Jesper Juul on the Game
Last week Jesper Juul — who’s visiting MIT from Copenhagen — gave a talk here called “About the Game.” It was very well received, impressing the audience members from Brown’s Graphics Group as well as those from German Studies.
One of the impressive things about Jesper’s talk was a definition of games he offered that I think is essentially correct — though it creates a typology in which the kind of game I played most while growing up (pen and paper RPGs) is considered borderline. Here are the parts of the definition:
- Rules
- Variable & quantifiable outcome
- Value assigned to outcomes
- Player effort
- Outcome associated with player
- Optional consequences
What makes the RPGs I played border cases, as I understand it, is that there’s a Game Master who does active interpretation of the rules during play — in some sense RPGs lack fixed rules. Of course, the only games I’ve ever played where we didn’t actively interpret rules at some point were computer games, but I didn’t find this a problem with Jesper’s talk because (a) he recognizes that these phenomena are not binary (he calls RPGs border cases, rather than throwing them out of the category of games) and (b) his main goal, as I see it, is to construct a definition useful for computer games.
I don’t think Jesper’s game definition is online anywhere, but he also talked about some of his ideas of game innovation contained in “Just what is it that makes computer games so different, so appealing?”