New Paper: The Game of Video Game Objects

I have a new paper out, just presented at the CHI Play’21 conference:

“The Game of Video Game Objects: A Minimal Theory of When We See Pixels as Objects Rather than Pictures.” In Extended Abstracts of the 2021 Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play. CHI PLAY ’21. https://www.jesperjuul.net/text/gameofobjects/ 

We’ve discussed immersion (for and against), but I argue that we’ve overlooked a much more fundamental question: Why and when do we think of pixels on the screen as objects, rather than as pictures of objects?

During the pandemic, I built a game for exploring this question and wrote an accompanying essay. This extends my previous paper Virtual Reality: Fictional all the Way Down (and that’s OK).

The game presents a series of game objects, and asks the player to consider their status:

  1. When would you describe something as an object, rather than a picture?
  2. When do you think of it as the type of object it represents – like a rock or a lamp?
  3. And when would you argue that an onscreen object is the type of object it claims to be, such as a calculator?

The conclusion is not just that games and VR are cultural forms (obviously), but that we judge game objects based on what we are trying to use them for, and game worlds are always designed for particular kinds of uses. And we know this. There thus can be no universal metaverse, only different worlds built for different purposes.

From the abstract:

“While looking to the future, we have overlooked what is right before us. With new technology, haptics, rendering, virtual reality, we have spent much energy discussing immersion and presence, thinking sometimes about current technology, but often about a hypothetical perfect experience or future perfect technology.

In this, we have forgotten something rather fundamental: How do we in the first place decide to see a group of pixels on a screen as an object to which we have access, rather than as a picture of an object? This paper explores this question through a playable essay. At first, we may think that we will identify anything interactive as an object, but the playable essay demonstrates that this is much more complex and pragmatic, and that this identification has three steps – identifying pixels as an object rather than a picture, reasoning about the object as a specific type of object (such as a ball), and identifying it as a real instance of a type of object (such as a calculator).”

Thanks to IVD at The Royal Danish Academy, Nick Montfort, Stefano Gualeni, Pawel Grabarczyk, Dooley Murphy, and Jan-Noël Thon for comments; to Andrés Cabrero Rodríguez-Estecha for visual design; Stephane Bersot for the calculator asset. The project was made with Unity3D and Low Poly Game Kit by JayAnAm.

Eludamos special issue on Playfulness across Media

Here’s the new Eludamos special issue on Playfulness across Media, edited by Jan-Noël Thon.

Table of Contents

Perspectives

Introduction: Playfulness across Media
Jan-Noël Thon
PDF
1-12
The Meaning of Playfulness: A Review of the Contemporary Definitions of the Concept across Disciplines
Leland Masek, Jaakko Stenros
PDF
13-37
Can Playfulness Be Designed? Understanding Playful Design through Agency in Astroneer (2019)
Bettina Bódi
PDF
39-61
There Is No Immersion: Critical Intervention through Hypermediacy in Metagames
Sarah Thorne
PDF
63-85
Playing with Plants, Loving Computers: Queer Playfulness beyond the Human in Digital: A Love Story by Christine Love and Rustle Your Leaves to Me Softly by Jess Marcotte and Dietrich Squinkifer
Daniella Gáti
PDF
87-103
Taking Playful Scholarship Seriously: Discursive Game Design as a Means of Tackling Intractable Controversies
Stefan Werning, Jasper van Vught
PDF
105-125
Play and Playfulness in Lynda Barry’s What It Is
Kieron Brown
PDF
127-148
The Playful Affordances of Picture Book Apps for Children
Hanna Järvenpää
PDF
149-167
Playful Strategies in Print Advertising
Alysa Chiara Karels, Teresa de la Hera
PDF
169-198
Playing Make-Believe with #homemadeDisney Pandemic Ride Videos
Bobby Schweizer
PDF
199-218

Game Studies, volume 21, issue 2 is out

For your theoretical journey: Game Studies, volume 21, issue 2. 

