Casual Games: Reintroducing Gaming to the Masses – Part 2
Alright, so I was talking about Hardcore games and Casual games, and how they are played by people with a different state of mind. The Hardcore game is played like you read a book. You sit down, you have a few hours free, and you’re truly looking forward to immersing yourself in the title. The Casual game, well, is more like a song. While you could spend your time entranced with it, like some do, you could also just use it as background noise. Something to keep you entertained while you take care of other things.
Casual games are popular with people who haven’t played before because they present the game in a familiar format. Checkers would never take 40 hours just to finish, and neither will Diner Dash. It’s not so much that the rules are simpler in these games, it’s that the games can be digested in smaller chunks.
Tell a non-”hardcore” person that you want to play a game, and they’ll think you mean something like checkers. Pull out The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, and they’ll get annoyed because their assumptions aren’t getting met. They don’t expect a story, and see the story as extra nonsense rather than anything important. When they skip the story, they miss the clues and context which tells them their goals. Without goals, they get confused and just give up. They expect Chess, and they get The Godfather.
Casual games bring more people to the world of gaming, but they haven’t prepared those people to look at games in a new way, the way console and PC gamers have seen it for years now. Casual games don’t prepare people for hardcore games because they affirm the idea that games should be consumed like songs, and not like books.
Nintendo is changing this with their games and the Wii. The odd controller forces developers to re-teach all gamers how to play their games. Wii Sports is a casual game which rewards players for more involved play by giving out and taking away points for overall wins and losses, with that “Pro” status hanging just above each player’s head. Unlockables are becoming a great way to get casual gamers to put more interest in play while allowing them to play the same way they’re used to. They create objectives, and lead players to understand long-term objective based play.
Super Mario Galaxy is a great example of a game which could introduce casual gamers to more hardcore styles. The game has an over-all objective, but play is split between small galaxies which can be completed in a matter of minutes.
In the end, I think we need to train people how to play games, and what to expect from them. We need a gaming literacy system, in order to break old ideas of what games are and to teach people what they have become: narrative simulations. We need games which spread through the casual-hardcore scale, providing more ambient information, longer play periods, and long-term objectives that are tied within a plot, as the game moves up the scale.
Right now, it seems as if the two master-genres are moving apart, creating longer cutscenes that turn off even hardcore gamers. I don’t really have anything else to say about it.