游戏抽象度: This is the Chinese translation of my 2007 paper A Certain Level of Abstraction.

Thanks to Ji Chen for the translation!

电子游戏已经快有五十年历史了，而游戏的历史则长达数千年。无论游戏制作者还是玩家，都深深被已经形成的游戏文化所影响：制作者通过借鉴并发展游戏的传统和旧有类型，开发新的游戏；玩家则借助对游戏传统的理解和玩过的旧游戏更好地上手新游戏。
从事电子游戏研究的学者也同样深受游戏文化的影响，很多游戏传统已经被不自觉地被当作理所当然。恐怕问一些幼稚的问题更利于我们的研究。我将以此开头：为何我不能为所欲为？

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

I find myself scratching my head over the continued bursts of angry criticism against the Free to Play business model.

Here is Michael Thomsen writing in Kill Screen, “Will Work for Fun“:

The original Super Mario Bros. defined the console blockbuster with more than 40 million copies sold worldwide. After going free-to-play, Angry Birds has been downloaded over 700 million times (though some versions are still sold for 99 cents). The scope and stakes of videogame commerce have irrevocably changed, and, in a way, the value of the medium has degraded as a result. Designers are no longer selling games to people who want to buy them, they are selling their audiences to advertisers. Worse yet, they are using them as an interactive form of muzak, creating a lively backdrop against which the small percentage of people willing to spend money on new quests or in-game trinkets will feel more likely to spend.

The value of the medium has degraded? Really? On a basic level, I still feel that this type of criticism is eerily similar to the kinds of criticisms that people tend to direct at video games in general: commercial, exploitative, devoid of artistic merit etc…

There seems to  an underlying conservatism at play, where we intuitively believe that what we grew up with (games being sold in boxes at fixed price points) is a neutral good, and that everything else is ultimately a perversion. But all business models have a built-in skew: the boxed model skews towards  pretty graphics and a well-designed first-15-minute experience, after which the game quickly becomes boring and repetitive.

On the other hand, when I say this (that all business models and incentive structures have a built-in skew), I can hear myself mimicking my undergraduate university teachers:  ”games are always already influenced by business models” (the “always already” part signals that you are part of the clique).

So that also feels like a cheap argument. I was entertaining the thought that it has to do with a basic conception of games (the magic circle if you will) as an egalitarian space where things like money are not supposed to make a difference, and the free to play and microtransactions seem offensive because they make the playing field skewed and unfair. (See the report linked below.)

Again, the default counter-argument would be that this is an illusion – because there never is any pure game space where money does not matter and so on. But this is again too easy: the fundamental fact  is that our conventions of game-playing (and sportspersonship) involve trying to create a type of pure egalitarian space, regardless of the fact that this can never be achieved a 100% (and regardless of what researchers think).

Michael Thomsen discusses free to play and capitalism at length, but ultimately I think we need to acknowledge that money is just one of many different resources (and not the only one worth talking about). I recently  heard an established game developer argue that microtransactions are fair because they level the playing field between him and the people with more time on their hands, and I have entertained the same thought myself. Microtransactions are really a type of “executive summary” for games.

And that is the bottom line for me: no business model is neutral, but it is also true that free to play can  collide with some of our fundamental assumptions about what games should be. And yet … for some games, the more expensive executive summary just is the better deal. (And the task of Free to Play game designers is to make it so, of course.)

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PS. Here is a study of player perceptions of free to play: “Cash Trade Within the Magic Circle”, by Holin Lin and Chuen-Tsai Sun.

On Friday May 4th I will be a panelist at ROLFCon in Cambridge, with distinguished co-panelists Jamin Warren, Bennett Foddy and Michael “Kayin” O’Reilly.

Gaming: WHY THE %&*# IS THIS SO %&#ING IMPOSSIBLE??

Panelists: Bennett Foddy (QWOP / GIRP), Michael “Kayin” O’Reilly (I Wanna Be The Guy), Jesper Juul (NYU Game Center), Jamin Warren (mod – Kill Screen)

We all know what it’s like to be deliciously close to victory, only to have it snatched out of our hands by that %&*#ing obstacle that has stopped you for the 30th time…tonight. So why do we keep playing games that torture us? And who are the %*(@&ers $&@*ed up enough to make these games?

The creators of some of the most brilliant yet frustrating games of all time are joining us for this panel to talk about the love/hate relationship you have with their games and why they chose to make it that way. Please don’t throw your controllers at them.

