Rise of the casual gamer
Casual gaming is a curious thing. On the one hand, you have a wide array of games, appealing to many people who don´t have much more than 20 minute spells to while away during a hectic day. On the other hand, you have die-hard gamers, accusing companies of flooding the market with low intelligence, inferior games, and destroying our beloved gaming world in the process. This brings up an interesting predicament: is casual gaming the future we refuse to accept, or merely a way of widening a somewhat narrow market for appeal to the masses?
Firstly, we must define a casual game, and everyone´s definition is different. Most would agree that Peggle is the perfect example of casual gaming, but if that is true, why isn´t Tetris? And if the Mystery Case Files series, a collection of “find-the-object” murder mysteries is casual, why is the Monkey Island series, a collection of “find-the-object-and-use-it-with-another-object” games not? In my opinion the answer is quite clear – casual gaming is in the eye of the beholder, and possibly a reaction to a far loftier problem in the gaming world today.
As I write this, my wife is in the other room, playing a game called Cradle of Rome. This game is a combination of simple puzzling, and a basic city management, which she found on Facebook, and then bought online for about 10 pounds. Now, is this any less of a game, than say, my copy of Dragon Age? In reality, no, it isn´t. She gets as much enjoyment out of playing it as I did playing Dragon Age, and yet the gamer in me sneers down at her, and feels compelled to introduce her to a “real” game, such as Civilisation. The joke of the whole piece is that I own a Wii, arguably the most casual console ever, and fail to distinguish between this, and my wife´s gaming choices.
So, what does this tell me? To be honest, it really tells me that I need to climb down from the High Horse of Self-Importance, and accept that casual games are a sign of gaming as a whole becoming mass market. Everyone is now beginning to play, whether it is browser games such as Mafia Wars, iPhone games such as Texas Hold´Em, or the Call of Duty brigade who play long into the night. Such diversity in the market is a very positive thing for gaming as a whole, as the more money that is brought into the market, the more that is available for game development.
Gaming as an industry hit a very important point about four to five years ago. The PS2 was selling like hot cakes, and Sony and Microsoft had both started to showcase their upcoming consoles. The games on display were technically streets ahead of what was currently available to most gamers, and yet upon release, both consoles were still outsold (in massive amounts) by the supposedly inferior PS2. Why? I can´t tell you for certain, but I think it was down to two factors. Firstly, the price of both consoles was quite prohibitive, and the library of games was small. But secondly, and I think more importantly, the average potential customer was put off by the games themselves. Both Sony and Microsoft had managed to appeal to the fanboys, and alienate just about everyone else, by pandering to the needs of a small section of the market as a whole.
Most people who bought one of the two consoles fitted into a fairly consistent category: Late teen to late twenties, “hardcore”, male, long term gamers. The average X360 buyer could tell you all about long deathmatches on Quake 3 Arena, and discuss the plot of the original Half-Life. The average PS3 buyer was drooling over the screenshots for Metal Gear Solid 4, and wondering when the next Final Fantasy was due. In short, we (as I am one too!) long term gamers, who had been playing for years, and had upped our skills to a level whereby the console we bought needed to reflect our abilities.
The problem with this was (and is), that many newer gamers were unable to keep up. How can someone who has been playing FPS games for only a few months really contend with people who have been deathmatching for maybe ten years? And add in the basic “hardcore” mentality of many longer term gamers (particularly on Xbox Live), and a very harsh and unforgiving environment was created for new players. Heck, the term “Noob” comes from the word noobie, and is meant as a very heavy insult to anyone it is thrown at (which is an awful lot within the FPS crowd). All this contributed to alienating non-niche gamers as a group, and potentially could have destroyed the whole market for everybody.
So, thank heavens that at that time Nintendo defied the odds, by bringing out a new console which was playable by anyone. We diehards condemned it as a kiddie console, a “Grandma machine” with bright colours and easy controls which would be the swansong of the once great Nintendo. The joke was on us. The Wii outsold both the PS3 and X360 combined, consistently for about 2 years, and is still by far and away the market leader. The “toy-console” actually saved gaming in many ways, by making it once more a very wealthy business, drawing in large amounts of investment, and likely helping to keep many of the more hardcore development houses going in a time of tougher financial circumstances.
So, to get back onto the original point, casual games made are for today´s gamers in a rapidly expanding market. You could say that gaming is finally going truly “mainstream”, and numbers of gamers are rapidly on the rise. I actually swapped my X360 for a Wii, and now I regularly have people to play games with, such as Rock Band, Mario Kart, and Smash Bros Brawl. I couldn´t persuade most of my friends to play me at Project Gotham Racing, Soul Calibur, or Ghost Recon.
We, as a community of gamers, need to embrace casual gaming as much as we do our personal favourites. You don´t have to like them, you don´t have to play them, but you need to accept that they are games too, and are just as important as Modern Warfare 2, or God of War 3. A game is A GAME. It is designed for fun, as a pastime to be spent with friends, or alone, time spent in a fantasy world enjoying yourself. Whether that takes the form of Tekken or Bejewelled, there is no need for game snobbery. And remember, that person playing the game you look down at, could well be funding your ability to keep playing the games you like too.
The Bad: None
