SWAP ADJACENT GEMS TO MAKE SETS OF THREE: A HISTORY OF MATCHING TILE GAMES Jesper Juul, IT University of Copenhagen 205 2007 | Volume I, Issue 4 | Pages 205–217 From sales figures and interviews, we know that many people outside the typical video game audience play small downloadable video games like Zuma, Diner Dash, or Bejeweled. Such small video games are known as casual games, and have unsuspectedly become a major industry during the last few years. However, video game studies have so far mostly focused on foundational issues (“what is a game”) and on AAA games, big games purchased in stores. In this article, I try to remedy the situation by examining the historical development of the casual game sub-genre of matching tile games, to see how their game design has evolved over time, and to discuss the opposing perspectives that players and developers have on video game history. Keywords: Video games, history, user expectations, game design, casual games INTRODUCTION This article aims to write the history of a video game genre. The genre is that of matching tile game s, video games where the object of the player is to manipulate tiles on a grid in order to create matches. For a few years, the best known and best selling matching tile games have been the Bejeweled series from PopCap Games. Figure 1 shows Bejeweled 2 Deluxe (PopCap Games 2005). My interest here is in how matching tile games have developed during the past 21 years, in how new design and innovation has happened, and in the relation between game design and player experiences. The history of a game genre is also a mapping of the issues that face game developers as well as players. Matching tile games are today mostly sold via the distribution channel of casual, downloadable games, a channel that puts conlicting pressures on game developers: Innovate enough to differentiate, but make the game suficiently like other games that players ind it easy to pick up and play. 1 When developers claim that their game is the original game that inspired other games (rather than the other way around), they are also writing their version of game history. When a player picks up a game, he/she is also using their conception of video game history to understand the new game. Video game history is everywhere, in the development of games, in the selling of games, in the consumption of games. A POPULAR GENRE WITH NO VOCAL PROPONENTS Matching tile games are of interest because of their relative simplicity: As we shall see, a large number of games can be described with very few parameters, and a history of the genre can therefore serve as a model for understanding more complicated game genres. Additionally, matching tile games are interesting in that they may be the only genre with no vocal proponents, only critics. Where playing an imported Japanese game can be construed as a sign of game competence, matching tile games are perhaps the lowest scale on the cultural ladder. Critics especially tend to complain of too many games in the sub-genre of match-three games (usually referring to derivatives of Bejeweled ): On the big portals, at any hour, day or night, tens or hundreds of thousands of players gather to play Hearts, Spades, Canasta, chess, backgammon and a zillion shareware match-three games. (Varney, 2006) Figure 1. Bejeweled 2 Deluxe (Popcap Games 2005).