Review by MrLipid
A Casual Revolution
Author Jesper Juul
Publisher MIT Press
Released 2010
Verdict: 5/5 Gold Star
“Let’s start with the hype. A Casual Revolution is terrific. A succinct, informative, thoughtful examination of the forces that have been, as its subtitle says, reinventing video games and their players. Oh, and on top of all that, it’s just plain fun to read.”
Jesper Juul thinks deep thoughts about games. As Visiting Assistant Arts Professor at the New York University Game Center, it’s what you’d expect him to do. But you might not expect him to be having so much fun while he’s doing it. Then again, he was playing games before he was studying them and continues to play them now.
The main theme of A Casual Revolution is this: Video games have gone mainstream. To support that thesis, Juul takes us through, among other things, the history of the card game of solitaire, starting with Lady Cadogan’s Illustrated Games of Patience, published in England in 1876. A hundred or so years passed and then Solitaire appeared on Windows 3.0 in 1990, causing Steve Meretzky to argue that it was the beginning of casual computer games as such.
Juul devotes an entire chapter to the origins and development of “match three” games, such as Bejeweled, characterizing them as “one of the only game types with no vocal proponents, only critics.” Juul uses match three to distinguish between what developers would prefer doing (not match three) and what customers find appealing (more match three, please).
Juul also takes us back to the more recent moment when the Wii first appeared, was roundly condemned for its feeble graphics, underwhelming CPU and general toyishness, and then proceeded to take over the world. The Wii’s mimetic interface (the Wiimote “mimics” the actions a player would go through if actually bowling, golfing, tennis, etc.) was ideal for casual, pick-it-up-and-play gaming. (Other games featuring a mimetic interface include Guitar Hero and Rock Band. And with the release of Sony’s Move and Microsoft’s Kinect, we’ll see what sort of game libraries develop for the consoles that were not designed to appeal to casual gamers.) Juul notes that casual gaming was what he was looking for without knowing it: “I now have meetings, papers to write, trips to make, and it has become harder to find the long stretches of time required for playing the large, time-intensive video games that I still love. Casual games just fit in better with my life.”
Juul then lays out just what constitutes the difference between the games he used to play (and enjoy) and the games he plays today. He examines and contrasts five characteristics: fiction, usability, interruptibility, difficulty and juiciness. Fiction refers to the world the game offers its players, usability refers to how quickly a player can begin playing, interruptibility refers to how easily a player can stop playing, difficulty refers to how challenging a game is and juiciness refers to what sorts of rewards a game gives its player as incentives to continue playing.
Core (what used to be called hardcore) gaming tends to be negative in its fictions (Juul uses “vampires and war” as shorthand), not immediately usable (Civilization IV, anyone?) or interruptible, exhibits a high level of difficulty and is variable in terms of juiciness. Casual gaming tends to be positive in its fictions, immediately usable, highly interruptible, and more difficult than might be expected. The difficulty is softened with juiciness. A setback in a casual game does not mean the game must be replayed from the beginning. One cannot make a fatal, game-ending mistake in Peggle.
Looking at in evolutionary terms, modern electronic games started out in the arcade with the goal of separating players from their quarters. Games had to be enticing enough to attract everyone’s attention, easy enough for just about anyone to play, and difficult enough to require endless restarts from those who decided to keep playing.
Early home consoles picked up the “win or game over” style of arcade play, only grudgingly coming to the idea of save points to allow gamers to have a non-gaming portion of their day. After all, the gamer has already bought the game. Once the console is attached to the TV, there is no longer any need to endlessly extort quarters in order to keep the game going.
As the computer became a platform for gaming, the old arcade rules persisted, mutating from simple games played until one won or lost to complex games that required a massive investment of time and deep familiarity with genre conventions. Gamers of a certain age will remember, perhaps fondly, the big game boxes, the bulky manuals, and the cheat sheets that listed all the essential key combinations. Gaming became a hobby for those able to concentrate for hours at a stretch. Meretzky feels that gaming began to become a niche activity around 1980 and stayed that way until Solitaire showed up a decade later. After that, gamers began to separate into, broadly speaking, two categories: those who sought to test themselves against a core experience and those who preferred more casual diversions. And, as Juul points out, a single player can claim membership in both categories by playing core games casually or casual games from a core orientation.
