My Upcoming Book: A Casual Revolution

casualrevolution

Update November 2009: A Casual Revolution is now out. Read more on the book’s web page: http://www.jesperjuul.net/casualrevolution/

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Announcing my next book, A Casual Revolution: Reinventing Video Games and Their Players.

Set for release in November 2009, A Casual Revolution is my take on what is happening with video games right now:

  • Why is the Nintendo Wii more successful than the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3?
  • Why and how is the market for video games expanding?
  • Who plays Bejeweled, and why?
  • What is a casual player? Do casual players even exist?
  • What is casual game design?
  • Are casual games a throwback to the arcade game, or are they something new?
  • How did Solitaire become one of the most popular video games?
  • What is the secret behind the success of Guitar Hero and Rock Band?
  • Why is Parcheesi a social game? Why is Animal Crossing?
  • Does the rise of casual games mean the downfall of the hardcore game?
  • … and much more.

I will post more information about the book as we near the publication date!

Official description

The enormous popularity of the Nintendo Wii, Guitar Hero, and smaller games like Bejeweled or Zuma has turned the stereotype of the obsessed young male gamer on its head. Players of these casual games are not required to possess an intimate knowledge of video game history or to devote weeks or months to play. At the same time, many players of casual games show a dedication and skill that is anything but casual. In A Casual Revolution, Jesper Juul describes this as a reinvention of video games, and of our image of video game players, and explores what this tells us about the players, the games, and their interaction.

With this reinvention of video games, the game industry reconnects with a general audience. Many of today’s casual game players once enjoyed Pac-Man, Tetris, and other early games, only to drop out when video games became more time consuming and complex. For a long time, video games asked players to structure their lives to fit the demands of a game; with casual games, it is the game that is designed to fit into the lives of players. These flexible games make it possible for everyone to be a video game player.

Juul shows that it is only by understanding what a game requires of players, what players bring to a game, how the game industry works, and how video games have developed historically that we can understand what makes video games fun and why we choose to play (or not to play) them.

Endorsements

  • “An indispensible read for anyone interested or working in the field of video games. Jesper Juul makes sense of the shifting terrain of video game audiences and proves to be one of the finest minds in video games. A ground-breaking book!”
    –Sean Baptiste, Manager of Community Development, Harmonix Music Systems
  • “A Casual Revolution is a hard look at the unique characteristics of games outside of the hardcore. Juul pushes past the prejudice that casual games are somehow lesser experiences and presents a multifaceted view of ‘casualness,’ casual players and the non-trivial role of these deeply engaging games in our social and cultural lives.”
    –Tracy Fullerton, Director, USC Game Innovation Lab, USC School of Cinematic Arts, Interactive Media Division
  • “A thoughtful examination of casual gaming. I wouldn’t be surprised to find this book sitting on the shelves of game developers, marketers, and scholars. Juul has combined player ethnography, developer interviews, and informed analysis to produce an exemplary piece of game research.”
    –Chaim Gingold, Designer, Spore Creature Creator


Links

Official MIT press page.

Preorder from Amazon.

My new Job at the New York University Game Center

From August 1st, I will be moving to a position as a Visiting Professor at the brand new New York University Game Center.

I am looking forward to teaching, researching, and helping build the new program there!

(It is obviously also sad to leave the GAMBIT lab at MIT where I’ve had a great and productive time with my wonderful colleagues the last year and a half.)

Here is the official announcement from NYU:

The NYU Game Center Announces the Appointment of Game Studies Scholar Jesper Juul as Visiting Professor.

The Game Center, an independent multi-school center at New York University for the research, design, and development of digital games, established in fall 2008, has announced its first visiting faculty appointment, the Danish games studies scholar Jesper Juul.  His position as visiting assistant arts professor is effective August 1, 2009.  Juul is currently a video game lecturer and researcher at the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab.

In addition to teaching an introduction to video games course, Juul will help to lead the effort to develop and implement an overall pedagogical plan for the new Game Center, including designing curriculum, planning facilities, and identifying new faculty.  He will also lecture and give talks.

A respected scholar as well as a prominent authority in the field of game studies, Juul is the author of two books: A Casual Revolution: Reinventing Video Games and Their Players (2009 MIT Press) and the influential Half Real: Video Games Between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds (2005 MIT Press).  In addition, he has contributed chapters to a number of books as well as having authored numerous articles and papers on games and culture, delivered several keynote addresses, and been an invited speaker at many talks.

Juul has taught extensively at the IT University of Copenhagen and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.   He earned an M.A. in Danish literature from the University of Copenhagen and a PhD from the IT University of Copenhagen.

