half-real – The Ludologist

Tic Tac Toe and Conway’s Game of Life in Javascript

Jesper — Thu, 30 Jul 2015 12:39:39 +0000

For the Half-Real website (10 years ago!) I made two example programs to support the book’s discussions: an implementation of Conway’s Game of Life and a Tic Tac Toe program that plays perfectly by simply going through all possible game states.

Time passes, and I can no longer count on browsers running the Java applets that I originally wrote the programs in. They never ran on tablets and mobile devices either. And I dislike websites with broken applets.

So I have rewritten them to work in JavaScript. They feel like they always did, except they launch faster – and run on mobile phones and tablet:

PS. Tech notes: I did this using GWT, which compiles Java code to JavaScript. The good news is that GWT really works and consistently converts all Java logic to JavaScript. The more complicated issues concern (as we may expect) that all UI calls are different, and especially that Java is Thread-based, but JavaScript is callback-based, so any program flow that relies on threads (as in my case) has to completely reworked.

Half-Real published as Paperback

Jesper — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 16:20:56 +0000

MIT Press has now published Half-Real in a paperback edition.

It’s just like the hardback, except lighter and cheaper!

Get it from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk or your local independent bookseller.

Podcast Interview in the Another Castle Series

Jesper — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 15:00:22 +0000

Game Design Advance has posted a podcast interview with me as part of the Another Castle series. The interview, here, is about the state and history of video game studies as well as a dive into some of the concepts from Half-Real. Other interviewees in the Another Castle series include Frank Lantz, Anna Anthropy, Greg … Continue reading

New Paper Posted: A Certain Level of Abstraction

Jesper — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 23:09:24 +0000

I have posted my conference paper from September’s DiGRA 2007 conference in Tokyo:

The paper A Certain Level of Abstraction discusses abstraction in games. This is the paper’s abstract:

ABSTRACT

This paper explores levels of abstraction: Representational games present a fictional world, but within that world, players are only allowed to perform certain actions; the fictional world of the game is only implemented to a certain detail.

The paper distinguishes between abstraction as a core element of video game design, abstraction as something that the player decodes while playing a game, and abstraction as a type of optimization that the player builds over time.

Finally, the paper argues that abstraction is a related to the magic circle of games and to rules as such.

Games referenced include Cooking Mama, Diner Dash: Flo on the Go, Karate Champ and The Marriage.

The paper is a bit of a follow-up to some of the rules & fiction discussions in Half-Real – you think you are finished, but you are not.

http://www.jesperjuul.net/text/acertainlevel/

What do Games Mean? Braid, then flOw pulled from Slamdance

Jesper — Mon, 08 Jan 2007 23:31:06 +0000

More fallout from Peter Baxter’s decision to remove Super Columbine Massacre from the Slamdance festival:

First Jonathan Blow pulled Braid, and now Jenova Chen has pulled flOw.

Not much to say, the error of Baxter’s decision so obvious, and Blow and Chen deserving credit for sticking out their neck.

The basic problem is this: For unknown reasons, some people assume that games always condone the actions of the player or the events in the game. This is obviously wrong, so let me offer a broader perspective with what I wrote in Half-Real about what games mean:

Where is the moral?

As a first example, consider Cecil B. DeMille’s film The Ten Commandments (1956). With Charlton Heston playing the part as Moses, we follow the biblical tale about the birth of Moses, his adoption, the exodus from Egypt, Moses parting the waters, and finally receiving the Ten Commandments from God. In this film, it is clear that the protagonist is good, and that his actions are good. This means that we see the protagonist as carrier of the film’s moral, but are protagonists always good? We can compare the Ten Commandments to Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni: The personal goal of Don Giovanni is to seduce as many women as possible, something at which he is sublimely skilled. Towards the end of the opera, Don Giovanni is offered the option of repenting his sins, but he refuses and is finally swallowed by the flames of hell. It should be clear that the moral of the opera is that God punishes sinners, and that the protagonist demonstrates what we should not do. We do not automatically assume that the actions of a protagonist are “good” or “right”.

[…]

A meaningful car crash

We can see why it would be a misunderstanding to see a game as an expression of the players wanting to perform the in-game actions in reality. Games are rather – like stories – things that we use to relate to death and disaster. Not because we want them to happen, but because we know they exist. Consider the game Burnout 2 (Criterion Studios 2002). Burnout 2 can be played in a special crash mode, where the object is to drive into a busy intersection at full speed in order to create as large pile-ups as possible (fig. 5.18). It should be obvious that we do not play this game because we want traffic accidents, but because we know they exist and because we want to consider the possibility of death and destruction.

Figure ‎5.18. Burnout 2 (Criterion Studios 2002), crash mode: Create the largest traffic accident possible.

