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.
OK, here are some pics from the defense:
Last slide – the main points of the dissertation.
The committee: Brian Sutton-Smith, Peter Bøgh Andersen, and Marie-Laure Ryan.
Hard questions.
But actually all the answers are in this book.
At the blackboard with Marie-Laure Ryan: When do rules cue fiction and when does fiction cue rules?
A brand new Ph.D. – I do look sort of happy.
Yesterday, I “successfully defended my dissertation”, so I am now a Ph.D..
I think it went as well as you can reasonably hope for, though it’s amazing how quickly 4 hours can pass. (Rumor has it that the people in my family who are not into computer games experienced time as passing rather slowly, so it goes.)
And then big party afterwards, slept late.
The people at the game research center gave me an Xbox. I’ve resisted the Xbox for a while, among other things because it’s so damn big, but now I have the big three (+ Dreamcast) all lined up.
Jesper’s law: You know you’re in the right line of work when the gift from your colleagues is a game console.
Thanks to everybody who made this possible, the friends who supported me in different ways, and to all the people who provided interesting discussion and comments during the process. You rule! Game on.
Don’t know why I didn’t post it earlier, but here it is.
The defense is January 16th, 13:00 hours in room 0:19 at the IT University of Copenhagen, Glentevej 67, 2400 Copenhagen NV.
This dissertation aims to provide the basic components of a theory of video games. By video games I mean games played on personal computers, consoles, and other games played using computer processing and a video display.
The dissertation argues that there is a basic affinity between computers and games: computers and computer processing are commonly used for playing games, and the modern digital computer works as an enabler for games in the way that the printing press or cinema has worked as enablers for storytelling.
The central theme of the dissertation is the examination of video games as a constantly evolving tension between the rules and fictional worlds. The dissertation describes video games as two rather different things at the same time: video games are real in that they consist of real rules that players actually interact with; but fictional in that the worlds they project are just that, fictional. In this perspective, to playing a video game is to be engaged in the interaction with real rules while imagining a fictional world, and to design a video game is to design a set of rules as well as a fictional world.
Chapter 2 on the classic game model examines a number of previous game definitions in order to provide a new definition of games, a definition that describes games as working on three different levels: the level of the game itself, as a set of rules; the level of the player’s relation to the game; and the level of the relationship between the activity of playing the game and the rest of the world. The model is classic in the sense that almost all traditional games fit squarely inside this model, but the later part of the 20th century has seen a number of game forms – including some video games – that have developed beyond the classic model.
Additionally, the model does not tie games to any specific medium, and games are therefore transmedial in the same way that narrativity is transmedial. Video games are therefore best seen as a continuation of a long history of games, but video games have revolutionized games primarily by letting the computer handle the rules, thereby freeing players to focus on strategy and fictional worlds.
Chapter 3 on rules examines games as rule-based systems. I argue that rules in games offer affordances as well as limitations, and that the rule-based nature of games provides an explanation of the affinity between computers and games. This affinity extends to the theoretical realm in that many aspects of the rules of games can be understood through the lens of computer science. Games are basically state machines that proceed according to rules that have an algorithmic character: the rules of a game are designed to be unambiguous, definite and above discussion. I explain that this happens through a process of decontextualization, where each rule also includes a specification about what aspects of the game are relevant to the rule.
The dissertation argues that the rules of games produce an apparent paradox: while the rules of games are algorithmic, the enjoyment of a game depends on these rules presenting challenges that cannot be solved algorithmically. This takes different forms in different games but we can outline two basic ways in which games are structured and provide challenges for players: that of emergence (a number of simple rules combining to form interesting variations) and that of progression (separate challenges presented serially).
This leads to a player-oriented account of what it is to play a game: the player of a game will at any given point have a specific repertoire of strategies and methods for playing the game. Part of the attraction of a good game is that it continually challenges and makes new demands on the player’s repertoire.
Chapter 4 on fiction provides an account of the fictional aspect of games, 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 to describe how the fictional world of a game can be optional for the player.
It is argued that the majority of games contain incoherent worlds: worlds that cannot fully be imagined due to incoherencies, but where the player accepts incoherence as a reflection of the rules of the game.