The NYU Game Center is housed in the Skirball Center for New Media at the Tisch School of the Arts and is an all NYU collaboration of the Tisch School, Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development, and Polytechnic Institute of NYU. The Center is supported by generous grants from an anonymous donor, the Rockefeller Foundation, and Sharon Chang and the TTSL Charitable Foundation.

New Collection on the Semiotics of Computer Games

computer_games

From the Italian Association for the Study of Semiotics, the collection Computer Games between Text and Practice looks at games from, yes, a semiotic perspective!

Cover (pdf, 488 Kb)

Index and acknowledgements

Introduction (pdf, 108 Kb)
by Dario Compagno and Patrick Coppock

section one
Playing Games: from Cooperation to Interaction

Gabriele Ferri (pdf, 660 Kb)
Interpretive Cooperation and Procedurality.  A Dialogue between Semiotics and Procedural Criticism

Otto Lehto (pdf, 2 Mb)
The Collapse and Reconstitution of the Cinematic Narrative: Interactivity vs Immersion in Game Worlds

section two
Which Role for Narrativity in Computer Games?

Jack Post (pdf, 588 Kb)
Bridging the Narratology – Ludology Divide. The Tetris Case

Alessandro Catania (pdf, 244 Kb)
Les Jeux sont Faits! Immersiveness and Manageability of Game Narratives

section three
Revisiting Enunciation: Embodied Players

Agata Meneghelli(pdf, 620 Kb)
Simulacral and Embodied Enunciation in Computer Games

Adriano D’Aloia (pdf, 768 Kb)
Adamant Bodies. The Avatar-Body and the Problem of Autoempathy

section four
Temporal and Spatial Features of Virtual Environments

Mario Gerosa, Jennifer Grace-Dawson (pdf, 1,0 Mb)
Chronology and Historicization in Virtual Worlds and Video Games

Joaquìn Siabra-Fraile (pdf, 800 Kb)
Manic Miner under the Shadow of the Colossus: A Semiotic Analysis of the Spatial
Dimension in Platform Video Games

Alex Wade (pdf, 472 Kb)
Spatial Typologies of Games

section five
Authorship and Game Creation

Marco Benôit Carbone (pdf, 284 Kb)
The Adam of Videogames. From Invention to Authorship through the Analysis of Primordial Games

Filippo Zanoli(pdf, 505 Kb)
Logos Language in Richard Garriot’s Tabula  Rasa: an Analysis of Symbols, Semantics and  Textual Implications

Well Played 1.0: Video Game, Value and Meaning

Drew Davidson’s Well Played anthology is out for purchase or for reading on the web.

What makes a game good? or bad? or better?

Video games can be “well played” in two senses. On the one hand, well played is to games as well read is to books. On the other hand, well played as in well done.

This book is full of in-depth close readings of video games that parse out the various meanings to be found in the experience of playing a game. 22 contributors (developers, scholars, reviewers and bloggers) look at video games through both senses of “well played.”

Content:

Get Well Played here.

Without a Goal – the podcast

Ryan Wiancko of Industry Broadcast has been kind enough to create a podcast of my paper Without a Goal: On open and expressive games.

From the paper:

According to a widespread theory, video games are goal-oriented, rule-based activities, where players find enjoyment in working towards the game goal. According to this theory, game goals provide a sense of direction and set up the challenges that the players face.

However, the last few decades have seen many things described as “games” that either do not have goals, or have goals that are optional for the player: Sims 2 (Maxis 2004) has no stated goals, but is nevertheless extremely popular. The also popular Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (Rockstar Games North 2005) is superficially a goal-oriented game, yet the game allows the player to perform a wide range of actions while ignoring the game goal.

Get the podcast here!

Happy Birthday, Tetris

25 years young today! Alexey Pajitnov released Tetris on June 6, 1984.

Tetris
The DOS version of Tetris.


Electronika 60
The original platform for Tetris, the Elektronika 60.

Originally launched in the Soviet Union, the history of Tetris intersects with the cold war, of course.

In the history of video games, Tetris is sometimes claimed to be the first casual game (subject to discussion).

There are now so many versions of Tetris that it feels like a folk game in the public domain – it’s a kind of hello world of games. Yet, the Tetris company is also trying to assert a legal right to the game, threatening some people who implement it. It is one of the those things – Tetris feels universal, like chess or crossword puzzles, that it is counter-intuitive that someone could own or control it. I wish there was a clear solution to this issue.

Happy birthday!

Easy to Use and Incredibly Difficult: On the Mythical Border between Interface and Gameplay

Should a good game have an easy interface, but difficult gameplay? How can we tell the difference between the two, between interface and gameplay?