Well Played: volume 1 number 3
Drew Davidson et al. 2012

Time Tech and Tales: The fall and rise of the popularity of narration in games seen through Monkey Island 2 and Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney
Emmanuel Eytan

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Queue’d Up: The Functioning of Randomized Groups in World of Warcraft
Charles Ecenbarger II

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EUROPA UNIVERSALIS II: Conquest, trading, diplomacy from the Middle Ages to Napoleon
Simon Egenfeldt-Nielsen

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Deus Ex Ludos: Representation, Agency, and Ethics in Deus Ex: Invisible War
Joseph Hogle

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Playing as a Woman as a Woman as if a Man
Gabriela T. Richard

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Get it here.

And here it is: A Casual Revolution came out in South Korea last month.

Thanks to my translator, Jung Yeop Lee, for making it happen!

The book, now titled  ”캐주얼 게임- 비디오게임과 플레이어의 재창조”  is available at this link.

Did you solve the black monolith puzzle in Fez? Ars Technica chronicles the collective quest to solve the most cryptic puzzle of the game. This one involves cryptography and random guesswork.

I must confess that I simply don’t have patience for this kind of thing anymore. Fez is beautiful and charming, but I am bored out of my skull by go-everywhere-click-everything-guess-backtrack-repeat puzzles.

Fez is surely supposed to be interestingly old-school & challenging, but I think this type of puzzle worked much better when you were 12 and only had a single game – and you were playing it with your friends on long afternoons.

At the same time, the feeling of impossibility is fundamental to the enjoyment of puzzles: a good puzzle has to appear to be impossible, however briefly. This is why I am conflicted about Portal 2, which I completed without ever feeling stuck for more than a minute or two. Never being stuck makes me feel good about myself, but I can’t help but also feel that Portal 2 just played it a little too safe and was too afraid of veering outside my comfort zone.

I think the problem with puzzles in a game like Fez is that the delay between having a new idea for a solution, and trying it out, is just too big because of the traveling and exploration involved, so you end up repeating the same increasingly uninteresting actions over and over in order to try out new ideas for solving a given puzzle (full disclosure: I am not far into Fez).

(From Ars Technica.)

My first computer was a Commodore 64 (for which I continue to have the fondest memories). Jack Tramiel, founder of Commodore, died this weekend at 83.

Interested in improving your game development skills over the summer? Then take a look at our exciting summer opportunities for students to get hands on experience creating and thinking about games!

If you have any general questions about summer courses, please check this website or email the Game Center at gamecenter@nyu.edu

OART-UT 1604 Game Development Workshop
Summer Session I: 05/21/2012 – 06/29/2012
When: Mon, Wed 12.30 PM – 3.15PM

This course reflects the various skills and disciplines that are brought together in modern game development: game design, programming, visual art, animation, sound design, and writing. The workshop will situate these disciplines within a larger context of game literacy and a historical and critical understanding of games as cultural objects. Classroom lectures and lab time will all be used to bring these different educational vectors together into a coherent whole; the workshop will be organized around a single, long-term, hands-on, game creation project. Working in small groups under the close supervision of instructors, students will collaborate on the creation of a playable game. As a creative constraint to help inspire them and guide their designs, the students will be given a theme to express in their game projects.

OART-UT 1606 Thinking About Games
Summer Session II: 07/02/2012 – 08/10/2012
When: Tue, Thu 12.30 PM – 3.15PM

This class is an overview of the field of video games that approaches them from several theoretical and critical perspectives. No special theoretical background or prior training is needed to take the course, but to have had a broad practical experience with and basic knowledge of games is a distinct advantage. Also, an interest in theoretical and analytical issues will help. You are expected to actively participate in the lectures, which are dialogic in form, with ample room for discussion.

The course will prepare the student to:
- Understand and discuss games from a theoretical perspective
- Apply new theories and evaluate them critically.
- Assess and discuss game concepts and the use of games in various contexts.
- Analyze games, and understand and apply a range of analytical methods

[Updated with photo from match and Wikipedia entry. Thanks to Janus Lodahl and Bernie DeKoven].

Somehow I missed this, but Danish situationist Asger Jorn designed a three-sided football (that is, soccer) game back in 1961.

And the Asger Jorn museum in Silkeborg inaugurated their Triolectic football court last weekend. This is from the opening match. (Image courtesy of Midtjyllands Avis.)

It’s a returning question: what does it mean to declare that a game is an artwork of sorts?

And even more media: A somewhat unedited 2012 document of Triolectic Soccer: