BOOK REVIEW

How Everybody Got Game by Jesper Juul

Videogames, ever more easily learnable, are no longer the special province of male adolescents and twentysomethings.

By JONATHAN V. LAST
In April 2006, Nintendo announced that its forthcoming videogame system, code-named Revolution, would be formally (and nonsensically) called the "Wii." Not much was known about the console at the time except that Nintendo was opting out of the race for better graphics and that the machine would be controlled with a device that looked like a TV remote. Industry observers thought that Nintendo was committing corporate suicide and that the Wii would be crushed by the more powerful Microsoft Xbox 360 and Sony Playstation 3, one system already a major seller and the other set to launch at the end of the year.
In May 2006, at the annual Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles, the world got its first look at the Wii. Crowds mobbed Nintendo's booth, clamoring to play it, rushing passed the fancier Xbox and Playstation demonstrations. It was the first sign that something was fundamentally shifting in the videogame industry. Jesper Juul's "A Casual Revolution" explains what happened, and why.
Many people think of videogames as the province of pimply-faced middle-schoolers and ne'er-do-well twentysomethings. But that image is misleading, Mr. Juul explains; it comes from a particular period of videogame popularity. The first videogames, such as Pong and Space Invaders, were in fact intergenerational hits. In a 1974 article about the new videogame craze, the Los Angeles Times observed that "never before has an amusement game been so widely accepted by all ages. Everyone from teenagers to senior citizens enjoy the challenge that the Video Games offer."
By the early 1980s a distinctive videogame culture had indeed developed and gamer demographics narrowed. It was during this period that the stereotype of the young male videogame fiend was born, and not without reason. Both mall arcades and home consoles came to be dominated by adolescent boys. "When video games developed a new expressive and creative language of their own," Mr. Juul notes, "they also shut out people who did not know that language."
Consider the game Contra. In 1988, Konami, a Tokyo-based developer, released Contra for the Nintendo Entertainment System, a game in which players fought their way through a jungle filled with alien soldiers. Hidden in the game's programming was a secret code. If players pressed a series of buttons before starting the game—up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, b-button, a-button—they were magically given 30 lives when they started the game instead of the three lives that everyone else would get.
This sequence of button-pushes became known in gaming circles as the "Contra Code," and over the years it became a kind of standardized trick in other games. Even today, performing the sequence unlocks secrets in scores of games that have nothing to do with Contra. The Contra Code is part of the syntax of videogames. And it's a perfect example of why, over the years, videogames became mysterious and inexplicable to nongamers.
The game controllers likewise became incredibly complicated. Mr. Juul tracks their evolution from the single joystick with a single button to the ne plus ultra controller of the Xbox 360: This monstrosity features two joysticks, a D-pad, six buttons, two option shifters and two shoulder triggers. By 2006, the controllers were incomprehensible to a person unfamiliar with the physical lingua franca of such devices.
Today, however, the trend is moving in the other direction. The Nintendo Wii, for example, uses a mimetic controller—meaning that players simply wave it around the way they would in real life. Play a tennis game on the Wii and you simply swing your arm as you would on an actual tennis court, holding the Wii controller rather than a racket. The change in input devices, Mr. Juul observes, has created a change in the character of the games themselves. Mimetic devices "encourage short game sessions played in social contexts."
The Wii is the most recent, and most successful, example of what Mr. Juul calls "casual games"—that is, videogames intended for people who wouldn't ordinarily consider themselves videogamers. Of which, it turns out, there are quite a few. Since its launch, the Wii has outsold the Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 combined. There are all sorts of other "casual" games, of course. Remember that the term "videogame" is not confined to sprawling, elaborate games such as World of Warcraft and Call of Duty. Anyone who has played Solitaire or Minesweeper on his personal computer—or Tetris or Bejeweled on her cellphone—is a gamer.
The success of casual games, Mr. Juul writes, "is due in part to the fact that they do not require players to know video game history." You don't need know the Contra Code or master the 10-finger art of the Xbox controller to pick up a casual game, like Guitar Hero, Wii Tennis or Dance-Dance Revolution. They are all easily learnable, in large part because they are based on activities with which most people are passingly familiar.
As a result, the demographics of gaming today are migrating toward what they were at the beginning of the era, when videogames were seen as an intergenerational amusement. While the bulk of console gamers are still adolescent boys and young men, the Entertainment Software Association estimates that 40% of all gamers are women over the age of 18; and 25% of Americans over the age of 50 play videogames.
It was a stroke of bad luck that, in the late 1970s, the videogame industry wandered into a ghetto just as it was gaining wide acceptance. Mr. Juul's "A Casual Revolution" makes it clear that videogames are now finding their way back into the wider world.
Mr. Last is a senior writer at The Weekly Standard.