The importance of the game world varies on a scale from the highly replayable multi-player game (the emergence game) where the player gradually ceases to imagine the game world to, at the other extreme, the "complete-once" adventure game (the progression game), where the player only faces each setting once and therefore is more likely to take the fictional world at face value. A video game provides the player with the opportunity to imagine a fictional world. The player’s experience of the game world does not appear to require much consistency – the world of a game is rather something that the player can choose to imagine for a shorter or longer period of time, or not at all.
Chapter 5 on rules and fiction is the synthesis of the two previous chapters, and discusses the complex relationship between rules and fiction. While rules also construct the fictional world of a game, the fictional world also builds the player’s expectation of the rules of the game.
Rules and fiction rarely match completely: in most cases, the fictional world of the game will be larger and more detailed than what is implemented in the rules, but mismatches between rules and fictions can also generate positive effects, working as a way of playing with the player’s expectations, as a way of creating parody, and finally as a way of foregrounding the game as a real-world activity.
Methodologically, the dissertation is based upon an eclectic combination of theories and methods including literary theory, film theory, computer science, sciences of complexity, economic game theory, game design literature, and some psychology.
Some readings:
The new Game Studies issue #5 is out, with pieces by Edward Castronova, Gonzalo Frasca, Shuen-shing Lee, Laurie Taylor, and Jan Van Looy. I haven’t been that active in relation to GS lately, having been engaged in other business, but I am working on getting the reviews up and running again.
A somewhat old link, James Der Derian’s article on the description of war as a game in relation to the Iraq war.
My game definition also discusses this very briefly – I think Der Derian overstates the case a bit, but it’s certainly possible to explain why war is often described as a game: Because it shares 5 of the 6 features of my game definition: 1) Rules, 2) Variable and quantifiable Outcome, 3) Value assigned to outcomes, 4) Player Effort, 5) Player attached to Outcome. But NOT 6) Negotiable/optional consequences.
And a somewhat overlooked book, Marcel Danesi’s The Puzzle Instinct discusses the history of puzzles from ancient Egypt to the present day. I would have wished that it mentioned video games, but it’s a valuable book anyway.
Tic Tac Toe (noughts and crosses) is always such a nice example.
I was thinking about strategies and decided to implement a program that plays Tic Tac Toe according to John von Neumann’s minimax. This is a kind of meta-strategy that can be used for playing any game: Always chose the move that will minimize the maximum damage that your opponent can do to you.
The algorithm works recursively by looking for the move that will let an optimally playing opponent inflict the least damage. The opponent’s strategy is calculated by way of the same algorithm, and so on. This means that on the first move, the computer investigates the entire game tree – it considers every single possible Tic Tac Toe game and then choses randomly among the best (least dangerous) moves.
Have a go at http://www.half-real.net/tictactoe/
My Ph.D. defense has been set to take place on January 16th.
The committee consists of Peter Bøgh Andersen, Marie-Laure Ryan, and Brian Sutton-Smith.
Exciting, exciting, exciting.
Christie’s in New York is auctioning a 2nd century ad Roman dice that looks suspiciously like an RPG d20 dice:
[Link courtesy of Philip Tan.]
Does anybody know the history of the d20? I was pretty convinced that it was of newer origin.
(Yes, I know, I placed this in the “games” category even though I claim that RPGs aren’t really games.)
I guess the previous post wasn’t quite clear, but the point was simply that there is a historically dominant way of creating “games” – this includes a final, quantifiable outcome. MMORPGs deviate from this classic game model in that there is no final outcome. The following statement is therefore true:
MMORPGs deviate from the classic way of making games. Whether we want to call them “games” depends on whether we want to keep the word “game” as is or expand it in order to include “games” that do not have final outcomes.
There is no remotely objective way of making this decision, and this is why I made a game definition that I call “the classic game model” because it is a historically dominant way of creating “games”, but a model that is now being challenged by things such as MMORPGs. By doing this I hoped to shift the focus from the sequence of letters “g-a-m-e” to a question of what we mean by “game”.
That was the idea, anway.