At the same time, a huge amount of effort and a massive investment were being dumped into improving the graphics capabilities of both computers and consoles. High definition televisions when connected to the latest and most powerful generation of consoles promised to equal or surpass computers in terms of graphic splendor. Massive screens and surround stereo would be, on more than one level, game changers. At least, that was the expectation. After all, hadn’t the core audience been clamoring for this sort of technology?
Maybe. But there was a group of gamers which had been growing since 1990 that wasn’t particularly concerned about such things. A group that, today, is perfectly happy playing games whose recommended specs (taken from a recent Big Fish Games title) are in this rather quiet neighborhood:
OS: Windows XP/Vista
CPU: 800 Mhz
RAM: 512 MB
DirectX: 8.1
Hard Drive: 186 MB
Or enjoying a bit of bowling or golf on the Wii or going portable with a DS. Or even downloading a playing a game on, of all things, a phone.
What was going on here? One way of putting it is that the technology was now mature enough to offer simple and engaging experiences on a variety of platforms. (Mature as in “not feeling compelled to show off every capability in every scene” — like those ill-conceived 3D epics that are forever tossing items at the audience to remind them that they’re paying to experience something in 3D.) The audience for these simple and engaging experiences had begun to form in 1990, one hand of Solitaire at a time.
Gaming as an activity had gone from core to mainstream. Surveys revealed that the typical gamer was more likely to be an older woman than a young male. The social component of playing simple games together online — the number of people playing FarmVille exceeds the size of the entire user base of Twitter — or discussing single player games on bulletin boards, has become as much a part of the experience as the actual play.
Juul, being a proper academic, uses survey data, sales data, historical research, and personal interviews with both players and developers, along with his own history as a gamer, to flesh out his description of this moment when video games went mainstream. And while aware that there are folks who view the rise of casual games as the end of gaming as it was intended to be, Juul simply shares his observations about what appears to be happening. A Casual Revolution is a reflection on a moment, not a diatribe or a eulogy.
As someone who has spent many happy hours exploring the worlds conjured up by this world’s game developers, I found bittersweet comfort in Juul’s admission that he no longer has the time to play the kinds of games that made him a gamer. Same here. Confronted with a new game that couples steep PC hardware requirements with a quirky, one-of-a-kind control scheme and little in the way of juiciness, a game of the sort that once might have had my eager attention, today I have to say, I’ll pass. (I’ll always remember the time we spent together, System Shock.) Or, for that matter, confronted with a game that features simple button mashing but which requires the purchase of, say, an Xbox 360 or a PS3, I’ll pass. (I’m looking at both of you, Halo Reach and Heavy Rain.)
What Juul has captured is the journey that many gamers of a certain age have taken. Those of us who were there when it all began now find ourselves wanting to experience, as much as possible with the lives we lead today, the joy of play that attracted us to games in the first place. For some, that means casual games. For others, well, here is a particularly good piece on how aging changes gaming.
Perhaps in his next book, Juul will examine what effect a world where games are mainstream is having on those who have never known anything else. Perhaps. Or would that be as futile as asking fish their opinion of water?
Send an email to the author of this review at mrlipid@tap-repeatedly.com.
Hmm, I think you just sold me a book, old bean.
[…] This post was mentioned on Twitter by karsonm and Lester Macintyre, Bradley. Bradley said: A Casual Revolution | Tap-Repeatedly: A setback in a casual game does not mean the game must be replayed from th… http://bit.ly/heNdUy […]
I love the way Juul describes – and MrLipid captures – the argument that it’s not “Core” versus “Casual,” like we’re about to rumble or something. It’s how we find our play and fit it into our world.