 

Fear and anxiety induced by games are ubiquitous, but unexplored. This article analyzes fear and anxiety inducing mechanics and modalities found in Slender — The Eight Pages. It gives a detailed account of how fear and anxiety are induced; later using it to further explain the way they might be activated by several in-game components.

by Matthew Horrigan

Many essays in game studies deploy the concept of liminality. The term has become diluted with use. However, Turner and van Gennep developed liminality together with related concepts that suggest a richer account of play than liminality captures on its own. This essay discusses the role of the liminoid in connecting players with characters.

 
by Selim Krichane
This article traces the emergence and generalization of the term “camera” in discourses surrounding videogames. The detailed analysis is based on a large corpus of magazines in French and English and on game manuals. This study enables us to renew the traditional narratives on the relationship between cinema and videogames during the 1990s.
 
by Eoghain Meakin, Brian Vaughan, Charlie Cullen
An illustration and discussion of the practical uses of Aristotle’s Poetics when describing video game narratives. What emerges from this lens is the articulation of a cognitive arc for both the player and player character and the mechanisms used to make this possible.
 
by Gregory P. Perreault, Emory Daniel Jr., Samuel M. Tham
This study looks at the case of the mobile, loot box-focused game Final Fantasy Brave Exvius to better understand how and why gamers spend real-world money on in-game purchases. Players are motivated by their community, social identity, and nostalgia for the games of their youth.
 
by Jon Stone
Are ‘poetry games’ a paradox? This article considers the problems inherent in mixing what Astrid Ensslin describes as “two entirely different interactive, productive, aesthetic, phenomenological, social, and discursive phenomena,” charting the differences in greater detail.
 
by Nansong Zhou
Many Chinese players relate to the game character in Travel Frog as if it were their child. By conducting interviews with 20 players from major Chinese cities, this article explores how the relationships between players and this character are deeply rooted in player conceptions of their ideal lifestyle and ideal parent- child relationships.

It took 1000 hours to write my book Handmade Pixels

I was waiting for the pandemic to blow over before thinking about time management again, but it looks like there will be no simple global endpoint, so here goes. I hope this is useful for other potential writers.

How long does it take to write a book? I must confess I had no idea, but writing Handmade Pixels took me 1000 hours over the course of 4½ years. I had already written a paper on independent games in 2014, but it wasn’t until August 2015 that I decided to write the book that became Handmade Pixels.

Associate professor jobs like mine with dedicated research time are unfathomably privileged and increasingly scarce, yet even people like me will complain of not having time to do research. I use a time tracker to figure out where my time goes, and this lets me see how much time I spent on this book. It’s not an exact science – sometimes I’d work on something else that drifted into the project, and sometimes I’d be interrupted while working.

Results: I clocked a total of 983 hours which were distributed like this (click to zoom):Bar chart showing hours spent per monthAs you can see, only 2/3 of the time was spent in the earnest book-writing phase – after signing a contract and before publishing. Especially copyediting, proofs, and promotion took much more time than you’d intuitively expect.

To my surprise, most of the time I only just managed to work on the book around 20-30 hours a month. My contract technically says that I can (should/should be able to) research 60 hours per month, but I only exceeded that twice. For most months, there were apparently always enough other things happening for me to spend that much time on the book.

This is also the largest book project I’ve done, and I surely couldn’t have done it without my assistant Dooley Murphy, or without the good support of MIT Press and my editor Doug Sery.

Finding the time

I was positively unsure if I could write this book on my regular work schedule. My first three books were all written on considerable chunks of free time (Half-Real: my PhD, A Casual Revolution: 6 months off, Art of Failure: a 6-month grant), so could I even write a book during my regular schedule of teaching, meeting, supervising, and being the head of an educational program? I also have kids, and my productivity drops vertically if I am sleep-deprived, so working late does not make me more productive.

After a million days of never getting to the research I cared about, I’ve settled on the classic writer routine:

  1. Go to the office.
  2. Get a cup of coffee.
  3. Write till noon without checking email or social media.
  4. Let the world of emails and meetings wash over me.

This was the best choice imaginable. Of course, it wasn’t always possible to evade other responsibilities in the morning – there were lots of days where I failed – but it at least felt like a pattern, and let me get a continuity of working on the project almost every workday. I probably did around 10 late nights for the entire project, and none after midnight. Not because I didn’t have to, but simply because staying up late would make me miserable without speeding up the project at all.

Motivation

Some people have asked me how I find the motivation to not go on social media or do other short-term tasks when I am supposed to write, and I am not always successful at that. I do find it useful though to think very hard about how a given activity makes me feel: if I randomly go on social media or check email, it makes me feel terrible & life feel meaningless, while starting my day with research makes me feel great and my life feel meaningful. (There is a good podcast on thinking about “how does it make you feel“.) It’s a bit like the idea of getting drunk on champagne in the morning – on some level it sounds great, but in practice you know it will feel terrible. So you try to do the thing that will make you feel better.

