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.
Polygon has kindly published an excerpt from Handmade Pixels.
This is an excerpt from my history chapter, “A selective History of Independent Games”. My concern here is the prehistory of independent games and the central question: is independent game development new or old?
https://www.polygon.com/2019/11/15/20962788/indie-development-history-handmade-pixels
Proud to announce Real Games: What’s Legitimate and What’s Not in Contemporary Videogames by Mia Consalvo and Christopher Paul.
This is the 8th(!) book in the Playful Thinking series.
How we talk about games as real or not-real, and how that shapes what games are made and who is invited to play them.
In videogame criticism, the worst insult might be “That’s not a real game!” For example, “That’s not a real game, it’s on Facebook!” and “That’s not a real game, it’s a walking simulator!” But how do people judge what is a real game and what is not—what features establish a game’s gameness? In this engaging book, Mia Consalvo and Christopher Paul examine the debates about the realness or not-realness of videogames and find that these discussions shape what games get made and who is invited to play them.
Consalvo and Paul look at three main areas often viewed as determining a game’s legitimacy: the game’s pedigree (its developer), the content of the game itself, and the game’s payment structure. They find, among other things, that even developers with a track record are viewed with suspicion if their games are on suspect platforms. They investigate game elements that are potentially troublesome for a game’s gameness, including genres, visual aesthetics, platform, and perceived difficulty. And they explore payment models, particularly free-to-play—held by some to be a marker of illegitimacy. Finally, they examine the debate around such so-called walking simulators as Dear Esther and Gone Home. And finally, they consider what purpose is served by labeling certain games “real.”
For your theoretical processing: Loading journal, 12/20.
“The Father of Survival Horror”: Shinji Mikami, Procedural Rhetoric, and the Collective/Cultural Memory of the Atomic Bombs
Ryan Scheiding
Playing Past and Future: Counterfactual History in Fallout 4
Sam McCready
Taking College Esports Seriously
Nyle Sky Kauweloa, Jenifer Sunrise Winter>
“No one gives you a rulebook to raise a kid”: Adoptive Motherhood in The Walking Dead Video Game Series
Sarah Marie Stang
The Role of Architecture in Constructing Gameworlds. >Examples from Dishonored>
Anthony Zonaga, Marcus Carter
Buying Time: Capitalist Temporalities in Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp
Rainforest Scully-Blaker
Chris Richardson was kind enough to interview me about The Art of Failure for his This is not a Pipe podcast series.
https://www.tinapp.org/episodes/artoffailure
On the page I also mention some of the books that have inspired me as a writer.
Here are all the published papers from the 2019 DiGRA conference.
For Handmade Pixels, I did a rather extensive series of interviews with developers and festival organizers.
I was interested in general questions of how they framed their own role and how they saw the history of independent games, as well as in the concrete details of their development or festival-organizing practices.
I am dropping half the interviews now, and will publish the rest during the later months of 2019.
| Anna Anthropy
Game designer known for games such as Dys4ia, author of the Rise of the Videogame Zinesters manifesto. |
Bennett Foddy
Educator and game developer behind punishing games such as QWOP and Getting over it with Bennett Foddy. |
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| Bernie DeKoven
Pioneer in physical and communal games, including with the New Games movement. |
Celia Pearce
Educator, writer and game developer who has worked with games, VR, and multimedia since the late 1980s. |
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| David Kanaga
Composer and game developer of games such as Proteus and Oikospiel. |
Jason Rohrer
Independent game developer of games such as Passage and One Hour One Life. |
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| Jonathan Blow
Independent game developer, best known for Braid and The Witness. |
Kelly Wallick
Chairperson of the Independent Games Festival since 2015, CEO and founder of Indie MEGABOOTH. |
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| Tale of Tales
Belgium-based artist duo—Auriea Harvey and Michaël Samyn—known for their earlier work with experimental and experiential games such as The Path and The Graveyard. |
I am thrilled to announce that my new book, Handmade Pixels: Independent Video Games and the Quest for Authenticity, is out today on MIT Press.
How can a digital, immaterial, and globally distributed video game be authentic?
Video games are often dismissed as mere entertainment products created by faceless corporations. The last twenty years, however, have seen the rise of independent, or “indie,” video games: a wave of small, cheaply developed, experimental, and personal video games that react against mainstream video game development and culture. In Handmade Pixels, I examine the paradoxical ways developers, players, and festivals portray independent games as unique and hand-crafted objects in a globally distributed digital medium.
But where did independent games come from? Are they independent, just like cinema and music? I tell the history of independent video games from 1998-2018, and show the ongoing tensions around what indie games should be: Fun games? Games with political impact? Games representing diversity? Are indie games a movement for more democratic games, or do they speak only to a small audience of connoisseurs?
I describe all of this as a continued quest for authenticity – a quest to distance indie games from big publishers, from traditional game form, and from the lack of diversity in big-budget and casual games.
This is a trade book for a broad audience, but with theoretical underpinnings. It shows many strange new games in detail, it contains stories from my own participation in game jams and conferences, it is lavishly illustrated with more than 100 color pictures, and it features interviews with 21 developers and festival organizers (Jonathan Blow, Anna Anthropy, Bennett Foddy, Simon Carless, Nathalie Lawhead, and more).
The book took a lot of work, but it was also fun to write, as it gave me the chance to play hundreds of fascinating games, and to connect with interesting people in the independent game community. I hope you will enjoy it too.
Upcoming talks
I will be presenting the book at the NYU Game Center on October 10th, and at IndieCade in Los Angeles on October 12th.
Get the book
Handmade Pixels is available from (preferably?) your local independent bookstore, MIT Press, or any number of online retailers.
Official MIT Press site: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/handmade-pixels
My own book site, with the full developer interviews. https://www.jesperjuul.net/handmadepixels/
I will be presenting my new book, Handmade Pixels, on October 10th 2019 at the New York University Game Center.
“Join us to celebrate the launch of Jesper Juul’s latest publication, Handmade Pixels! Handmade Pixels: Independent Video games and the Quest for Authenticity is the new book (MIT Press) from video game researcher Jesper Juul, about the history and idea of independent video games.
Through examples of many interesting and strange games, and through audience participation, I will tell the history of independent games, and point to their ongoing challenges: What happens when players deny that an experimental independent game is a “real game”? Are experimental independent video games for everyone, or only for a small group of connoisseurs? Can we continue to make new video games by referring to older analog or digital visual styles? How can we create authenticity in a thoroughly digital world?”
Get your tickets here.