The value of Casual Games

January 30th, 2006, By Duncan Gough

With the advent of the Xbox, specifically the Xbox 360, there has been a growing amount of talk about the dearth of creativity in games. The reasoning behind these sentiments pointing to big companies like Microsoft fighting to win over an potentially huge audience, largely young adult males with high disposable income. Further, to attract these kinds of users games are being altered to work like action-packed blockbuster movies. Loud guns, explosions, fast cars, realistic worlds and near photo-realist graphics are seen as key to this market and a slew of supposedly ‘next-gen’ games are the result – Halo 3, Project Gotham Racing, Call of Duty 2, etc.

It follows that the more ‘bang for your buck’ these kinds of attention-grabbing games require, the more donkey-work it takes to set them up. The grunt work of creating the guns, graphics, physics is leading to a perpetual ‘crunch mode’ which has led to any number of observers pointing to the diminishing importance of game-play or even fun in these new titles. In a direct parallel with block-buster movies, the hallmark of these games is the absence of plot.

Into this potentially doomed development cycle comes the vague genre of casual games. Vague in the sense that casual games can encompass advergames, online games, downloadable games and even handheld games. Since the release of the Sony PSP and Nintendo DS last year, handheld casual games seem to be taking hold. Whilst the Sony PSP has a technological lead, porting PS2 games across has caused a few wrinkles as the gameplay needs to be adapted to fit with the mobility of the device. When it works, however, it works excpetionally well. The Nintendo DS, however, has a clear lead on handheld, casual gaming.

Starting with the release of Nintendogs, (1) it was clear that Nintendo saw the mazy casual games market as their own. Which should come as no surprise, since Nintendo has a long history of making innovative games that appeal to kids and adults alike. Evidence of their success in leveraging the broad appeal of casual games is starting to filter through, notably in the following blog posts.

On cabel.name, a new game called Brain Training is reviewed.

And what does Brain Training do? Well, you hold your Nintendo DS like a book (with left and right screens), and you basically use the touchscreen to undergo a wide variety of simple, cleanly-designed, interesting exercises intended to make you smarter. Or, at least, keep your brain sharp and fresh and delicious. At the end of your “fun”, the game eventually calculates and reports your “mental age” — often with painful/comedic effect — and tracks your progress over the weeks and months of self-education. And that’s about it.

Which, to my mind, is a very good example of a casual game, one that is designed to be picked up and played for short burst, especially given this statement:

Seeing grandmothers on the train holding their Nintendo DS like a book sends an instant signal — “brain training in progress”.

In addition to this, Matt Webb details his experiences playing Animal Crossing on a Nintendo DS.

Animal Crossing is slowly teaching me about a certain kind of aesthetic. There’s the Happy Room Academy who send me a weekly score of how well my furniture and decoration matches, but the Feng Shui is the brilliant part. It’s the ultimate in an invisible but all-pervasive rulespace. It’s the glue that joins the entire game, but it’s never referred to.

Read the whole article, it’s a compelling reason to buy a DS or a GameCube and get a copy of Animal Crossing to see how and why the adrenaline-hyped guns, graphics and physics style of gaming is a threat to gameplay. A threat to fun.

Unless, of course, your racing car in Project Gotham Racing can become the seed for your experience in that game. Or, the safety of a family photograph you treasure in Call of Duty 2 can affect your chances of survival like the position of a stove in Animal Crossing.

Sub-systems like Feng Shui or Luck make intriguing additions to games and I see no reason why casual games shouldn’t dictate how ’serious’ games evolve. Especially not with Spore still on the horizon.

Update: pingmag.jp has a more in-depth review of the Brain Training games.

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