Category: my publications

Are virtual reality objects real? I have a new paper out in the Disputatio journal, titled Virtual Reality: Fictional all the Way Down (and that’s OK) .

The paper came about as a response to David Chalmer’s 2017 paper The Virtual and the Real, about which Pawel Grabarczyk organized a seminar in Copenhagen in the summer of 2018.

TL;DR: Chalmers uses virtual reality to argue that there are structures (such as calculators) that exist regardless of their physical or non-physical implementation, and as such virtual reality objects can be perfectly real.

I argue, orthogonally, that virtual reality is not becoming “just-like-the-real-thing” based on any fidelity to the physical world. VR is not just technology, but art; a human act of communication and selective implementation. I also argue that VR is half-real: we are not magically transported to another world, as VR is only selectively implemented (it rarely has the photons that make up light, for example), and as users we we are conscious of how the world is a limited implementation made for the purpose of a particular experience.

I keep returning to this question: When we play a game, are we free –  or are we prisoners of the game rules?

Here is Playing, my contribution to Henry Lowood and Raiford Guins’ wonderful Debugging Game History collection.

In the piece I argue that there are four main conceptions of the act of game-playing, going from playing as submission to playing as creation.

1. Playing as submission, where the player is bound by the limits set forth by the game rules.

2. Playing as constrained freedom, where the game creates a space in which players acquire a certain amount of freedom and the opportunity to perform particular acts.

3. Playing as subversion, where the player works around both the designer’s intentions and the game object’s apparent limitations.

4. Playing as creation, where the game is ultimately irrelevant for (or at least secondary to) the actual playing.

Read the full text here: http://www.jesperjuul.net/text/playing/

Back from the 2016 DiGRA/FDG conference in Dundee, here is the paper I gave on using design patterns to understand video game history: Sailing the Endless River of Games: The case for Historical Design Patterns.

 
The Pay Once & Play category was introduced in the Apple App Store in early 2015. Though video games were for a long time, at least from 1985 to 2015, mostly sold in boxes for upfront payment, this business model was not actually named as “Pay once & Play” until after the emergence of the free-to-play or freemium business model. Why not? Because it was obvious that all video games were sold in boxes, so why would you mention it when talking about video games, or video game history?

This is the topic of the paper: The problem isn’t just that games change, but that games change in ways we haven’t predicted. The major events in video game history concern things that had previously been taken for granted: MMOs like World of Warcraft moved the role of the player community to the forefront; casual games reconfigured the audience; mobile games reconfigured distribution and business models; independent games set up a new relation between developer and audience. Video game history continually forces us to reconsider what it is we are studying, when we study video games.

In the paper I then propose that we can redefine game design patterns to help us to talk about video game change. I return to matching tile games as an example of how to write history using design patterns.

http://www.jesperjuul.net/text/endlessriverofgames/