The thing with software though is that it stops working. But with, well, modern tools it turned out to be surprisingly quick to make my old compiled (Java!) game run in modern browsers.

Please play it here: https://jesperjuul.net/play/highseas/

The High Seas core team was my old collaborator Mads Rydahl and me, and we thought – quite prematurely – that match-3 in the style of Bejeweled was over, and hoped we could invent a new mechanic. We prototyped heavily using GameMaker and ended up with a new concept that merged the two main traditions of matching games, the “manipulate fallen tiles” of match-3 and the “manipulate falling tiles” of Tetris – in High Seas you can move everything, all the time. In addition, and I think this was inspired by the card game Set, you can make matches based on both similar colors and similar shapes.

Through persuasion and connections, we secured a deal with Game Trust, a casual game developer/tool company (fun fact: Elon Musk was on the company board).

This was a spare-time project for all of us, but also incredible amounts of work. As co-game designer and programmer, I had dozens of special-case situations to consider, as when the user tries dragging a falling tile to the right side of the screen, wrapping around to the left, just when a match is occurring, and new falling tiles are waiting for the player to release the tiles below, and a blocking tile anyway stands in the way in the middle of the line. And so on. It was a lot of programming of the sort where you have to balance any number of interlocking elements and think hard about the right steps for solving the conundrum in all possible situations. Was it also somewhat overengineered? For large projects I always end up making entire game engines, as I did here. On the other hand, that probably made it easier to convert to the present-day platforms.

2006-2007 was just at the peak of the downloadable casual games boom. Downloadable casual was a new thing, both for reaching a broader audience than the larger-budget games of the day and for the then-fancy new distribution method of downloading a game to your computer. In the initial release of High Seas, we had unfortunately taken “casual” too literally and made the game much too easy. If you see an echo of this experience in my two books A Casual Revolution and The Art of Failure, you are not wrong.

In the second version, we had found better difficulty balance (do try the Expert mode), and also added many more effects. I still enjoy playing High Seas, and now you can play it on a modern computer or on a phone.

Credits

Developed by: Soup Games & The Planet
Game design: Mads Rydahl and Jesper Juul
Graphical and model design: Simon Sonnichsen
Graphics & 3D: HappyFlyFish / Michael la-Cour and Jesper Fleng
Additional graphical design: Mads Rydahl
Sound: Kæv Gliemann
Story writer: Heather Chaplin
Programming: Jesper Juul
Special thanks to: Rasmus Keldorff

https://jesperjuul.net/handmadepixels/interviews/ismail.html

https://jesperjuul.net/handmadepixels/interviews/gage.html

Yes, in a way, but what do we mean by “better”?

In The Unseen Hand: The Influence of Visual and AI Literacy on AI Text-to-Image Generation, and its partner article Algorithmic Creativity, we studied a question on everybody’s mind at the moment:

If an “AI” can create content, such as images, from a typed prompt, do design skills still matter? Or do technical skills matter even more?

In collaboration with Mood Visuals, we asked students from a technical university and a design school to fulfill a brief of creating a “brutalist medieval castle.” We then tracked the prompts that students were using, and the experts from Mood Visuals rated the images on both aesthetic quality and on how well they fulfilled the brief.

As you can see in the paper, we had some hypotheses, but the main takeaways were the following:

1. The student groups created images that were rated as having equal visual appeal. Having visual skills (“visual literacy”) did not improve the aesthetic quality of the images.
2. But: Students with visual skills (“visual literacy”) were much better at fulfilling the task.
3. Visual design students also used a larger vocabulary, including more adjectives, and tried more varied prompts.

From this small study on the use of AI to generate concept art, we can see the outline of what AI image generation does (at least for the moment):
AI image generation has the democratizing effect of allowing everyone to create visually appealing images, but creating something that fulfills a task or is appropriate for a given situation continues to require expertise. 

Alessandro Canossa, Lisa Toender, Lucas Fellner, Jesper Juul, Willem Maden, and Jichen Zhu. 2025. “The Unseen Hand: The Influence of Visual and AI Literacy on AI Text-to-Image Generation.” IASDR Conference Series. https://dl.designresearchsociety.org/iasdr/iasdr2025/fullpapers/337.
https://jesperjuul.net/text/unseenhand/

Thanks especially to my co-organizer Alessandro Canossa, keynote speakers Valentina Nisi, Miguel Sicart, and Tim Garbos, program chairs Max Birk and Anastasia Salter, and to all helpful colleagues and volunteers at the academy. Thank you!

https://fdg2026.org

See you in August!

Read more and register here: https://fdg2026.org

Thanks to everybody who made it happen.

Visual Game & Media Design is a cross-disciplinary program open to all creative BA students.

Read more about the program here: https://royaldanishacademy.com/en/programme/visual-game-and-media-design

From the press:

A deep dive into the reflective modes of playfulness in video games.

Slowness and reflectiveness have always been part of the video game medium, though they have been used very differently throughout its history. In Zen and Slow Games, Víctor Navarro-Remesal challenges the dominant discourse of action and quick reflexes in video games to offer an analysis of reflectiveness as a style in games, tracing its evolution from its origins to the present time. Two labels are of particular importance: the Zen modes (and later, Zen games) of the 2000s, especially during the Casual Revolution, and the slow games or slow gaming movement, which started in the 2010s and is ongoing today. The term “reflective games” is offered as an umbrella to bring together these and other labels to raise awareness and discussion of slow gaming.

Praise:

This book brilliantly explores reflective games, a style that resists capitalism’s rush by creating spaces of peace, presence, and self-discovery. It weaves form, meaning, and everyday tactics into an inspiring vision of play.
Susana Tosca, author of Sameness and Repetition in Contemporary Media Culture and Understanding Videogames

A carefully crafted, profound critique of meditation and slowness in digital games, Zen and Slow Games takes us on a journey to the boundaries of the medium, detaching playfulness from the pressures of winning and performing otherwise dominant in games and contemporary societies.
Martin Roth, author of Unboxing Japanese Videogames and Thought-Provoking Play

In this age of neoliberal life coaching, time management, and endless self-optimization, many of us yearn for slower, more mindful lives. How these aspirations reflect in what and how we play is the focal theme of this timely, accessible, and nimble new book.
Stefano Gualeni, author of Fictional Games and Il Videogioco del Mondo