Juul, Jesper
2005
Half-Real: Video Games Between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds

When Jesper Juul writes about transmedial games, he refers to the fact that games are a transmedial phenomenon: “many games move between media: card games are played on computers, sports continue to be a popular video game genre, and video games occasionally become board games” {Juul, 2005 #270, p. 48}. He gives the example of chess “as one of the most broadly implemented games, since [it] is available as a board game, on computers, and [is] even played blind, where the players keep track of the game state in their head” {Juul, 2005 #270, p. 49}. He points out “there are big differences in the ways that games move between media. Card games on computers should be considered implementations since it is possible to unambiguously map one-to-one correspondences between all the possible game states in the computer version and in the physical card game. Sports games on computers are better described as adaptations, since much detail is lost in the physics model of the computer program because it is a simplification of the real world, and in the interface because the video game player’s body is not part of the games state. Adapting soccer to computers is therefore a highly selective adaptation” {Juul, 2005 #270, p. 49}.