“Easy to Use and Incredibly Difficult: On the Mythical Border between Interface and Gameplay” is a paper I co-wrote with Marleigh Norton and which we presented at the Foundations of Digital Games Conference in April 2009.

The paper is meant as an in-depth examination of the common argument that the interface of a game should be easy-to-use. We argue that this is not necessarily the case.

In the paper we make the case that first of all, there is no way to clearly distinguish between interface and gameplay. Secondly, even when we can identify the interface in a given game, a difficult-to-use interface may very well be part of the core challenge of the game. In other words, no: good game does not equal easy interface + difficult gameplay.

For example, Street Fighter II has an interface that makes it easier to move your character than the interface of Toribash does, but that does not mean that it is a better game. It simply means that Toribash places part of its challenge in the basic movement of the character.


Street Fighter II

Toribash


Paper abstract:

In video game literature and video game reviews, video games are often divided into two distinct parts: interface and gameplay. Good video games, it is assumed, have easy to use interfaces, but they also provide difficult gameplay challenges to the player. But must a good game follow this pattern, and what is the difference between interface and gameplay? When does the easy-to-use interface stop, and when does the challenging gameplay begin? By analyzing a number of games, the paper argues that it is rare to find a clear-cut border between interface and gameplay and that the fluidity of this border characterizes games in general. While this border is unclear, we also analyze a number of games where the challenge is unambiguously located in the interface, thereby demonstrating that “easy interface and challenging gameplay” is neither universal nor a requirement for game quality. Finally, the paper argues, the lack of a clear distinction between easy interface and challenging gameplay is due to the fact that games are fundamentally designed not to accomplish something through an activity, but to provide an activity that is pleasurable in itself.

Olli Sotamaa’s Phd: The Player’s Game: Towards Understanding Player Production Among Computer Game Cultures

Olli Sotamaa has defended his PhD at the University of Tampere. The PDF is available here. Congrats!

Abstract:

This dissertation presents a cultural approach to player production. The contribution of my work to the current scholarship on players is to broaden the understanding of the relation between play and other forms of game cultural productivity. The dissertation suggests that as the manifestations of gaming hobby break out of “magic circle of play”, the productive activities of players become central to our understanding of games and gaming.

While game studies have so far been pretty good in identifying the structural elements of game systems and the different motivations of players, they have mostly not touched the larger social structures and industrial systems that ultimately shape both the games that are offered to players and the ways they are played. Whilst we know quite a lot about how the rules can be used to guide and constrict players activities, the “rules” that direct player production are scarcely investigated. This dissertation provides an approach to how these regulations and byelaws could be studied.

Instead of sticking to the game world boundaries the dissertation turns the focus to the larger dynamics of game culture and examines the opportunities and constraints provided by the current game industry paradigms. The underlying interest is in outlining games as profoundly co-produced entities which can be only understood if both the contributions of developers and other industry bodies and the investments of players are taken into account.

The dissertation consists of six articles and a lengthy overview section. The introductory chapters provide theoretical and historical background for the approach. The articles introduce practical case studies and apply, discuss and develop further the starting points. While various dimensions of player production are elaborated in the introductory chapters, the articles focus mostly on the players’ productive practices that result in new game elements (game modifications) and the ones that exploit the game software to produce entirely new digital objects (machinima).

The dissertation is committed to a particular notion of the nature of play. I argue that segregating the sphere of play from “ordinary life”, “utility” and “productivity” runs the risk of hiding the similarities and interesting connections between play and the related realms. Rather than happening in a given “magic circle”, the space for play needs to be negotiated. I have in the thesis examined how these negotiations spread beyond the borders of the game as games are increasingly integrated into our daily lives. Secondly the study suggests that also the boundaries between ‘players’ and ‘producers’ are by definition blurred and actively negotiated. I further argue in favour of conceptualizing player production as a network of activities. The composition and dynamics of this network are guided by forms of gaming capital.

Finally, the dissertation seriously questions the tendency of studying media consumption and production in separation. As the media practices are becoming increasingly participatory and co-operative, it is difficult to argue for keeping these domains of research apart from each other. Player production highlights how digital media products are increasingly also tools that allow media consumers not only to personalize their experiences but also to share and circulate their productions. This furthermore underlines the need to abandon the dichotomous and stabile either-or models and the demand for holistic studies of the emerging media culture. While the industry bodies take part in shaping the emerging player cultural formations, it is at the same time increasingly difficult to understand game industry without taking players into account. In this respect, game cultures originate in various sites, often defined both by resistance, exploitation and mutually beneficial relations.