The audience of a movie does not automatically assume that the protagonist does good, and neither does the player of a video game believe that the protagonist of the game does good. A game is rather play with identities, where the player at one moment performs an action considered morally defensible, and the next moment tries something that the player considers indefensible. The player chooses one mission or another, tries to complete the mission in one way or another, tries to do “good” or “evil”. Games are playgrounds where players can experiment with doing things they would or would not normally do.

[…]

I think that having the tools for discussing games, and remembering how we interpret other cultural forms can prevent us from making na?ve, literal interpretations of games.

(Half-Real, p. 191-194).

Half-Real nominated for Game Developer Front Line Awards

Jesper — Tue, 12 Dec 2006 18:49:50 +0000

OK, for that I am honored. Game Developer Magazine has nominated Half-Real for best book in the Game Developer Front Line Awards. Half-Real is obviously not a book about game development, but it was certainly intended to be useful in many of the discussions that pop up around games and development.

The book nominees are quite different, so let’s see what happens.

SAN FRANCISCO, Nov. 28 /PRNewswire/ — The editors of CMP Technology’s Game Developer have named the finalists for the 2006 Front Line Awards, the magazine’s ninth annual evaluation of the year’s best game-making tools in the categories of programming, art, audio, hardware, game engine, middleware, and books.

The final award winners, plus one inductee to the Front Line Awards Hall of Fame chosen for its outstanding contribution to the game development industry for five years or more, will be announced in the January 2007 issue of Game Developer, available on newsstands beginning January 17, 2007.

The finalists for the 2006 Game Developer Front Line Awards are:

ENGINES
Torque Game Builder 1.1.1, Garage Games
Valve Source Engine, Valve
Unreal Engine 3, Epic
HeroEngine, Simutronics Corporation
Gamebryo 2.2, Emergent

BOOKS
"Better Game Characters By Design,"
Katherine Isbister, Morgan Kaufmann
"3D Game Textures: Create Professional Game Art Using Photoshop,"
Luke Ahearn, Focal Press
"ShaderX4,"
Wolfgang Engel (ed.), Charles River Media
"Game Writing: Narrative Skills for Videogames,"
Chris Bateman, Charles River Media
"Half-Real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds,"
by Jesper Juul, The MIT Press

HARDWARE
FireGL V7300, ATI
GEForce 7950GX2, Nvidia
PhysX, Ageia and BFG Technologies
Alienware Mj12 8550i workstation, Alienware/Dell
Xbox 360 XMA Audio Decompression Hardware, Microsoft

MIDDLEWARE
AI.implant, Engenuity Technologies Inc.
SpeedTree 4.0, IDV
Havok FX 4.0, Havok
Euphoria, NaturalMotion
Kynapse SDK 4, Kynogon SA

PROGRAMMING
XNA Game Studio Express, Microsoft
Perforce SCM 2006.1, Perforce Software
NVPerfKit2, Nvidia
IBM Rational Purify Plus v7.0, IBM
DevTrack 6.0, TechExcel

ART
Modo 202, Luxology
Maya 8, Autodesk
Corel Painter IX.5, Corel
Softimage Face Robot, Softimage
MotionBuilder 7.5, Autodesk

AUDIO
Wwise 2006.2.1, Audiokinetic
Miles Sound System v7.q, RAD Game Tools
CRI ADX, CRI Middleware Co. Ltd.
Vivox Precision Studio and the Vivox Network managed service, Vivox
ISACT, Creative Labs

For more information, please visit Game Developer online at www.gdmag.com.

Half-Real Reviews and Commentary at RCCS

Jesper — Sun, 03 Dec 2006 18:49:49 +0000

The Resource Center for Cyberculture Studies has posted two new reviews of Half-Real: One by Curt Carbonell, one by Randy Nichols. And I have written a short response.

Complete announcement follows:

a new set of book reviews [ http://rccs.usfca.edu/booklist.asp ] from

the Resource Center for Cyberculture Studies for December 2006:

