NYU Game Center Lecture Series Presents Jesper Juul

Jesper Juul is one of the most influential scholars to study games. Jesper was the first person to ever get a PhD in Game Studies, and has written several field-defining books: Half-Real looks at the thorny questions of games and storytelling; Handmade Pixels interrogates the myth of independent games; The Art of Failure dives into the contradictory psychology of what it means to play. Jesper is also a game designer and developer and integrates critical theory into his practice as a maker of both commercial games and experimental independent projects. He is a founding faculty at the NYU Game Center and is currently a faculty at the Royal Danish Academy of Art & Design, where he heads their game program.

Five Imaginary Commodore 64s: Video game history on the world’s best-selling (and almost forgotten) home computer

The Commodore 64 is officially” the world’s best selling home computer” and was – in the number of titles launched – also the dominant platform for video games from 1984 to 1992. Yet did we also forget this machine, relegating the history of the home computer to Silicon Valley, Apple and IBM, and the history of video games to Nintendo and Sony? Through game examples, I will tell a history of the C64 platform where cultural ideas of the platform always intertwined with the realities of developing software and games for the machine’s quirks. This

history spans the C64’s conception as a system for arcade games, to unimaginative ports from previous computer generations to an experimental phase through the demo scene where bugs were exploited to expand platform’s abilities, to today where the C64’s once new technology is now a historical style of graphics and audio that we can choose at will.

Jesper will be here for a Thursday evening Lecture Series talk that will be happening in-person and streaming live, followed by a Saturday afternoon workshop, happening in-person and only open to current NYU Game Center students.

The NYU Game Center would like to thank our event sponsors: Fresh Planet, Take-Two Interactive, Dots, and Empire State Development. Their generous support makes our events possible.