If your life seems to be lacking a certain academic something, Jesper Juul of The Ludologist (among other things) has posted his conference paper from the September Digital Games Research Association international conference in Tokyo. I admit that since I'm backlogged in slogging through lots of other academic reading, I haven't had time to take a close look at it, but how bad could a paper that covers Cooking Mama, Karate Champ, StarCraft and Dead Or Alive 4 be?

This paper explores levels of abstraction: Representational games present a fictional world, but within that world, players are only allowed to perform certain actions; the fictional world of the game is only implemented to a certain detail.

The paper distinguishes between abstraction as a core element of video game design, abstraction as something that the player decodes while playing a game, and abstraction as a type of optimization that the player builds over time.

Finally, the paper argues that abstraction is a related to the magic circle of games and to rules as such.

I have absolutely no doubt that it's more interesting than The Agrarian Origins of Modern Japan; it's a text-heavy article (obviously), but hey, there are pictures!

New Paper Posted: A Certain Level of Abstraction [The Ludologist]