I'd Like More Casual In My Hardcore, Please.
A few weeks ago I wrote a little article asking "What Kind Of Gamer Are You?" focusing on the undefined group sitting somewhere between the "Casual" and the "Hardcore" gamers. Like those marketing noodleheads I liked to mock. The ones who insisted that everything must be put in its category. "So, is this an FPS, or an RTS, or a sports simulation?" You try and explain that it's something totally different and doesn't really FIT inside one of the eight boxed they liked to stuff everything inside of, and they got really confused.

I keep reading articles where people try to define casual games by genre (color-matching games, card games...) or demographic (40+ year old women), budget ("games made for under $100,000"), or even medium ("small, downloadable" or "web-based" games). You know what? That's just so much crapola.

It's like someone in 1912 describing "airplanes" as "wooden vehicles with two sets of wings and a propeller in the back, which can carry a pilot and sometimes one other passenger to altitudes of nearly 1,000 feet." Sure, that was probably an adequate description of most if not all airplanes of the day, but if you restricted yourself to that definition, we'd have no more airplanes flying in the air today than we had in 1912.

What's a casual game? It's a videogame designed for an audience that doesn't play a lot of videogames. You could call them "Beginner," "Introductory," "Newbie Friendly," or "Entry Level" games, but those imply a level of progression from casual to hardcore that may not exist. Grandma may really dig Bejeweled 2 and Snood, but that doesn't mean that two years from now she's gonna be laying the smack down in Unreal Tournament. Maybe she will, maybe she wont. She might still be playing Bejeweled 2 and Snood.

Casual is an adjective, not a category.

The first commercial "casual" videogame was Pong. Nolan Bushnell started out the the geek favorite "Space War," and it failed. Apparently only science and engineering students really got into battling rockets in space on one of these new-fangled machines. So Bushnell created the much more casual-friendly game "Pong" - which was very similar to ping-pong, tennis, and other games most players already had some familiarity with. It was comfortable for beginners - they instinctively understood the rules of the game because it had a familiar (and relatively popular) metaphor. It was excruciatingly easy to understand - you only had a paddle that could be turned one way or another. It was still playable after a couple of beers. Nobody had to work very hard to enjoy the game.

And the rest is history. For a while, videogames pretty much meant PONG, because everybody was busy copying everyone else's success. Then people started getting a little bit creative, a little LESS "casual-friendly" because a market of people already familiar with videogames had emerged. It was only a nudge out of their comfort zone to go from Pong to a game about a shark, or a racing game, or a maze game, or a pong-style game where you knock bricks out of a wall. In 1979 (I think) Asteroids came out, and became a huge classic. Not Pac-Man huge, but still big. It was able to borrow some of the gameplay and ideas from Bushnell's first attempt, "Computer Space," only this time the ideas "took."

Was "Pac-Man" a casual game? I dunno, but I think so. It attracted a bunch of new players (including women) to the medium, so I think it counts. Would it have succeeded in 1974, without Pong? Who knows.

Now fast forward to today. Could someone who never played a videogame at all (let alone a First-Person Shooter) handle a game like Unreal Tournament or F.E.A.R.? Not without a heck of a lot of work and frustration. They'll start with basic questions, like looking at approaching enemies and asking, "So which one of those is me?" The standard control schemes that are second nature to some of us (WASD, number keys to switch weapons, and now which button do I press to jump?) are only slowly acquired by this new player. Even after going through the tutorial and starting on "Easy" difficulty, the new player is likely to be intimidated at best, and likely overwhelmed. These games are made with the experienced, veteran gamer in mind - the type of player who would be BORED revisiting basic FPS territory. They are looking for a game that will challenge the skills that they have honed over the course of many months or years and many different games.

That is hardcore.

You may end up seeing some "hardcore" games in those genres that are typically labeled "casual" - like the action / puzzle genre (home of those loveable match-three games). Bejeweled 2 and Big Kahuna Reef are clearly deeper, more challenging experiences than their predecessors. Are they less accessible to beginners? Arguably, yes --- but not by much. The designers have been careful to keep the user interactions pretty simple. The number of choices (or, to be more specific, the RANGE of their choices) aren't significantly increased --- it's just that they've been made harder with more variables to consider. Bejeweled 2 is as simple to "get into" and play as it's prequel, but mastery of the game requires more thinking ahead.

Will we get to the point that these genres of games typically associated with casual gaming are no longer casual? Maybe. Solitaire is the quintessential "casual" game type. I know there are some versions of Solitaire out there that intimidate me to the point where I won't even try. Somewhere, some grandma who "doesn't play games" is out there laughing at me because of this. She has mastered five hundred solitaire variants, and I'm left saying, "Okay, now what can I do with the three of spades? Is this a good card?"

"Casual" is an adjective, a fuzzy little collection of virtues that makes a game suitable to 'non-gamers.' I think those are virtues that need to be embraced by more games (not all games - there's always a need for games that challenge the skills of experienced players) in order to keep growing the market and bridging the gap between casual and hardcore.

Labels: casual games, Game Design

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 7:32 PM (Permalink)