I have just finished reading Jesper Juul’s A Casual Revolution: Reinventing Video Games and Their Players. For anyone interested in the casual/hardcore debate, I highly recommend this quick read (about 150 pages excluding research data). Since I’ve talked numerous times about the casual/hardcore debate, most often focusing on the gender implications, I thought it would be helpful to have a review of this great book.
I have always respected Juul’s work–it’s thoughtful, and I rarely find myself disagreeing with him. Actually, the only criticism I have is that I wish he would go into more depth concerning particular issues that he raises. The book begins with a meditation on the idea of casual games: how they came to be, how they have been typically relegated to a negative position in the video game world, and how other scholars have traditionally thought about them. According to Juul, most video game theorists have either focused on the game or on the player to define what casual and hardcore means. We have hardcore games, played by hardcore players, and we have casual games, played by casual gamers. But the nuances of this, and in particular the tenuousness of the lines that divide these terms, haven’t been explore satisfactorily.
What Juul does, that I really like, is that he doesn’t take the questioning of these terms to mean utter lawlessness. Just because he is making definitions messy, and calling into question the ways we think about them, doesn’t mean that we should have no terms, no definitions. In fact, he spends a lot of time nuancing casual and hardcore. He creates situational “sliders” that have multiple definitional components. For example, one way to example casual and hardcore players is to look at where they fall on the following continuums: fiction preference, game knowledge, time investment, and attitude toward difficulty (30). What Juul focuses on is not how accurate these are, or what the best way to distinguish between these two groups is, but rather as a way to look as perceived preferences and actual player preferences. It’s descriptive, not prescriptive.
Another interesting point Juul makes is about video game exceptionalism. In a nutshell, video game exceptionalism suggests that one reason for the staunch attitudes and exclusionary practices in the games community is that we try to fit video games into other things. We try to make games art, or entertainment, or narrative, or whatever. Juul suggests that video games may not be like anything we have ever experienced. They may be exceptional, and thus all of the rules are thrown out the window and that we need to learn from scratch how to deal with them. Considering how many times games I like have been denigrated because they’re too simple, or not graphically interesting, or too commercial, I rather like Juul’s notion of video game exceptionalism. If video games aren’t trying to be art, or to be whatever, then perhaps we can just enjoy them.
Finally, there is one line that I believe sums up the brilliance of this work: “The casual revolution is that moment we realize that the primary barrier to playing video games was not technology, but design” (146). This is what is at the heart of this book, and also why I worry that the video game industry–at least the big buck devs–may be heading in the wrong direction. We don’t need better graphics or newer and better consoles, but we need games that are better designed. Or if not better, at least designed with *us* in mind. Solitaire, the most popular computer game of all time, is free (in some cases), usable, casual, able to be interrupted, easy to play but difficult to master. So the casual game revolution was never really a revolution. But a rediscovery of who plays video games and why.
