When I get older, losing my hair

January 17th, 2006, By Duncan Gough

I’ll blame it on the Guardian. First of all, and I’m a bit late to the party I’ll admit it, the new design is horrible. The colours are distracting, the typography is horrible, the logo is poor. I’ll admit it, I’m a stuck-in-the-mud and I want my old Guardian back, please.

On to the real story - the Guardian Gamesblog asks, ‘Can the games industry address an ageing population?‘, to which the answer is, of course, yes. In fact, the whole article can be answered in two words, Casual Games.

However, notwithstanding the fact that anyone who has been to a B&Q (a UK DIY store) these days will know that it’s full of home networking accessories and not ageing idiots, the article just seems to be more navel-gazing from the gamesblog, sadly.

Wired.com ran an article this week on how the ageing population in Japan is bringing about some major cultural changes. Have Namco, Nintendo, Capcom and Konami et al caught the zeitgeist?

The one name that stands out in that list if Nintendo since I’m fairly certain that most Nintendo games got out of their way to avoid targetting teenagers and young adults. Nintendo games are all about being safe and having fun, which seems to target squarely an ageing population as well as a young one.

I’ve been meaning to post about the types of people who play casual games for some time now, even more so now that it seems the Guardian has forgotten that casual games actually exist to serve, amongst other things, an older market with slower pcs.

To illustrate the point by using one of my own games, this is what casual games look like, at their very simplest, it has to be said.

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