Image courtesy of the IGDA 2006 Casual Games report.
Today, the casual games market is huge, and is cross-platform. Everyone talks as if it’s the next big thing in gaming, that it’s where the money is at. The irony is that casual games have been the mainstay of the industry for years, where they started from, and what the majority of the gaming population play.
Let’s define what a casual game is first of all. In my opinion a casual game is one that you can pick up and play whenever you want to play something quickly and in between something else going on in your life This seems like an overly broad statement, but for me it suffices. I’m not a complicated man. I just make complicated decisions.
The IGDA in their 2006 Casual Games White Paper defines a casual game across a number of dimensions, but also defines it as
“… games that are easy to learn, utilize simple, controls and aspire to forgiving gameplay”.
They also look at gaming patterns including:
- Specific Favored Genres (Puzzle, Card, Light System Management, Casual Action)
- Primary Points of Access (where and how you play)
- Responding to Audience Needs and Demands
Not a bad description of casual games today. Of course, casual games really started back many years ago with the creation of the original gaming consoles, 8-bit computers and then 16-bit computers. The Atari 2600 was the granddaddy of the casual game platform with the ability to swap cartridges in and out on a whim. This allowed you to play games incredibly quickly because there was little to no load time.
Most of the 8- bit computers used a tape deck to load games from, and this would mean it would often take 2-3 minutes of loading before you could play a game. The development of disk drives changed this so that games could be larger and could load quicker. This became the standard for the Amiga and Atari ST home computers. A few computers used cartridges. The Acorn Electron I owned years back had a peripheral called the Plus 1 ROM extender which allowed you to use applications already loaded into ROMs; I used to play Starship Command regularly this way. In fact, at the time I felt spoiled because the game would load instantly. It was also an incredibly geeky thing for anyone, never mind a 13 year old to own.
Let’s get back to casual gaming today. What Douglas Adams said about space in the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy:
“Space is big - really big - you just won’t believe how vastly, hugely mind-bogglingly big it is. You may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist, but that’s just peanuts to space.”
we can say the same about casual gaming. Just like space, it’s just going to get bigger and bigger. Our lives today are much more complex than they were 25 years ago, with demands on our time coming from many areas such as family, work and friends. The technology that’s supposed to have made life easier for us has instead made live much for frantic for us, which is why casual games have really taken off. Many people don’t have the ability to invest 1-2 hours at a time on a particular game, but they can spare 15-30 minutes of time here and there while they commute or are between particular tasks. The massive growth of the Nintendo DS market shows just this. Games are also more socially acceptable these days and we’re exposed to them on a regular basis, and what used to be passive entertainment on television has become interactive entertainment in the palm of your hand or on your desktop between Word documents.
We’re now in what I’d term the Second Gamer Generation where the children of the first true gamers are coming into their own. My own kids have grown up exposed to games from an early age, much earlier than I was. They’re going to be gamers all their life, and I’m happy for that, because I’d rather they did that than get involved in any number of other problems.
Okay, enough maudlin’. Time to get back to Peggle .. casual games don’t complete themselves you know.
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