Category: my publications

Variation over Time – The Transformation of Space in Single-Screen Action Games

Here is a paper I wrote a few years ago but never posted: Variation over Time – The Transformation of Space in Single-Screen Action Games was published in the Space Time Play anthology in 2007.

At that time, I was becoming interested in doing detailed analyses of specific video game designs. (Also evident in my Swap Adjacent paper.) I think it is important to paint the big picture, but I find it interesting to supplement this with more specific examinations of very focused topics. The big and the small pictures are then meant to supplement each other.

Variation over Time concerns the kind of early video game design where variation was provided by opening the playing field during the course of a level. Examples include Space Invaders, (Ms.) Pac-Man, Pengo, and Super Bomberman. From the paper:

My interest here is in a specific way of providing variation, the qualitative change of difficulty that is created by opening the playing field during a game level. This is a type of design where obstacles are gradually removed and the playing field becomes more open as a result. We can see this design in a number of board games (e.g. backgammon, chess, checkers), and it was a popular design in the non-scrolling action video game, most prominently in the 1980s. But for reasons I will discuss later, this design has become unusual in contemporary video games. Consider the early video game Space Invaders (Taito 1977) as a first example. (Figure 1.)


Figure 1. Space Invaders (Taito 1977)

More.

游戏、玩家、世界: 对游戏本质的探讨 (The Game, the Player, the World translated to Chinese)

Guan Pingping of Zhejiang University has been so kind as to translate my paper The Game, the Player, the World: Looking for a Heart of Gameness into Chinese.

Get it here: 游戏、玩家、世界: 对游戏本质的探讨.

A Casual Revolution is out!

A Casual Revolution: Reinventing Video Games and Their Players has just been published by MIT Press.

casualrevolution_200A Casual Revolution is my take on what is happening with video games right now:

  • Why is the Nintendo Wii more successful than the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3?
  • Why is the audience for video games expanding?
  • Who plays Bejeweled, and why?
  • What is a casual player? What is casual game design?
  • Are casual games a return to the arcade game, or are they something new?
  • How did Solitaire become one of the most popular video games?
  • What is the secret behind the success of Guitar Hero and Rock Band?
  • Why is Parcheesi/Ludo a social game? Why is Animal Crossing?
  • Does the rise of casual games mean the downfall of hardcore games?
  • … and more.

A Casual Revolution is a 256-page book about what is important: The joy of the casual video games that we play during a work break, on phones, with the family, or with friends at a late-night party.

The book includes 100 illustrations as well as interviews with game players and developers.

Get A Casual Revolution from your neighborhood bookstore or from your favorite online retailer.

The book’s companion website is: http://www.jesperjuul.net/casualrevolution/

The official MIT Press page: http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=11844

Thanks to everybody who made this book possible!

-Jesper

Introduction to Game Time – the podcast

Ryan Wiancko from IndustryBroadcast has once again been so kind as to provide a podcast for a paper of mine.

This time it’s Introduction to Game Time – An examination of game temporality, which was published in the First Person anthology and subsequently included in Half-Real in revised form. (The paper is also known as “Time to Play”, which I find is the better title.)

Click here for the podcast.

My Upcoming Book: A Casual Revolution

casualrevolution

Update November 2009: A Casual Revolution is now out. Read more on the book’s web page: http://www.jesperjuul.net/casualrevolution/

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Announcing my next book, A Casual Revolution: Reinventing Video Games and Their Players.

Set for release in November 2009, A Casual Revolution is my take on what is happening with video games right now:

  • Why is the Nintendo Wii more successful than the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3?
  • Why and how is the market for video games expanding?
  • Who plays Bejeweled, and why?
  • What is a casual player? Do casual players even exist?
  • What is casual game design?
  • Are casual games a throwback to the arcade game, or are they something new?
  • How did Solitaire become one of the most popular video games?
  • What is the secret behind the success of Guitar Hero and Rock Band?
  • Why is Parcheesi a social game? Why is Animal Crossing?
  • Does the rise of casual games mean the downfall of the hardcore game?
  • … and much more.

I will post more information about the book as we near the publication date!

Official description

The enormous popularity of the Nintendo Wii, Guitar Hero, and smaller games like Bejeweled or Zuma has turned the stereotype of the obsessed young male gamer on its head. Players of these casual games are not required to possess an intimate knowledge of video game history or to devote weeks or months to play. At the same time, many players of casual games show a dedication and skill that is anything but casual. In A Casual Revolution, Jesper Juul describes this as a reinvention of video games, and of our image of video game players, and explores what this tells us about the players, the games, and their interaction.

