jesper juul's HALF-REAL is comfortable being half-wrong
(this is the 6th of my brief responses to the books i read in 2023. last time i talked about george saunder’s A SWIM IN A POND IN THE RAIN. you can check out a full list over on my twitter)
I finished Jesper Juul’s Half-Real (2005, MIT Press, 233 pages) a few days ago, and I found it pretty interesting. I’m never entirely sure how to write these quick blurbs for the academic / nonfiction I read, partially because they can’t really function as summary and, given the nature of academia, there’s always going to be someone who’s done better critical response than I can 2-3 days out from a first-time read. I’ll try, anyway.I liked Juul’s book—in part, I think, because it is willing to be wrong.
Half-Real is a book chock full of apparent binaries—between emergent and intentional design, between narrative and rules, between classic models and new attempts to understand digital media. This is the kind of thing (especially in a rapidly changing space like games studies) that tends to make books absolutely unreadable, in my opinion—no matter how universal the person designing the new models and categories thinks they are, with twenty years of hindsight it becomes deeply apparent how specific and situational their thinking was. Consider Juul’s musing on the tension between what he calls “narratology” and “ludology”—a conversation which, though he was thinking in interesting ways when this book came out, has been ground into dust (and, more importantly, situated fundamentally differently) by the eternal discourse over “ludonarrative dissonance” which feels like it defined the 2010s. In this sense, reading Juul was a bit like reading Butler at the start of the year—I can’t help but approach the text in a different way than the author intended, in part because I can’t help but read it through decades of slow, misguided filtering outward into popular discourse.
That being said, I didn’t find Half-Real frustrating in the way I did, for instance, get annoyed at the datedness of James Paul Gee’s What Video Games Have To Teach Us. That wasn’t because, like with Butler, I found a core of the text which was lost in the translation to popular conversation, but rather because—almost as fast as Juul is setting up systems and models—he seems to be willing to tear them down. He complicated every binary he establishes, constantly attending to middle-points and edge cases in a way which doesn’t give you the sense of... let’s say unearned self-confidence you often get from people who think they’re writing field-defining theory (although I do think Juul’s book does position itself as potentially field-defining, in ways which the intervening decades have complicated and confirmed). So there’s my two-cents. Half-Real is good in part because it has really good thoughts, and in part because, in unpacking and self-reflecting on those thoughts, it gestures at the inevitable process of theoretical replacement in a way that is really soothing when you’re reading books old enough to be inaccurate but not so old as to be historical.
