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.
From the When 2.0 event, News. com has a video clip of Will Wright discussing games, time, and phase spaces.
The clip makes me want to see the beginning and end of the talk, but interesting nevertheless.
It’s is pretty clear that Will Wright thinks very much in terms of systems (high SQ), the surprising part is that he was able to pull off a very human-centered, emotional game like the Sims.
Lately I’ve been working with Diginet and IGDA Denmark to set up a game jam in Copenhagen.
So I am happy to tell you that Nordic Game Jam 2006 will run January 27th-29th 2006 at the IT University of Copenhagen.
The basic format is that you can sign up as a team or individually, and that between Friday and Sunday you have to make a game prototype on the theme of collaborative multiplayer. Games are then demonstrated on Sunday afternoon with panel and participant judging.
Compared to the Indie Game Jam, this game jam is focused more on group work, and is also technologically agnostic, encouraging people to work with whatever tools they prefer.
The event is for game developers, students, researchers, and everyone in between. Around 40 participants in all.
Read more and sign up here.
If you haven’t played Rag Doll Kung Fu, you really should.
Not that it’s the greatest game ever made, and the controls (dragging the rag doll character around) can be infuriating. Yet it has some strong things going for it: a unique lo-fi aesthetic with deliberately unconvincing cut-scenes, and low-budget but super-cool 2d graphics. And it’s being distributed online via Steam for $15.
Gamasutra has an interview with Mark Healey, the Rag Doll Kung Fu developer. (Registration required.)
GS: So we’re talking a zero budget for the cut scenes?
MH: Yeah, basically. We ended up spending about fifty pounds for some plastic swords and headbands. We borrowed a video camera and just improvised. It was just a couple a friends who decided to make a stupid kung-fu film. There was never any plan. It’s amazing it came out as well as it did.
I think the big news is that Rag Doll Kung Fu really hits the sweet spot as an indie game: It was developed on a small budget, it is cheap, and at the same time it has a specific feel, a lo-fi aesthetic that you can not get from big budget titles. This is the kind of indie game we have been waiting for for a long time.
I am happy to announce that my book, Half-Real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds has now been published by MIT Press.
Half-Real is an attempt at creating a basic theory of video games: In the book I discuss what video games are and how they relate to non-digital games, how players learn to use a game, how players imagine the world of a game, and why video games are fun.
Half-real is a book on video game theory, but it is generally readable. As for method, the book is an eclectic mix of theories on games, film and literary theory, computer science, and psychology.
In addition to the introduction, the book has five parts:
Classic game model: Chapter 2 presents a classic game model, whose contents are inspired by a number of previous writers on games. The model describes how games have been constructed in a specific historical period, while allowing for the possibility that games can change and develop from an older model.
Rules: Chapter 3 is inspired mostly by discussions in the game development community, and attempts to apply some terminological and methodological stringency to the discussion of rules in games. In order to describe games as rule-based systems, I draw on computer science, on the sciences of complexity, and on economical game theory. In order to describe the player’s use and experience of the rules of a game, I draw on Marcel Danesi’s writings on puzzles (2002), some game design theory, and some cognitive science.
Fiction: The goal of chapter 4 is to provide an account of the fictional aspect of games, but an account that covers the spectrum from abstract games, to games with incoherent fictional worlds to games with detailed fictional worlds. To be able to discuss this spectrum, the theory of fictional worlds is employed.
Rules & Fiction: Chapter 5 is the synthesis of the two perspectives of rules and fiction and discusses their interactions by way of multiple detailed examples.
Chapter 6 sums up the points of the book and provides some further perspectives.
The book is based on numerous game examples, with more than 100 screenshots from the past 40 years of video games.
The book’s companion website is up at http://www.half-real.net.
The website also contains A dictionary of video game theory, an expanding dictionary of video game theory terms.
Though Half-Real shares its title with my PhD work, this book is brand new, all together nicer, more readable, more fun, and just better.
A lot of work went into this book, so I hope you like it!
Next speaking engagement is December 3rd at DAC 2005 in Copenhagen: A panel with Sara Mosberg, Espen Aarseth, and Staffan Bj?rk called “Gameplay: The Great Debate“.
On December 5th, I will be keynoting at the Serious Games Summit Europe in Lyon. This talk will be about “A New Kind of Game: Broadening Our Idea of What Games Can Be“. See you!
I have a new “hardcore” column up at the DiGRA website today. Called Goals and Life Itself, it tries to point at some of the problems and fault lines I see in video game studies today, and does so by discussing goals, vitalism, and genre theory (in a marginally provocative way, was my intention):
A short theory of goals: You are playing a card game with some friends. A few rounds into the game the group begins arguing. One player claims that the goal of the game is to gain as many tricks as possible; another claims that the goal is to avoid getting any tricks.
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One of the recurrent events the past few years has been the researcher who questions “formalist” theories of games in favor of “in-context” or “situated” methods. This is a special position, where the speaker argues that other researchers are forcing rigid theories upon a complex world, while the speaker asserts that he or she is studying actual game playing.
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This type of assertion is constantly repeated in video game studies: Most obviously in an occasional skepticism towards general theories of games in favor of localized studies, but it is also present when the game developer claims to have a perfect understanding of actual games, as opposed to the researchers locked in their ivory towers, away from the real world. The outlines of the stance can be seen when researchers reject theories from other fields in favor of their own brand new theories of games, or when yet other researchers claim to emphasize the warmth of the story compared to the coldness of the rules. The problem is that this never ends – anybody can reject other theories as cold, stale, and rigid, while declaring their own to be the real thing, a true reflection of what games are really like, of actual game playing.
The New York Times has a reasonably good article on academic programs teaching video games.
The headline of this post comes from Jack Emmert of Cryptic studios (City of Heroes).
“This whole idea of teaching game design is a fabrication,” Mr. Emmert said. “I’m a serious academic, and what is the actual skill that they’re teaching? If you’re not teaching a quantifiable skill, then you are teaching an opinion. Making games is an art form. You need to understand the technical side, but I loathe any attempt to teach game design as an academic discipline.”
As someone who teaches game design, I find this to be complete … fabrication. How exactly did Emmert reach the conclusion that we are not teaching the students any (quantifiable) skills. I’d like to know.
In the article, Tracy Fullerton sets the record straight:
“It reminds me that there was a moment when film studies really took off and the guys at the studios were like, ‘Who are these Spielbergs and Lucases and Coppolas coming out of these film schools with these crazy ideas?’ They’ll come around.”
Anandtech already has an article on how to disassemble your 360. Not because we can, but because we absolutely have to do it right now and nobody can stop us!!!!