The Pure Game: A Short History of Video Game Aesthetics

Jesper Juul, visiting professor at the NYU Game Center, delivers his talk at the Art History of Games Symposium on February 5, 2010 in the High Museum of Art's Rich Auditorium on the campus of the Woodruff Arts Center, in midtown Atlanta. The symposium was presented by Georgia Tech and the Savannah College of Art and Design.

With the continuing recognition of video games as a cultural form comes an ongoing discussion about what video games should be. In this talk I will sketch a history of aesthetical arguments for "pure" video games. Such arguments have worked by identifying a single important quality of video games that is then to be protected against dilution. Examples include the idea that video games should only be rule-based systems, and the newer position that video games should be "immersive" simulated worlds. These, Juul argues, are flawed arguments, but arguments that nevertheless play a significant role in the history of video games.

Jesper Juul is an influential theorist in the field of video game studies. He is currently a visiting professor at the New York University Game Center and has been a visiting scholar in comparative media studies at MIT. He holds a Ph.D. in video game theory from the Center for Computer Games Research in Copenhagen, where he held a position as an assistant professor until mid-2007. Dr. Juul also has worked as a designer and programmer in video game and chat development, and participated in the Indie Game Jam.

He has been working with the development of video game theory since the late 1990s. His more recent work deals with the fictional aspects of video games as well. His book on video game theory, Half-Real: Video Games Between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds, was published by the MIT Press in 2005. The book was named by designer Ernest Adams as one of the "50 Books for Everyone in the Game Industry." His recently published book, A Casual Revolution, examines how puzzle games, music games, and Nintendo Wii are bringing video games to a new audience. Juul maintains the blog, "The Ludologist," on game research and other important things

Materials hosted by SMARTech, Georgia Tech's institutional repository, ‪http://smartech.gatech.edu/.

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Education

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• art history of games
• video games
• georgia tech
• scad
• nyu game center
• juul