Plus the idea of The Gamer’s Journey. Since it all still exists in living memory those of us who game now started with more or less the same library and sampled from it throughout our lives. My heady school and college days long gone, like Juul (and most of the rest of you, I bet,) I have meetings, papers to write, trips to make, and it has become harder to find the long stretches of time required for playing the large, time-intensive video games that I still love.
Toss in children, bills, an other commitments, one wonders how there’s even time in the day for casual games. But the point I like is that it shouldn’t be considered a “demotion,” nor should Casual gamers be somehow “less” than Core gamers. All play is sacred. The ones we should pity are the ones who don’t play at all.
Excellent piece MrLipid. Those closing paragraphs really struck a chord with me, as did Harbour Master’s The Second Game when I read it some time last year.
I’m clinging on for bitter life here and while ever there’re people like Armand around innocently recommending Morrowind and willing to sink a few evenings a week into L4D2 I’ll have difficulty leaving core games behind.
There’s an irony in knowing that if I pick up this book I’m going to have trouble finding the time to read it.
Anyway, thanks for a fantastic read.
I find the concept of “fiction” here to be particularly intriguing, though I’m not sure if understand it entirely. Is Juul, essentially, talking about the tone of the milieu? When I think of casual games, strong plots and settings don’t generally come to mind. For instance, Pop-Caps’ games usually have the barest plots (if they have any at all), and their narratives are entirely skippable. However, the visuals that the plots imbue the games with usually have a fun-loving atmosphere, a more positive atmosphere.
I’m probably getting ahead of myself here (as I said, I’m still a little unclear on the concept), but I wonder if the perception that “core” games usually have more “negative” fictions comes from a stronger sense of responsibility to the setting than casual games. Many “core” games saddle the protagonists with the well-being of anywhere from a large group to, quite often, the entire world, failure at a mission or a game over screen certainly holds a major negative connotation in this respect. But when the balls get to close to my frog in Zuma, there isn’t much implication that I’ve let anyone down but myself.
Thinking about it more, I realized that the sort of overt apocalyptic pathos that “core” games seem to strive for is often the mark of hack jobs in most other forms of narratives (Bergman is usually considered a better filmmaker than Roland Emmerich). But I’m not sure if that’s related.
Good one!
I think I fall into the ‘plays core games casually’, probably the same as most of you – grabbing whatever time we can.
Still, we’ll all retire one day, and then we might revert back to hard core gamers.
More and more the people of My Generation have turned to playing core games casually. It’s a natural reflection of growing up with games, going through school with games, and then suddenly coming out and having a life and responsibilities. As we’ve all ruefully said many times, it’s harder and harder to play eight hours of Civ V straight through. Harder and harder to commit to the 100+ hours of a New Vegas. We still want to play these games, but often we have to settle for sampling them and moving on.
I think game development is sensing this and moving in a similar direction. Games are getting shorter… something I used to condemn, but now, provided it stays reasonable, I’m okay with it. They’re also getting shorter because of technical issues, of course, but there is a trend in design that’s, like, “Hey, we want people to finish our game, not just play the first 20 hours.” And I can really applaud the thinking.
It’s also a Money’s Worth issue. The 2-hour Portal was easily worth $50 or even $100 given how much I’ve played. Same could be said of Defense Grid, Immortal Defense, or even Minecraft. Similarly I put 150 hours at least into Oblivion and “got my money’s worth.”
While you have certain expectations when you’re laying out $50-$60 USD, said expectations can be for brevity and quality over enormity. Size, after all, doesn’t matter.
Here’s how Juul explains fiction:
“The first impression of a game comes from the presentation of what it is ostensibly about….The traditional hardcore game is often set in dangerous situations, allowing the player to take on the role of a soldier, or to crash cars, and so on. Casual games are often set in more positive and familiar settings. One could be tempted to say the sun always shines in casual games. In psychological terms, the fictions of the two games shown (Wii Sports and Gears of War) have different emotional valence, which refers to whether an emotion inclines you to approach something or to avoid it….Casual games almost exclusively contain fictions with positive valence. Traditional hardcore games generally have fictions with negative valence, even if a few traditional hardcore games, such as hardcore tennis games, have a positive valence.”