Casual GamesMay 15th, 2008 by Suzie
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Casual gamers. Doesn’t the phrase make shivers run down your spine? Industry experts everywhere are calling out this new audience, these so called casual gamers with their free time and bulging wallets.
Who are they, exactly? They are housewives, they are retired, they are kids playing Tetris on their cell phones. They are the people buying Wii fit and trying to train their brains. They are this huge user base that developers are desperate to attract and cough up cash.
Hardcore gamers don’t like it of course. When your Grandmother (she’s fine, by the way, it would take more than a pick-up truck to take down that grand old matron) is taking over your console it all feels a bit, well, quality family time. We’re not about that. We like to get competitive. We like to swear at the screen and toss the controller at the wall (well, I do).
It’s hard to put your finger on. Obviously its good that games are reaching a wider audience, and developers are making enough money to stay in business…. and yet. And yet.
A lot of it is simply choice. Once upon a time, if you were a gamer and you met another person who said they were a gamer, chances were very high they had played Zelda, Mario, Sonic and so on. Nowadays, you hear someone say they are gamer they might mean that they play Halo or it might mean they look after pets on their DS. It’s hard to know. There’s less shared culture. The ‘gamer’ subculture has grown so big it’s now diving into sub-subcultures. It’s an interesting one though, based around the type of games you choose to play rather than around age, location or the usual criteria for making a subculture. We’re as likely to be playing World of Warcraft with a 42 year old mother of three as we are a 12 year old boy.
Hardcore gamers feel a little threatened by that. Used to be that you felt exclusive, outcast but elite. Now we’re normal.
Then there’s the sneaking suspicion that we are losing the developers. Once upon a time, we were the ones with the purchasing power. We could, in a small way, shape the destiny of the Playstation. Of the Xbox. Now we’re a minority share. EA want the casuals. Nintendo want the casuals (though simultaneously denying that they even exist). Sony still seems to be on our side, but for how long? If it’s a choice between plowing huge funds into a triple-A game with no guarantee of a return or funding dozens of smaller projects all of which turn a profit… well, we all know what the best business decision would be.
Then there’s the final irrefutable fact that casual games are better games. They are more innovative, and no, innovation isn’t everything but they are also more fun. Small file sizes and less than cutting edge graphics gives indie developers a chance to shine, and imaginative new ideas are getting a turn in the spotlight.
There’s always going to be a place for the competitive shooter with the cutting edge graphics and massive team of developers but that’s only a small facet of the industry, and honestly always has been. Gamers need to learn to share their title with the wii-bowlers and kitty-collectors, and they need to welcome the diversity of games around.
And finally, Monique said she won’t kill me for mentioning that CrosuS (a software program I’m involved with) is currently running an upload competition. If you got game, we got prizes. So go check it out if you’ve got some spare time.
May 15th, 2008 at 11:07 am
Glad to hear your grandmother’s all right!
May 15th, 2008 at 11:36 am
I lied, I’m going to run you over with a car now.
May 15th, 2008 at 11:42 am
The industry was pretty stagnant for a while because of all the cookie cutter fan boy first person shooters coming out. I say bring on the casual gamers and the creativity it’s forcing developers to have
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May 15th, 2008 at 3:42 pm
I do think there is still an exclusivity factor. It has just changed quite a bit. Like you said it used to be gamer vs. non-gamer (although I’m not sure if that has always even been the case as much… during NES & Atari days I think that games enjoyed a much more mainstream culture then we saw in the 15 years since). Now it is different… most gamers like to use genres, but my personal exclusivity is gamer age. And by that I don’t mean your current age, I mean how long you’ve been in games. I value the opinion of elder gamers more than the newb punks that run around playing world of warcraft and madden thinking they are all that but have no idea what Tecmo Bowl is, or the way to get infinite lives on mario or contra (contra is more mainstream due to the big press conference Microsoft had where that was a big point of contra coming to live). I bet a lot of gamers these days don’t even know Ultima or the many other games that not only were completely awesome, but still are. That is my exclusion, and you can generally see these people from a mile away. They are obvious because they always buy games because they are pretty. Raccoons they all be.
May 15th, 2008 at 8:38 pm
I agree that the casual games tend to be the more fun games. Sometimes I can’t help but see people who play casual games as more hardcore than those stuck to their WoW without a clue as to what ELSE is out there.
I suppose hardcore and casual, to me, has a different meaning from everyone else. Hardcore gamers are the ones who care about all games, who watch the industry and find games that they enjoy, rather than basing what is good and what is not solely on what kind of hardware is required to play it.