With this reinvention of video games, the game industry reconnects with a general audience. Many of today’s casual game players once enjoyed Pac-Man, Tetris, and other early games, only to drop out when video games became more time consuming and complex. For a long time, video games asked players to structure their lives to fit the demands of a game; with casual games, it is the game that is designed to fit into the lives of players. These flexible games make it possible for everyone to be a video game player.

Juul shows that it is only by understanding what a game requires of players, what players bring to a game, how the game industry works, and how video games have developed historically that we can understand what makes video games fun and why we choose to play (or not to play) them.

Endorsements

  • “An indispensible read for anyone interested or working in the field of video games. Jesper Juul makes sense of the shifting terrain of video game audiences and proves to be one of the finest minds in video games. A ground-breaking book!”
    –Sean Baptiste, Manager of Community Development, Harmonix Music Systems
  • “A Casual Revolution is a hard look at the unique characteristics of games outside of the hardcore. Juul pushes past the prejudice that casual games are somehow lesser experiences and presents a multifaceted view of ‘casualness,’ casual players and the non-trivial role of these deeply engaging games in our social and cultural lives.”
    –Tracy Fullerton, Director, USC Game Innovation Lab, USC School of Cinematic Arts, Interactive Media Division
  • “A thoughtful examination of casual gaming. I wouldn’t be surprised to find this book sitting on the shelves of game developers, marketers, and scholars. Juul has combined player ethnography, developer interviews, and informed analysis to produce an exemplary piece of game research.”
    –Chaim Gingold, Designer, Spore Creature Creator


Links

Official MIT press page.

Preorder from Amazon.

Without a Goal – the podcast

Ryan Wiancko of Industry Broadcast has been kind enough to create a podcast of my paper Without a Goal: On open and expressive games.

From the paper:

According to a widespread theory, video games are goal-oriented, rule-based activities, where players find enjoyment in working towards the game goal. According to this theory, game goals provide a sense of direction and set up the challenges that the players face.

However, the last few decades have seen many things described as “games” that either do not have goals, or have goals that are optional for the player: Sims 2 (Maxis 2004) has no stated goals, but is nevertheless extremely popular. The also popular Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (Rockstar Games North 2005) is superficially a goal-oriented game, yet the game allows the player to perform a wide range of actions while ignoring the game goal.

Get the podcast here!

Easy to Use and Incredibly Difficult: On the Mythical Border between Interface and Gameplay

Should a good game have an easy interface, but difficult gameplay? How can we tell the difference between the two, between interface and gameplay?

“Easy to Use and Incredibly Difficult: On the Mythical Border between Interface and Gameplay” is a paper I co-wrote with Marleigh Norton and which we presented at the Foundations of Digital Games Conference in April 2009.

The paper is meant as an in-depth examination of the common argument that the interface of a game should be easy-to-use. We argue that this is not necessarily the case.

In the paper we make the case that first of all, there is no way to clearly distinguish between interface and gameplay. Secondly, even when we can identify the interface in a given game, a difficult-to-use interface may very well be part of the core challenge of the game. In other words, no: good game does not equal easy interface + difficult gameplay.

For example, Street Fighter II has an interface that makes it easier to move your character than the interface of Toribash does, but that does not mean that it is a better game. It simply means that Toribash places part of its challenge in the basic movement of the character.


Street Fighter II

Toribash


Paper abstract:

In video game literature and video game reviews, video games are often divided into two distinct parts: interface and gameplay. Good video games, it is assumed, have easy to use interfaces, but they also provide difficult gameplay challenges to the player. But must a good game follow this pattern, and what is the difference between interface and gameplay? When does the easy-to-use interface stop, and when does the challenging gameplay begin? By analyzing a number of games, the paper argues that it is rare to find a clear-cut border between interface and gameplay and that the fluidity of this border characterizes games in general. While this border is unclear, we also analyze a number of games where the challenge is unambiguously located in the interface, thereby demonstrating that “easy interface and challenging gameplay” is neither universal nor a requirement for game quality. Finally, the paper argues, the lack of a clear distinction between easy interface and challenging gameplay is due to the fact that games are fundamentally designed not to accomplish something through an activity, but to provide an activity that is pleasurable in itself.