s club, so it’s pretty dead as a platform.)
Notice how weighted his words are… Hint, hint, but not saying anything definite. (So we can try to divine the intentions while also waiting for Nintendo to deliver on their Wiiware promises.)
Finally, Satchell said that next year Microsoft will announce full details on, and its vision for, opening XNA creations to the community. “Think of it as publishing channel for the community,” saying when launched it will create “a revolution for the industry.”
Satchell referred to development of XNA as coming in three tiers — first with the initial release of the package and the Creators Club, now opening up Live networking, and finally providing the publishing channel. “Nobody’s done it,” he said, “we’re really opening up the console.”
Asked just how much Microsoft would be managing the service, or if it would be opening it up entirely as a true YouTube, Satchell said full details would have to wait until the new year, but offered, “We want it to be open so people can participate in it, and we want to stay true to principle of owning your own IP. There’s going to be some innovations in what we do that bridge the gap between fully free for all and completely managed portfolio.”
He similarly said no announcements could yet be made on whether the service would allow players to freely download community creations, or whether it would continue the Creators Club scheme it currently employs.
But again, what is holding them back? As long as the platform holders get a slice of any income, why not let developers be free to publish whatever they want?
Is it video game exceptionalism – that no platform holder want seedy, bad, controversial content on their platform for fear that it might hurt it? (Even though seedy, bad, controversial content works great for the sales of books, CDs, and DVDs.)
I posted some time ago on the difference between playing and performing music, with Guitar Hero being an example of how you perform the role of being a guitar player rather than actually playing guitar. (Slash professes to not being that good at Guitar Hero).
In Rock Band things are a little different: Drumming is actual drumming (your physical actions map to being an actual drummer), singing is actual singing … but the guitar is still about performing the role of a guitar player.
Why is that?
It seems to boil down to the different parts to play – almost everybody can sing, if badly.
It is very simple to be a bad rock drummer (bass drum, snare drum, bass drum, snare…) that still fills the part of a drummer, if badly.
By comparison, guitars have pretty high barriers to entry – if the song has a fast riff, you can’t get away with only playing every other chord. And then even playing guitar chords takes a while to learn (and makes your fingers hurt).
It’s the instrument. (Perhaps that was obvious, I just needed to write it down.)
In my previous post on Half-Life 2: Episode Two stats, I had overlooked that the Episode One stats have been available for a long time.
The big question: What is the dominant way of experiencing this game? The answer is a bit convoluted:
Games Completed (38.84%)
Our data indicates that while 50.64% of the players have reached the final map (as noted in the Highest Map Played graph below), only roughly half of those players have completed the game. This leads us to believe that either players are quitting before they see the credits, or there is a bug in how we collect this data.
So we don’t really know.
The interesting definitional issue is this: When do we know that someone will not complete a game? Personally, I have given up on very few games, so I have hundreds or more likely thousands of games that I am still playing on some level, even if I haven’t touched them for decades. I will finish Elite as soon as I get the time, I promise!
So it continues: The brouhaha around Jeff Gerstmann’s firing from Gamespot, possibly due to him giving negative reviews to games from major Gamespot advertisers.
I’ll just point to Joystiq’s link collection of the day.
Or actually – whatever did happen, it’s not a bad thing that everybody is reminded of the potentially problematic relation between advertising revenue and game review scores – and the backlash this can inspire if not handled properly.
And one of the Joystiq links discusses how the Game Rankings average has become a benchmark – but while we can all agree how silly it is, it’s hard not to care about the numbers (80% being the lower threshold it seems). Isn’t it?