Interview with Jesper Juul on Indie Game History

In this interview, we talk to Jesper Juul, a scholar of video games and a professor at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. He’s written books such as A Casual Revolution: Reinventing Video Games and their Players, which looks at how mobile games have changed where, when, how, and even why we game, and The Art of Failure: An Essay on the Pain of Playing Video Games, which grapples with the pain involved in game overs and other ways of losing at games. He’s also a game designer and developer who’s experimented with casual games, conceptual games, and multiplayer games.

We brought Jesper on to discuss his most recent book, Handmade Pixels: Independent Video Games and the Quest for Authenticity, a book that tells a history of indie games running from 1998 to the present. We cover a lot of ground in our conversation, talking about topics including how to define an indie game, what happens when platforms for indie games (like Flash) disappear, and whether or not the question, “is it really a game?” is a productive one.