Speaker: Jesper Juul, New York Game Center
Time: Wednesday, January 13, 6-8 pm
Location: USC’s Robert Zemeckis Center for Digital Arts (RZC)
Room 201 Zemeckis Media Lab (ZML)
The Rise of Casual Games
It seems like only yesterday that video games were considered the province of males between 12 and 35. Yet with the launch of the Nintendo Wii, with the proliferation of casual games in browsers, with music games and cell phone games, video games seem to have broken out of their cultural niche. In this talk I will present a short history of the rise of casual games, and discuss its implications for game developers, player, and for the future of video games.
Jesper Juul has been working with the development of video game theory since the late 1990′s. He is a visiting arts professor at the NYU Game Center, but has previously worked at the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Lab at MIT and at the IT University of Copenhagen. His book Half-Real on video game theory was published by MIT press in 2005. His recently published book, A Casual Revolution, examines how puzzle games, music games, and the Nintendo Wii are bringing video games to a new audience. He maintains the blog The Ludologist on “game research and other important things”.