Structure

Writing is often very solitary, so habits are very idiosyncratic. I personally don’t have daily goals like word counts, but I have very long TODO lists, describing things I need to read, games I need to play, screenshots I need to take, interviews I need to edit, paragraphs that need to be linked, arguments that need to be sharpened, and so on. For a writing session, I just want to check off some checkboxes. I keep the list of checked tasks around so I can see my progress. I also make new tasks just to check them.

Fast or slow?

Is 1000 hours fast or slow? I really have no idea. I am probably somewhere in the middle. I know of writers faster than me, and writers who take more time than I do.

This is what I learned from writing Handmade Pixels. If you want to write, I hope there will be time for you to do so as well.

Fractal time: Announcing Lyapunovia’21

Fractal time: Here’s Lyapunovia’21, a remake of my 1992-93 (yes) Amiga program of the same name.
A “mindbogglingly colorful” realtime & animated fractal; a small side project almost entirely unrelated to what I think is my career. Free, creative commons, and playable in your browser. 
https://www.jesperjuul.net/lyapunovia/

The History of Lyapunovia

“Lyapunovia: Displaying the Juiciest Object in Mathematics.
Lyapunovia is a mindbogglingly colorful program that makes pictures from a simple mathematical formula … offering you everything you ever wanted in visual representation of mathematical abstractions.”
-Me in 1992.

This new version came about when I saw that a modern computer – or phone – can easily render a fractal like this in real time using the graphics card.

In this new version, I focused on making the user experience fun, on making it pleasurable to navigate around the fractal image. I have also animated the fractal a bit, so the goal is not to arrive at the final image, but to explore a strange animated object.

Backstory

Lyapunov Space fractals were created by Mario Markus in the late 1980’s, and probably popularized by Dewdney’s 1991 article in Scientific American.

Having read the Scientific American article, I wrote the Lyapunovia fractal program for the Commodore Amiga in 1992-93. This was just around the peak of shareware, and users could physically mail me payment for a full version of the program, which I’d dutifully send them on floppy disks. Version 1.5 was released the following year, now supporting new Amiga 1200 and 4000 computers with their fancy new graphics chipsets, and switched to a more convenient donation model. (Here is the original readme file.) I probably sold and received literally *many dozens* of contributions, so I was happy.

After that, a made a small version for long gone BeOS, and dabbled in a PC version.

Lyapunovia had a weird role in my life. It made a tiny bit of money for a poor student, but it also heavily distracted me from actual studying, which in some ways would have been better for me, yet I got hired by my future multimedia workplace MouseHouse because they’d seen the program and called me up. Going back to Lyapunovia gives me an intense feeling of where it was made, “while watching the tiny little bit of blue sky I can see from my room if I push my head flat against the window and look directly up”, as the readme file says.

My later life has become something else – writing books about video game theory, occasionally making games, and continually teaching students to make, think, and write about video games.

My original training though, just before Lyapunovia, was in demo culture, and from that I probably brought the idea that programming (which I enjoy) can also be visible and understandable to non-programmers as well. I have mostly channeled this into games, but why not try the fractal thing gain?

What do fractals mean?

In their 1990ish heyday, I think fractals represented both the future, modern technology, and then-new ideas of chaos and emergence. Today there’s something retroish about them. Yes, we know that small formulas can create complex patterns, but the actual speed of modern computers (coming here from the graphics card of your device) makes fractals immediate in a way they were not.

Clearly, I am making choices here about how to represent Lyapunov Space, but that experience is always one of the formulas having an emergent mind of their own. The fractal doesn’t care about us, and I think this gives a feeling of “sublime banality” – a fractal is vast, infinite, and incomprehensible to our human minds, but it also doesn’t ask anything from us. Other words: Alien, reptilian. It’s a lot like deliberately electronic music, which can be read as life-affirming by showing us how we’re either wonderfully alive unlike the mechanical world, or that we’re wonderfully mechanical as well, or that we are freed from having to fall into established categories. Here’s to that.

Programming then and now

The Amiga program was gigantic, and the mental work was very hard, figuring out how to do things I did not know how to do; writing and rewriting the code, waiting for the program to render, writing the image saving routines, and so on. This was a huge undertaking for me.

This new version was made quickly (~20 hours), it is pretty small, but as is the case with modern web development, it includes 4 entirely different languages – HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and GLSL. The main challenge here has really been to read up on all the documentation, like the weird limitations of the GLSL version I was using. Thanks to WebGLFundamentals for the best WebGL explanations. I have also focused on designing a pleasurable interface that could be used across a range of devices. The idea of the pleasurable interface wasn’t really common in 1992 (except in games).

Game Studies vol 21, issue 1 (20th anniversary)

Yes, Game Studies issue 21/1 is out.  The rumors are true, this is the 20th anniversary issue.

