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.
Rob Alvarez Bucholska was kind enough to interview me for his Professor Game podcast.
The conversation touches on a lot of things I don’t usually talk about, like writing method, game design methods, and the relation between game-making and theory. I hope you enjoy it.
Direct link here.
I am happy to announce that Bernie De Koven’s final book is now out, courtesy of Holly Gramazio, Celia Pearce, and Eric Zimmerman. I contributed a small essay about what it was like to play with Bernie.
The Infinite Playground is available from MIT Press and elsewhere.
https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/infinite-playground
For your theoretical inspection: Game Studies 20/01.
This study investigated players’ emotional attachment to two non-player characters from BioWare’s Mass Effect trilogy. Qualitative analysis of forum posts found players expressed intense emotional attachments but from different viewpoints. These emotional attachments also influenced how players engaged with the game mechanics of Mass Effect 2.
Can science fiction stories imagine more just futures for disabled bodies? Turning away from a future where technology has eradicated disability, this article explores crip encounters in Mass Effect 1-3 and interrogates the complex relationships between technology, culture, and disability.
This article applies the concept of prosthetic memory to Mafia III in order to discuss the significance of both contexts of production and reception in determining memory-making potentials of historical digital games with attention to racialized oppression in and beyond games.
Why do soda machines appear so frequently in video games? What purposes do they serve? What values do they represent? This article examines how virtual soda machines help anchor video games in a world we recognize as similar to our own, while simultaneously reinforcing the consumerist values of modern capitalism.
This article interrogates how war and play are smeared together in Battlefield 1, the first AAA game set in World War I. It advances liminality as a conceptual framework to investigate the ambiguities and contradictions that emerge in the tension between the history, memory and cultural meanings of World War I and the game’s ludic qualities.
For your theoretical dissection, Game Studies journal issue 19/02.
Game Studies: The International Journal of Computer Games Research is out now (Volume 19, Issue 2).
Editorial
Game Studies: How to play — Ten play-tips for the aspiring game-studies scholar
by Espen Aarseth
Articles
“Gotta Catch ‘Em All” – Can Playing Pokémon Go Influence Mood and Empathy?
by Tracy Packiam Alloway & Rachel Carpenter
Don’t Fear the Reapers, Fear Multiculturalism: Canadian Contexts and Ethnic Elisions in Mass Effect
by David Callahan
The Indiepocalypse: the Political-Economy of Independent Game Development Labor in Contemporary Indie Markets
by Nadav D. Lipkin
The Open, the Closed and the Emergent: Theorizing Emergence for Videogame Studies
by Joan Soler-Adillon
Book Review
Review of Gaming the Iron Curtain
by Jaakko Suominen
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.