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Reviewer: John M. Artz

We tend to stereotype the typical video game player as a young male with one or more game consoles, who has been so initiated into the arcane world of video games-the language, design, and interface options-that it has become a second language and an alternative life. And, it is a world, most likely, where he spends far too much of his time. Juul finds this conventional image both misleading and grossly untrue. In fact, to use my own analogy, it would be like pointing to the audiences of Broadway plays as typical consumers of performance art, while forgetting about or possibly ignoring the audiences of TV shows like Everybody Loves Raymond . To get to the point: while performance art is quite diverse, the audience numbers are definitely on the side of Ray Romano. The same is true of video games, which range from hardcore games to casual games, and the numbers and demographics are definitely on the side of casual games. Casual games differ from hardcore games in that they are effortless to play and usually fill the day's odd minutes as either a form of distraction or entertainment. Hardcore gamers invest a huge amount of time in both learning and playing a game, while casual gamers invest little time in learning the game, and typically only play a few minutes at a time, for diversion. People who play casual games usually do not think of themselves as "video game players," and when asked if they play video games, they might answer no. This is not because they want to hide their game playing, but because they do not think of their activity as video game playing. The premise of this book is that the audience for casual games is bigger than the audience for hardcore games, and this gap is growing. Juul looks beyond the hardcore game paradigm and explores the role of video games in a much larger social context, in order to see "how [video] games fit into people's lives." I can attest to this dichotomy from personal experience. It took me more time than I would like to admit to learn World of Warcraft , and yet I can idly play FreeCell while I am thinking about something else entirely. As another example, I learned how to play Wii Sports Tennis in a matter of minutes. FreeCell is a diversion and Wii Sports is entertainment, or even exercise; I do not think of them as video games, although they obviously are. This book is well researched and well documented. Juul clearly discusses the extent of casual games and the way they "fit into people's lives." Personally, I would have extended the ideas in this book to speculate about parallels between hardcore and casual games on one hand, and command line versus graphical user interfaces on the other. And I think the comparison is apt. But, to his credit, Juul does not step beyond that for which he has evidence. I highly recommend this book to two very different groups of people. First, people who are interested in the video game industry as a business will benefit from understanding the full range of game options, what game developers are trying to achieve, and why people play video games. Furthermore, as the title of the book implies, the emergence of casual games may well represent a revolution in the video game industry. Second, video game designers will benefit from its nontraditional views on video game design and use. Online Computing Reviews Service