Without going overboard reminiscing, I’ll just say I think our major goals were achieved, and that it’s fine how Game Studies is just one journal among many now. I think we helped:

  • Provide a platform for all kinds of work related to video games – humanities, social science, philosophical, aesthetic, political.
  • Establish video games as a meaningful cultural form (with “aesthetic, cultural and communicative” aspects, as the original header said).
  • Establish that this meaning (and politics) can be found not only using traditional analytical tools, but that a new object of study can call for new tools (yeah, such as looking at meaning, politics in game rules and interaction – which many people resisted in the beginning).
  • Reflect a field that changed over time.

One thing I have learned since is that history is basically a game of telephone, often a heavily mythologized one. Thus I don’t want to overstate our centrality – many people were studying video games and thinking about publication channels back then and before. And to counter the erasure that the game of mythologizing telephone creates, let me just list and thank all the people who were in the original group when I was most involved in the journal:  Espen Aarseth, Markku Eskelinen, Marie-Laure Ryan, Susana Tosca, Gonzalo Frasca, Anja Rau, Aki Järvinen, Lisbeth Klastrup, Torill Mortensen, Jill Walker.

******

Two Decades of Game Studies

by Espen Aarseth

This issue of Game Studies marks the 20th anniversary of the journal.[more]

Animal Mayhem Games and Nonhuman-Oriented Thinking

by Marco Caracciolo

This article discusses a recent strand of videogames that foreground disruptive animal characters in an urban environment. I link this “animal mayhem” to recent debates on the nonhuman, showing that videogames like Goat Simulator and Untitled Goose Game (my case studies) evoke the inherent strangeness of human-nonhuman connectedness.[more]

Beyond the French Touch: The Contestataire Moment in French Adventure Digital Games (1984-1990)

by Filip Jankowski

This article attempts to suggest a revision of the historical aesthetic category frequently called the “French Touch.” The article focuses on games that matched the contestataire moment in the history of France from three development circles (Froggy Software, Cobra Soft and François Coulon), arguing that they escape this traditional categorization.[more]

The Child in Games: Representations of Children in Video Games (2009 – 2019)

by Emma Reay

This paper examines representations of children in contemporary video games through content analysis. Using a sample of over 500 games published between 2009 and 2019, it identifies the dominant functions of child characters and documents patterns of representation across genres and over time.[more]

“Twere Well It Were Done Quickly”: What Belongs in a Glitchless Speedrun?

by Martin Ricksand

This article analyzes speedruns, the practice of beating a game as fast as possible. The article applies theories from the philosophy of sport as well as the philosophy of fiction, and outlines a way of how to adjudicate on what strategies may be employed in different kinds of speedruns.[more]

“Actual history doesn’t take place”: Digital Gaming, Accuracy and Authenticityby Eve Stirling, Jamie Wood

This paper examines university students’ perceptions of how playing historical videogames has affected their understanding of the past. It focuses on how active engagement in gameplay affects perceptions of historical time and sense of place, in particular the relative importance of accuracy and authenticity.[more]

Towards a Model of Objective-Based Reward Systems

by Agata Waszkiewicz, Mateusz Kominiarczuk

The article proposes a model of objective-based reward systems based on Gary Alan Fine’s frame analysis and Jesper Juul’s goal typology. The model reconceptualizes various reward-bound goals commonly encompassed under the categories “quests” and “achievements” in order to show them as non-homogenous and yet not dissimilar.[more]

Book Reviews

Review: Who Are You? Nintendo’s Game Boy Advance Platform

by Martin Roth

Who Are You? Nintendo’s Game Boy Advance Platform (2020) by Alex Custodio. Cambridge, Massachusetts & London: MIT Press. ISBN: 9780262044394. pp. 280.[more]

Review: Transnational Play: Piracy, Urban Art, and Mobile Games

by John Sharp

Transnational Play: Piracy, Urban Art, and Mobile Games (2020) by Anne-Marie Schleiner. Baltimore, Maryland: Project MUSE. ISBN: 9789048543946. pp. 182.[more]

Study at the Visual Game & Media Design MA in Copenhagen, March 1st deadline

Please come and study with me at our two-year masters program in Visual Game & Media Design in Copenhagen.

The application process is now open for the Visual Game & Media Design master’s program at the Royal Danish Academy in Copenhagen.

This is a two-year program running from September 1, 2021. The application deadline is March 1st.

