Casual Revolution

We used to think that video games were mostly for young men, but with the success ofthe Nintendo Wii, and the proliferation of games in browsers, cell phone games, and social gamesvideo games changed changed fundamentally in the years from 2000 to 2010. These new casual games arenow played by men and women, young and old. Players need not possess an intimate knowledge of videogame history or devote weeks or months to play. At the same time, many players of casual games showa 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 thisreinvention of video games, the game industry reconnects with a general audience. Many of today'scasual game players once enjoyed Pac-Man, Tetris, and other early games, only todrop out when video games became more time-consuming and complex. Juul shows that it is only byunderstanding what a game requires of players, what players bring to a game, how the game industryworks, and how video games have developed historically that we can understand what makes video gamesfun and why we choose to play (or not to play) them.

Jesper Juul is a researcher at the Danish Design School and an affiliate of the New York University Game Center. He is the author of Half-Real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds (2005), published by the MIT Press.