Stacey Mason reviewed Half-Real by Jesper Juul
Review of 'Half-Real' on 'Goodreads'
4 stars
Even 7 years after its publication Half-Real remains a landmark moment in the development of Game Studies as a field. Juul's approach to games bridges a formal analysis of their rules and systems with a nuanced approach to their fiction. Half-Real offers several useful, citable definitions and concepts and provides good outlines and approaches to exploring games, particularly through their formal qualities.
That said, the book is not without problems. As with any book in which the primarily goal is establishing definitions and boundaries, edge-cases are many, and the categories are sometime contradictory. Juul, a staunch ludologist, does not examine the fiction of games in anywhere near the depth that he explores their systems. Still, from the approach of both a researcher and a designer, having formal boundaries is useful for understanding where games still need exploration. There are a few places where his categorizations could have used a little …
Even 7 years after its publication Half-Real remains a landmark moment in the development of Game Studies as a field. Juul's approach to games bridges a formal analysis of their rules and systems with a nuanced approach to their fiction. Half-Real offers several useful, citable definitions and concepts and provides good outlines and approaches to exploring games, particularly through their formal qualities.
That said, the book is not without problems. As with any book in which the primarily goal is establishing definitions and boundaries, edge-cases are many, and the categories are sometime contradictory. Juul, a staunch ludologist, does not examine the fiction of games in anywhere near the depth that he explores their systems. Still, from the approach of both a researcher and a designer, having formal boundaries is useful for understanding where games still need exploration. There are a few places where his categorizations could have used a little more defense and insight into his methodology, which particularly stand out since many other arguments seem watertight. As a whole, however, his explanations are interesting and provocative.
The tone of the book is very academic, and as such I wouldn't recommend this book to a casual reader, or even to most (non-academic) designers. To a researcher, however, this book is an indispensable resource. It points to intersections with many disciplines and offers great references for further exploration. Juul's definition of what a game even is, a question that has been explored for centuries, remains one of the more convincing definitions in the field.
