Something about casual games has to do with their nonthreatening appeal in presentation. They aren' t dark, brooding, and intimidating. They generally have a light mood (perhaps almost clinical and corporate in the case of some of the " brain" derivatives). They appeal to people who often haven' t played many video games at all, but have vaguely fond memories of cute old school games like
Donkey Kong and
Frogger. Ironically, those cutesy coin-op games of yore are controller-smashingly frustrating and difficult even for many of today' s hardcore players.
But truth be told, there are certain aspects to casual games that can and do overlap with hardcore games. One is the enjoyment of competing against yourself and doing the same activity over and over in order to improve your score. Here, the difference between a casual gamer and a core gamer might simply come down to the degree to which the player becomes interested in continuing to work to improve their performance (I am intentionally avoiding the traditional mainstream media' s gawking accusations of " obsession" ).
Another is the enjoyment of exploration in a well-designed environment -- e.g.,
Professor Layton and the Curious Village has high production values and a very appealing retro aesthetic, similar to the mass appeal of Herge' s " Tintin" comics. A game like this, now considered " casual," has a lot in common with what many core gamers respect and admire in the heyday of LucasArt' s point-and-click adventure games. Were the LucasArts games casual games? Of course not. But within the context of contemporary industry buzz-vernacular, released today, they might be considered as such.
Some elements usually absent from casual games: realistic death (if any death at all), realistic or extreme violence, gloomy atmospherics, extensive grinding, and long narratives (not to give too much credit to the narratives in hardcore games, which still are usually nowhere near the quality of decent novels and films).
It' s this last aspect that I' d like to highlight as the place where hardcore games have taken a wrong turn: long narratives. That is to say, the emphasis on a vast quantity of hours of play as opposed to improving the quality of the story within a lesser number of overall hours of play. In other words, a 70-hour game with cheesy, distracting dialog and a cliched plot riddled with illogical holes is simply not as satisfying and worthwhile an endeavor as a 10-hour game with a tight, solid and well-crafted story. (Indeed, even a game like
GTAIV, by all rights a solid 10-15 hour game, was padded with tediously repetitive missions into a 50 hour game, under pressure to appeal to a core audience that demands length at the expense of the necessary brevity of quality storytelling... sorry Mr. " It' s a perfect 10!"
)
Lastly, I have to question whether
Tetris is indeed a casual game. It is certainly visually non-threatening, but it has all the depth and, frankly, adrenalized anxiety factors that appeal to core gamers. (I personally hate playing it because it' s nerve-wracking.) Its casual appeal, therefore, is in its non-intimidating aesthetic design. Essentially a game like
Tetris brushes away the rubbishy buzzwords of core and casual -- it is both, because those buzzwords are ultimately insubstantial. A well-designed game will have broad appeal -- not to every last person, but certainly across broad swaths of demographics.
Spore is shaping up to have that kind of broad appeal. It seems to offer the depth of strategy and obsessive analysis and adjustment that appeals to the core mindset, while including the sit-back-and-enjoy-seeing-what-happens-for-a-while appeal of
The Sims. Sheeeit, even the lineage of
The Sims is traced back to the hardcore micromanagement in a friendly presentation of
Sim City. I could go on and on... for the most part, though, I maintain that core vs. casual is mainly buzz. And it' s a good thing that more and more people are trying out video games. The classification of " gamer" and " nongamer" should be irrelevant.
< Message edited by Zoy -- 26 Jun 08 19:12:21 >