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.
Apologies for lack of recent updates, but I have been moving.
I am spending August 2006 – January 2007 in New York City as a visiting researcher at Parsons School of Design.
The basic plan is this: Give some talks, talk to as many interesting people as possible, research, write.
Will be posting more about this.
Wired’s jargon watch lists ludology as on of the four featured terms this month:
LUDOLOGY
n. The academic study of videogames. Taking its name from the Latin word for game, and deriving techniques from literary and film theory, ludology analyzes EverQuest as art and Grand Theft Auto as cultural artifact.
Via Gonzalo at, eh. ludology.org.
I think this means we’re mainstream now.
If you’ve followed this blog, you will know that I obsess a bit over being called a “formalist”. (Digra 2005, matching tile games.)
As a one-liner, formalism is probably supposed to mean privileging the formal properties of the medium over user experiences, contexts, cultural codes, and so on. (I.e. just thinking about the rules, but refusing to discuss players.)
But I really experience it as simple name-calling: Being a “formalist” is 100% wrong, and you are a formalist.
I had just about forgotten the history of anti-formalism, but I stumbled across this article on Soviet composer Shostakovich. Basically, in 1948 Stalin struck down on “formalist” composers (those without much melody) in favor of “socialist realist” composition:
Khrennikov reported that people “all over the USSR” had “voted unanimously” to condemn the so-called formalists and let it be known that those named in the decree were now officially regarded as little better than traitors: “Enough of these pseudo-philosophic symphonies! Armed with clear party directives, we will stop all manifestations of formalism and decadence.”
This is not to say that any criticism of formalism is “Stalinist” nor to say that I am a persecuted Soviet composer, just that it is always a good thing to think about the historical roots of your theories.
At Businessweek, an interview with Peter Molyneux, Jonathan Smith and Simon Byron on game designs they dislike:
Jonathan Smith’s basic argument is that if the game is never too easy or too hard, as a player you feel “you might not be there at all”. This is a bit controversial in relation to current research (such as Robin Hunicke‘s) of auto-adjusting difficulty, where the game is supposed to match itself to the player.
Jonathan Smith’s point ties in with Noah Falstein’s article in Steve Rabin’s Introduction To Game Development, where he describes the ideal game difficulty as one that shifts between being hard and easy. As I recall, the basic argument is that as a player I should first try something very hard, and then a bit later get the experience that a challenge has become easy because of my newly acquired skills:
That sounds like an argument against perfect balance and against automatic difficulty adjustment, doesn’t it? But perhaps the better conclusion is not to avoid balancing and difficulty adjustment, but to balance and diffulty-adjust as to aim for something like the ebb and flow in the model above.
Good balancing is paramount, but balancing should not aim for a straight line.
Via Gonzalo, I must link to this clip of a chimpanzee playing Ms. Pac-Man:
As far as I have read recently, some mammals such as humans, pigs, and chimpanzees will perform mental challenges just for the fun of it, but lemurs will only do it for food.
I think this means that frivolousness is a sure sign of intelligence. Good to know in the summer heat.
IGDA has just released their brand new updated 2006 Casual Games White Paper. The white paper is an absolutely excellent resource for developers and even researchers interested in casual games. Get it. It’s free.
And Henry Jenkins, orator extraordinaire, now has a blog: http://www.henryjenkins.org/
According to a Macrovision report, summarized at Gamasutra, casual gamers are a lot more hardcore than you may think:
37 percent of those who use casual games play nine or more two-hour ‘sessions’ each week.
In addition, the survey, of 789 worldwide participants, found that casual gameplay happens most often at night, as opposed to during commute hours or other ‘quick break’ times during the day, again indicating that the moniker ‘casual’ is a little anachronistic for the gameplay style.
I don’t think this contradicts the conventional wisdom about having a low barrier of entry to a casual game, and making it playable in very small time spans – for the players I think it is all about not having to spend hours getting into a game, and being free to play when and how they want to.
People may still play a puzzle game for hours, but of their own free will …