Visual Game & Media Design is an intensive two-year program for students wishing to do creative work in game design, visual media, and beyond. During the program, you will continually combine the hands-on creation of digital games, animations, motion graphics, and visual designs with innovative conceptual approaches to game design and storyworld design.

Who can apply?

The program is in English, and is open to all students, Danish and International, with a relevant bachelor’s degree in fields such as graphical design, game design, or 3D modeling. We encourage students with non-traditional backgrounds to apply.

More about the program

To read more about the program, go to the website or email program head Jesper Juul, jjuul@kadk.dk

https://royaldanishacademy.com/programme/visual-game-and-media-design

For more details about the application process: https://royaldanishacademy.com/admission-master

Why study at KADK in Copenhagen?

The Royal Danish Academy is a leading academy in Scandinavia in the fields of architecture, design and conservation. It is located centrally by the Copenhagen harbor.

Copenhagen is a hub for video game development, with a vibrant English-language game development community, and home to both small and large companies such as Playdead, Sybo games, IO Interactive, Tactile, and Unity3D.

KADK works closely with (and is situated next to) the National Film School of Denmark, and with the professional TV and Film community in Denmark.

Game Studies vol 20, issue 4 is out

For your theoretical traversal, Game Studies volume 20, issue 4.

Articles

Assessing Toxic Behaviour in Dead by Daylight : Perceptions and Factors of Toxicity According to the Game’s Official Subreddit Contributors
by Patrick Deslauriers, Laura Iseut Lafrance St-Martin, Maude Bonenfant

This article identifies 5 key aggravating factors that may lead to toxic in-game interactions according to players’ perception. We studied the Dead by Daylight community using a content analysis of players’ conversations on the game’s official subreddit to help us better understand how they perceive potentially toxic behaviour inside of the game.[more]

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Dungeon Pirates of the Postcolonial Seas. Domination, Necropolitics, Subsumption and Critical Play in Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire
by Mateusz Felczak

This article is a close reading of a cRPG directly approaching the topic of colonialism in the fantasy setting. Its main goal is to present a framework inspired by the ideas of Achille Mbembe to assess the difficulties in applying potential elements of critical play that would transfer from the narrative into the game’s mechanics.[more]

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Negotiating Textures of Digital Play: Gameplay and the Production of Space
by Justyna Janik

This paper analyzes the mechanisms of communication connecting different types of actant during the moment of digital gameplay. Gameplay is here interpreted in the context of Lefebvre’s concept of texture, developing a view of gameplay as a performative and communicative experience.[more]

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Grades on Games: Gaming Preferences and Weekly Studying on College GPAs
by Kelsey Prena, Andrew J. Weaver

This study surveys college undergraduates to explore patterns across gaming, studying, and academic performance. Time studying on the weekends (positive), gender, and preferences for action games (negative) were significant predictors of academic performance. These results and complimentary results are discussed.[more]

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Like Seeing Yourself in the Mirror? Solitary Role-Play as Performance and Pretend Play
by Jaakko Stenros, Tanja Sihvonen

This article analyzes the single-player digital role-playing game as performance and pretend play through character creation, character interaction, and game mechanics. These games are positioned as toys that are “pretend-played” with expectations. Players’ extended “pretend play” is conceptualized and analyzed as queering.[more]

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Player customization, competence and team discourse: exploring player identity (co)construction in Counter-Strike: Global Offensive
by Matilda Ståhl, Fredrik Rusk

This ethnographic study explores a participant’s perspective on local player identity (co)construction in Counter Strike: Global Offensive (CS:GO). Although there are individual variances, the identities (co)constructed orient towards a perceived competent player identity shaped by technomasculine norms in online game culture.[more]

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From Dead-end to Cutting Edge: Using FMV Design Patterns to Jumpstart a Video Revival
by Carl Therrien, Cindy Poremba, Jean-Charles Ray

This paper argues that design patterns from full motion videogames are a useful source of design knowledge that can scaffold the development of new works. It presents results from a historical analysis of over ninety games using live-action full motion video. Methods for re-integrating this knowledge back into the design process are explored.[more]

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(Re)Mastering Dark Souls
by Timothy Welsh

This paper argues that the aesthetic experience of playing Dark Souls changes over time as the player community shares its collective mastery of the game. It analyses how late-stage player practices often replace exploration and discovery with efficiency and productivity. In conclusion it raises the need for a historically situated poetics of play.[more]

Book Reviews

Shira Chess, Play Like a Feminist.
by Esther MacCallum-Stewart

Play like a Feminist. (2020) by Shira Chess. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. ISBN: 9780262044387. 184 pp.[more]