In any case, a lot of those people who think they’re “hardcore” and shout it out are some of the reasons why I tend to shun gaming communities nowadays (and am not as deeply into games anymore). Used to be, gamers stuck together. Now it’s Xbox vs. PS vs. Nintendo vs. PC. It’s damn annoying. I’d rather be known as a “casual” gamer.
May 15th, 2008 at 11:19 pm
Bah, casual games (most of the time) have very little challenge to them, and like you said, tend not to be very competitive. You can never really get into a casual game like you can a epic title like Zelda or WoW (though WoW is now trying to appeal to casual gamers too, AHH!).
I’ll tolerate casual games as long as they don’t take over the sophisticated games completely.
But it seems they have taken over the Wii. I feel like my Wii is a cute little toy of a system that holds a plethora of Mario Party-esque mini-games. The only titles I had any interest in really were Twilight Princess and SSBB. And being a Zelda fanboy, It feels as if Nintendo is slowly killing my soul. *heavy sigh*
I love the fact that gaming is becoming more mainstream, yet hate it. Mainstream means appealing to the wider audience, like Pop music does ; and everyone knows pop music is terrible. I just hope they dont forget about the original fanbase.
May 16th, 2008 at 10:44 am
If I know that a game is touted as “casual”, I am usually less tempted to play it even though I still do. I love my Nintendogs but I can only play them for ten minutes before I get completely bored out of my mind. I have the need to accomplish things when I am gaming - one of the reasons I love the 360’s achievement system. I keep a running list of all the games I’ve completed because I’m all OCD like that, and casual games that can’t be finished annoy me because…they never end. A good deal of them, anyway.
May 16th, 2008 at 2:56 pm
I think at least some portion of this is that gamers are aging, too. I was hardcore when I was in high school and college, but once I started working (and by choice, chose a career with little free time, and another hobby in addition to gaming), I just didn’t have the time. There are lot of older gamers like me out there, people who played eight-bit Zelda when we were ten-twelve, and bombed every inch of the map, painstakingly, agonizingly, until we discovered all the secrets ourselves. These days I still play, but I wouldn’t do that. I’d look it up in a walkthrough, because I have so many other things I have to do, or want to do, that I want every bit of my game time to be fun, rather than frustrating. In the past, I had enough time that the hours I spent mindlessly grinding levels in the original Final Fantasy were balanced by each plot point I completed when I was finally strong enough. These days I get irritable if I have to grind for too long.
Obviously there is, and still should be, a market and fun, well-designed games for the hardcore set - I got my time, and the folks who have chosen to game exclusively as a hobby, or who simply have chosen careers or paths with more free time than mine - should get to have as much fun as I did planting a bomb on every single brick in every single frame of Hyrule. However, I can’t be too upset about the casual revolution, as without it, I’d have to give up the hobby entirely… and I’m not ready for that yet!
May 21st, 2008 at 3:12 pm
NES zelda is a funny example of how games have really changed… those NES games are often deemed too hard by modern “hardcore” gamers, a fact I find funny as hell as I too remember those days of trudging through those games with no help what so ever and ya know what, yeah finishing em.
I do think there is something to be said of gamer age… What Nintendo has really tried to do from the outset is not just to appeal to those outside of the core market, but to get back old gamers who have gotten lost over the years. You know, those older guys who played the NES and the SNES. And I think this is what the Wii has largely done. The whole reason I bought a Wii in the first place was for the Virtual Console. Say what you want about Live, while the online features are cool in some cases… overall I just want to play the original version. And a lot of these remakes you see on various platforms (live included) are not the same at all and this is part of the charm of the VC (don’t get me started on how Square completely ruined Final Fantasy on the GBA by importing their crappy new systems into a great game). At any rate, the thing with trying to get the former gamers back is that a lot of the stuff that people liked back in the golden age of gaming is the simplicity of these games. There wasn’t really any complexity to Super Mario Bros, Donkey Kong, or anything like that (Zelda was complex by design, and you note that these days though the series has maintained much of the feel, it is considered a simple game by many lol). So these are the games that Nintendo decided to start to remake when they started making new games for both the DS and Wii. I can’t say they’ve made a mistake, business is booming. And people I know in real world are truly interested in a console for the first time since the SNES days.
And gotta say it… when wasn’t WoW catering to the casual gamer? LOL They’ve always been known as the casual gamer’s MMO ROFL I think Puzzle Pirates is more hardcore than WoW and that game is based on casual games.