by gSathe
Casual games.
Yup. I said it. Casual games. Like the soft porn of the games industry, bite sized pieces of entertainment made with tiny budgets to do nothing but titillate you and reel you in, click click and click, while the actual porn gets downloaded in the background. Or the office spreadsheet waits for your inputs. Whatever works for you.
Web games, casual games, which draw sneers from hardcore gamers while reeling in hordes of housewives and office workers, who’d be as horrified of being clubbed together with the gamers as the gamers are of being clubbed with them, an entire empire under companies like Popcap, without even the humble (and sometimes not so humble) dignity of small indie games. The casual game in fact, has the ultimate slur attached to it - it’s the game that mom plays.
Except that I play casual games too.
See… It started off innocently enough. I was checking my mail and then I was checking my feeds while everyone else in the office where I used to work when I felt like it. And since I lacked the energy for a crawl through Wikipedia, I started to root about the internet for other ways of passing some time. Wasting time would be even better, but at that stage I was willing to settle for just passing time. Then I discovered the joy/love of Popcap games, and I very specifically discovered the glory of Bookworm. Lex and me, we were friends in no time at all, and it took even less time for the rest of the newsroom to become familiar with the little green guy, so much so that the daily meeting to discuss the news we were covering in the city that day would keep getting delayed as reporters would have to be pried away from the communal game of Bookworm.
Of course it didn’t stop there. Not only was my life devoted to keeping those burning tiles from reaching the bottom of the screen, but whenever writers block struck I’d turn to the wonder of these casual games, and in the middle of exceedingly dull stories about politics, I would be feverishly working to keep something, anything, from reaching the bottom, or at least one side of the screen.
The gamer in me also found reason to rejoice in these Flash games - many of them were painstakingly faithful renditions of the old NES games we grew up with, and I’d play them again now in the middle of a crowded office, fingers on my left hand hovering over ALT and TAB, just in case. I also realised that I was not alone. Over 200 million people are playing casual games, every month. 74 per cent of these are women. In fact, these simple games have done something that the industry keeps talking about all the time - brought the family together, because after all - these are the games that mom plays, right?
I was talking to a friend who talked about how her family is hooked onto Bejewelled and Zuma. Since everyone, the mom the dad and the two kids wants to play, there are daily fights and death threats exchanged on who gets the use of the family desktop. In my house by the way, this happened with Feeding Frenzy. Someone else I know hooked up their laptop to their plasma TV, so that they could play Pocket Tanks on the big screen. I can empathise - that is one intense game. What I want to know is who called these games casual in the first place? Because them little old ladies they can cuss out us noobs in a really hardcore way.
Of course, these games aren’t just puzzle games or text games for the little old ladies. They also have a very notable plus in that they’re close imitations and interesting translations of classic games which defined the genres which we speak of these days, games like Prince of Persia for example, which I first played in school, and which I get goosepimples just thinking about.
Casual games aren’t just imitators of the past either. There’s a lot of unique and innovative stuff which exists only as a casual game, which created genres along the way. For instance something like Diner Dash. It’s not just recycling Tetris or Pac-Man, but rather an opportunity to expand the genres and definitions, and challenge the way games are played. Brilliant games like N and Flow also started life in these same vats, and more and more exciting games keep coming from the same place, making it in many ways, the front line of gaming today.
So, casual more?
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