Category: my publications

On Zero-Player Games

Zero-Player Games. Or: What We Talk about When We Talk about Players is a paper I co-wrote with Staffan Björk for the Philosophy of Computer Games Conference in Madrid earlier this year (Staffan’s idea).

Zero-Player Games is one of my more philosophical papers, and deals with the topic of games without players. This is obviously something of a contradiction in terms, but the paper works by looking at interesting edge cases of what we consider to be a game.

It turns out that each of the edge cases we examine (such as Conway’s Game of Life or StatBuilder) tells us something fundamental about both games and players. In other words: by removing players from the equation, we show what was removed.

The paper thereby also questions seemingly “player-centric” theories of games: it is not uncommon to hear theorists claim that games are  nothing by themselves, but only come into being when played. We show that such arguments overlook the fact that players have preferences about which games they prefer to play.

Here is the abstract:

Do games need people? If so, what is it that makes people important to games? It can seem self-evident that games are artifacts designed to be used by players, but in this paper we will discuss the paradoxical idea of zero-player games. We do not wish to argue against the study of players, but we believe that many common conceptions of players are too vague to be useful. Based on the examination of zero-player games, we provide five subcomponents to help in the understanding of the player concept. Expressed as questions, these are: Is this a human player? Does the player have agency? Does the player play over time? Does the player appear to have intentionality? Does the player exhibit aesthetic preferences?

Read the paper here: http://www.jesperjuul.net/text/zeroplayergames/

 

PS. For more reading, here are all the papers from the Philosophy of Computer Games conference 2012 (scroll down).

游戏抽象度 (A Certain Level of Abstraction in Chinese)

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 Like Dying a Lot

Over at Kill Screen, a discussion I had with Jamin Brophy-Warren about failure in video games: I Like Dying a lot.

JBW: Do you think the way that game players deal with failure has relevance to the way that people deal with failure in life?

JJ: It’s very obvious that your personality kind of transfers to a certain extent. If you’re having problems dealing with major challenges in games, you probably also have problems in real life and vice versa. The thing with games is they allow for a kind of plausible deniability.

This is something I first read in Steven Pinker, who talks about how this happens with language typically. So if you say something like, “Nice laptop you’ve got there, it would be a shame if something happened to it,” that has a plausible deniability. Obviously there is a threat, but there’s a small way out that you could deny it’s the threat that it really was.

We have this freedom in games to take it seriously, even though it may not matter financially or whatever to you. But there’s also a freedom to not take it seriously. There’s a freedom in games to deny that the distress you were showing was all that important. In the 2010 World Cup, when the U.S. lost to Ghana, The New York Posthad a front page saying, ‘This sport is stupid anyway.’

The Paradox of Interactive Tragedy: Can a Video Game have an Unhappy Ending?

The conference organizers of the Storyworlds Across Media conference in Mainz have put up the videos from the July 2011 conference.

Here is the video of me talking about The Paradox of Interactive Tragedy: Can a Video Game have an Unhappy Ending?

This a chapter from my upcoming book on Failure, where I revisit a question that I dodged in Half-Real: Can a video game have an unhappy ending? (Answer is yes, in some ways, with modifications, it’s complicated.)

(The video contains a Red Read Redemption spoiler. You have been warned.)

The Dangers of Games in the Workplace

In the wake of Jane McGonigal’s Reality is Broken, I participated this week in a round table at Zócalo Public Square on the subject of “How Will Video Games Change the Way We Work?” The other participants were Mark Deuze, Paul Dourish, Nick Yee, and David Rejeski.

Here is my contribution.

Games can be a huge help—but have huge limitations

Reality is Broken makes a strong case for applying the lessons of video games to work, and to the rest of the world. While I am very sympathetic to this idea, I would like to add a caveat: Games work well in part because they provide clear goals and feedback, but the application of clear goals and feedback to work environments has in many cases proved disastrous. The employees of (for example) Washington Mutual have explained how they were being measured exclusively on the number of loans they were approving (clear goals), and how they were threatened with sanctions if they asked too many questions about a customer’s ability to pay (feedback). In fact, much of the financial crisis was due to the application of game-like design principles to work, where employees were forced to work toward short-term goals that were detrimental to the health of their company and the economy at large. In the Eastern Bloc, Polish furniture factories used to be rewarded on the basis of the weight of their total output, and consequently made the heaviest furniture in the world.

The key is to recognize that it is fine to set up goals and feedback in work environments only as long as everybody – from CEO to temp employee – understands that performance measures only give a partial image of reality. Clear goals and feedback are only inspiring in work situations when we have the discretion to decide how seriously we want to take them, and as long as there is no higher-level manager that takes the performance measure literally anyway. Games are also enjoyable because they give us wiggle room. If we are to use game design principles outside games, we need to make sure that the wiggle room is still there; we need to make sure that we are still allowed to use our sound judgment when faced with a performance goal.

I am probably coming out as a skeptic of gamification here, but the point really is that game conventions should not be blindly applied everywhere.

My argument is more fully developed in the book on Failure that I am currently working on.

Depth in one Minute: A Conversation about Bejeweled Blitz

I have posted an essay called Depth in one Minute: A Conversation about Bejeweled Blitz, which I co-wrote with Rasmus Keldorff for the new Well Played 2.0 anthology.

This is a conversation about the design and merits of the Blitz format, about how we develop strategies, about chance, about the danger of burning out on a specific game, and about the difference between younger and older players.

Incidentally, this is the fourth time I have written about Bejeweled (first time about matching tile games, second time about casual games, third time as game of the decade). It’s a bit like writing about haiku or minimalism – because there is so little to see, there is so much to say.

Read the paper here: http://www.jesperjuul.net/text/depthinoneminute/

Bejeweled: Game of the Decade

Over at Htlit.com, I have a short text arguing that Bejeweled is the most important game of the 2000’s (the decade, that is). (Waiting for the protests from a crowd of angry gamers.)

Viewed strictly as a game design, this probably isn’t the most enjoyable game of the decade. Neither is it the most innovative, being rather an incremental development based of a number of existing designs.What makes Bejeweled the game of the decade is its central role in the casual revolution: This game was instrumental in creating the first video game distribution channel aimed at an older and predominantly female audience (downloadable casual games), hence redefining our ideas of what a video game could be and who could play video games. Furthermore, its basic gameplay of swapping tiles to make colored matches has taken on a life of its own, now playable on cell phones and aeroplanes; as relaxed game sessions without any time pressure; packaged as a role-playing game set in a fantasy world (Puzzle Quest); as a one-minute intensive game for competing against friends (Bejeweled Blitz). That is the importance of Bejeweled: showing us how many different things video games can be, showing us that there are many ways to play, use, and enjoy video games.