Jesper Juul

And so it introduces a lot of uncertainty to even just where you're placing stuff or how things are going to interact.

I went back and reread Jesper Juul's Art of Failure book on uncertainty in games.

I don't super love that book because it's very, very surface level.

But his point is very much like if failure isn't a possibility, then victory doesn't really matter too much.

In the 1980s, its gaming chops made the C64 low-status.

The dismissive label of Game Machine implied that because the C64 was good for playing games, it was too much fun to take seriously, and could not also be used for serious things, like word processing, which it was used for, writes video game scholar Jesper Juul in Too Much Fun, a 2024 history of the Commodore 64.

The label also meant that if you wanted to be serious, you should get a much more expensive computer with nearly identical capabilities, except for the ability to play good games.

But the C64's cultural implications were quite serious.

It's also quite in line with, I think, other Nordic scholars.

Uh, Montola references Jesper Juul, who, um, used to teach at the Game Center where we all went to school and now I believe teaches at the Royal University of Copenhagen or something like that.

He teaches in Copenhagen.

Um, but you know, there's Juul, there's Pohjola, there's, uh, Jaakko Stenros, who is another sort of, like, LARP scholar.

So I think that's, like, one answer.

I think my other sort of, like, more real answer is that it depends which frame you set your goal in.

And Mantala sort of alludes this, alludes to this a- and references it, but, like, I think that, you know, we talked about fine-- defining frames in social terms, and then how Mantala and from, from, from Björk and Holopainen defines them in rules terms, and then what Mantala sort of gestures towards and, like, t- discusses briefly but I think could be expanded even further is defining frames in terms of goals.

And, like, j- just to run through these quickly, uh, a diegetic goal, which is sort of the most common goal in an RPG, I would say, I think, is like, "I'm gonna slay the dragon.