At first it was mainly women that played casual games online but now we have three brands to cater for a wide range audience because of the uptake from different demographics.

So we have come full circle, from catering to an audience that includes women, to catering to an audience that includes men.

It remains an open question how this will all play out with the new consoles. Has the time for consoles passed, or is there still a sufficiently large audience for them; an audience whose desires for games are not being fulfilled in mobile, browser-based or computer-based games?

]]> https://www.jesperjuul.net/ludologist/2013/11/26/at-first-it-was-mainly-women/feed/ 0 https://www.jesperjuul.net/ludologist/2012/04/25/a-casual-revolution-in-korean/ https://www.jesperjuul.net/ludologist/2012/04/25/a-casual-revolution-in-korean/#comments Wed, 25 Apr 2012 19:37:02 +0000 http://www.jesperjuul.net/ludologist/?p=1503 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.

I discussed this kind of “I am/am not a (casual) gamer” posturing briefly in A Casual Revolution, but what about the word itself?

Here is the Google Ngram viewer showing the frequency of the word gamer from 1900 to the present day.

I suppose the graph at first looks like what you would expect, but note how “gamer” only really becomes popular from 1990 and on – it was rarely used in relation to arcade games or early home computer games.

On a personal note this also explains why I never wondered that hard about whether I was or wasn’t a gamer: the word only became popular after my formative game-playing years in the 1980’s…

PS. Why is the curve flattening around 2005? Could it be that the rise of casual games is making the question moot?

It’s spot on in terms of picking up what I was thinking when I wrote the book, but then she is using it to discuss MMOs (and the development in a particular MMO),  something that I had not really thought the book to be about.

But that’s what’s so interesting (and a little scary) about writing theory: someone picks up on what you were thinking and applies it to something you hadn’t thought about … and what I wrote no longer belongs to me, but acquires all the meanings that is being put into it by other people. As it should be.

Half-Real, Kindle version.

A Casual Revolution, Kindle version.

I think academia tends to lag behind what is happening with video games outside the “core” space – even almost a year after A Casual Revolution came out, there is little writing on casual games. Even after Sony and Microsoft have changed their strategies to capture the new market.

Why this lag? I suspect that there is a typical selection problem that the people most likely to go into game studies are the people most dedicated to traditional game culture. But there really ought to be hordes of dedicated Facebook gamers doing PhDs on farming games.

The report in question is from a July 2010 workshop “Social Game Studies: What Do We Know, What Might We Learn?” under the following call:

“In tune with the relative newness of the hybrid medium that is social games, this workshop pursues two goals: One, to take stock of the academic and industry research on social games that has been done or is currently being conducted. Two, to identify what (if anything) makes social games different to video games on the one hand and social networks on the other: Which theoretical approaches and methodologies promise to capture these characteristics, which new data sources, methodologies and research questions do social games afford?”

Get the report here:

www.socialgamestudies.org/report

The event will feature
– Keynotes by Prof. Jesper Juul (Half-Real and Casual Revolution) and Christopher Sandberg (CEO and founder of The company P)
– Papers sessions presenting up-to-date Nordic research in the game area
– Two workshops, on Collecting and analyzing video data in game studies and designing and implementing pervasive games
– A social evening located in the new Digital Arts Centre in Kista, featuring music, good food and, of course, gaming

About the keynotes:
Christopher Sandberg is CEO and founder of International Interactive Emmy Award winning television and new media production company The company P. He has one and a half decade of experience in start-ups as CEO and as Executive Producer in television, online and mobile, ranging from drama to social applications and games. Sandberg is Executive Producer and Creative Director for the new project by Tim Kring (creator of Heroes), the Conspiracy For Good.

His keynote draw on experience from working with some of the leading showrunners in drama and having broadcast meet games, social media and live action street play. He will talk about the latest productions from The company P:  It is about letting the audience in to your world, and letting the shared experience out into the world”.

Jesper Juul has been working with the development of video game theory since the late 1990’s. He is currently at the NYU Game Center and The Danish Design School, but has previously worked at the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Lab at MIT and at the IT University of Copenhagen. His book Half-Real on video game theory was published by MIT press in 2005. His recently published book, A Casual Revolution, examines how puzzle games, music games, and the Nintendo Wii are bringing video games to a new audience.

He will be talking about The Casual Turn: Reinventing Video Games & reinventing Game Research

Registration fee includes coffee and tea breaks, lunches and conference dinner on Monday evening. The workshops have no registration fee but we need to know if you will participate.

Non Digra members need to become members, check http://www.digra.org/join

Early bird fees:
Regular – 130 Euro alt 1250 SEK
Student – 50 Euro alt 475 SEK

Registration after August 1:
Regular – 150 Euro alt 1450 SEK
Student – 70 Euro alt 650 SEK

For registration and further information, go to our website www.nordic-digra.org

The interview covers a range of issues, from A Casual Revolution to the use of video game studies in general.

To combat the idea that the only people who play games are teenage males and housemothers, Jesper Juul’s “A Casual Revolution” is a deftly argued and thoroughly researched recommendation. With the advent of the Nintendo’s Wii and social games like FarmVille on Facebook, video games of many shapes and sizes have become standard fare as swaths of previously ignored players now find themselves with controllers in hand. The result has been a muddling of the archetypes of “hardcore” and “casual” players. Juul, the visiting professor at New York University’s Game Center, paints a world of middle-aged women trying to kick fifty-hour-a-week-video-game habits and young professional men only clocking a few hours a week on their Xbox 360s before shuttling off to their cubicles.

Just Dance appears to be a dance game where the Wiimote tracks your dance moves. (A bit like ParaParaParadise I suppose.)

Now, this game wasn’t exactly a hit with the gamer press. Just Dance has a GameRanking of 53.6%. IGN rates it 2 out of 10:

I could try to talk about the visuals or the sound or sloppy way the game grades your dance moves, but I just don’t have the strength. It’s attention that the game, quite simply, doesn’t deserve. Do not buy this game. Do not rent this game, do not look at this game on the shelf, don’t even think about this game lest someone at Ubisoft find out and they prep a Just Dance 2. Such would be the end of all things, mark my words.

Sounds so bad it just might be good, doesn’t it? Amazon US users currently give it 4½ stars out of 5.

(Full disclosure: I got MW2 when it came out – and I really enjoy it. It’s just that I wouldn’t mind playing Just Dance as well. And that I enjoy watching the whole anti-casual posturing.)