1. Allegories of Communication: Intermedial Concerns from Cinema to the

Digital

Editors: John Fullerton & Jan Olsson

Publisher: John Libbey Publishing, 2004

Review 1: Kristen Daly

2. Close Reading New Media: Analyzing Electronic Literature

Editors: Jan Van Looy & Jan Baetens

Publisher: Leuven University Press, 2003

Review 1: Mary Leonard

3. Eloquent Images: Word and Image in the Age of New Media

Editors: Mary E. Hocks & Michelle R. Kendrick

Publisher: MIT Press, 2003

Review 1: Vika Zafrin

Review 2: Alan Razee

Author Response: Mary Hocks

4. Half-Real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds

Author: Jesper Juul

Publisher: MIT Press, 2005

Review 1: Curt Carbonell

Review 2: Randy Nichols

Author Response: Jesper Juul

5. How Images Think

Author: Ron Burnett

Publisher: MIT Press, 2004

Review 1: Leanne Stuart Pupchek

Author Response: Ron Burnett

6. Internet Politics: States, Citizens and New Communication Technologies

Author: Andrew Chadwick

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2006

Review 1: Viviane Serfaty

Author Response: Andrew Chadwick

7. Literate Lives in the Information Age: Narratives of Literacy from

the United States

Authors: Cynthia L. Selfe & Gail E. Hawisher

Publisher: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2004

Review 1: Lisa A. Kirby

Author Response: Cynthia L. Selfe & Gail E. Hawisher

8. Mobile Cultures: New Media in Queer Asia

Editors: Chris Berry, Fran Martin, Audrey Yue

Publisher: Duke University Press, 2003

Review 1: Terri He

Author Response: Chris Berry, Fran Martin, & Audrey Yue

9. My First Recession: Critical Internet Culture in Transition

Author: Geert Lovink

Publisher: V2/NAi Publishers, 2003

Review 1: Michel Bauwens

10. Rhetorical Democracy: Discursive Practices of Civic Engagement

Editor: Gerard Hauser, Amy Grim

Publisher: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2004

Review 1: David Schulz

11. The Deepening Divide: Inequality in the Information Society

Author: Jan A. G. M. van Dijk

Publisher: Sage, 2005

Review 1: Alan Zaremba

12. The Digital Sublime: Myth, Power, and Cyberspace

Author: Vincent Mosco

Publisher: MIT Press, 2004

Review 1: Dale Bradley

Author Response: Vincent Mosco

13. The Souls of Cyberfolk: Posthumanism as Vernacular Theory

Author: Thomas Foster

Publisher: University of Minnesota Press, 2005

Review 1: Michele Braun

Review 2: Kim Toffoletti

Author Response: Thomas Foster

14. Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction

Author: Nick Montfort

Publisher: MIT Press, 2003

Review 1: Russell Mills

Review 2: T. Michael Roberts

Author Response: Nick Montfort

Books You Should Read

Jesper — Fri, 13 Oct 2006 01:17:24 +0000

If you’re in the game industry, Ernest Adams has made a list of 50 books you should read. It’s at Next-Gen.
It’s an excellent list – OK, so Half-Real is on it – lots of breadth, so many things to go into.
For design, I really would put Tracy Fullerton’s (et.al.) Game Design Workshop on the list though.

Half-Real: Sample Chapters Available

Jesper — Fri, 26 May 2006 14:22:42 +0000

For your perusal, I have made a few sample chapters of my book Half-Real available on the website:

The Preface (in which I talk about my first video game)
The Introduction (the overview of the field)
The References (the texts and the games)
The Index (the people, the subjects, and the games)

I am also working on an update to the dictionary, which should be ready soon.

Half-Real: The Book is Here!

Jesper — Mon, 28 Nov 2005 20:36:44 +0000

I am happy to announce that my book, Half-Real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds has now been published by MIT Press.

Half-Real is an attempt at creating a basic theory of video games: In the book I discuss what video games are and how they relate to non-digital games, how players learn to use a game, how players imagine the world of a game, and why video games are fun.

Half-real is a book on video game theory, but it is generally readable. As for method, the book is an eclectic mix of theories on games, film and literary theory, computer science, and psychology.

In addition to the introduction, the book has five parts:

Classic game model: Chapter 2 presents a classic game model, whose contents are inspired by a number of previous writers on games. The model describes how games have been constructed in a specific historical period, while allowing for the possibility that games can change and develop from an older model.

Rules: Chapter 3 is inspired mostly by discussions in the game development community, and attempts to apply some terminological and methodological stringency to the discussion of rules in games. In order to describe games as rule-based systems, I draw on computer science, on the sciences of complexity, and on economical game theory. In order to describe the player’s use and experience of the rules of a game, I draw on Marcel Danesi’s writings on puzzles (2002), some game design theory, and some cognitive science.

Fiction: The goal of chapter 4 is to provide an account of the fictional aspect of games, but an account that covers the spectrum from abstract games, to games with incoherent fictional worlds to games with detailed fictional worlds. To be able to discuss this spectrum, the theory of fictional worlds is employed.

Rules & Fiction: Chapter 5 is the synthesis of the two perspectives of rules and fiction and discusses their interactions by way of multiple detailed examples.

Chapter 6 sums up the points of the book and provides some further perspectives.

The book is based on numerous game examples, with more than 100 screenshots from the past 40 years of video games.

The book’s companion website is up at http://www.half-real.net.

The website also contains A dictionary of video game theory, an expanding dictionary of video game theory terms.

Though Half-Real shares its title with my PhD work, this book is brand new, all together nicer, more readable, more fun, and just better.

A lot of work went into this book, so I hope you like it!