Isn’t All Gaming Casual?
Hola gamers!
This week I’d like to spend a little time talking “casual gaming.” You know the type — the Peggles and Bejeweleds of the world, the Carnival Games and the Word Whomps and practically every Wii game ever made. Because honestly, when people talk about “casual gaming” as a pejorative term, that’s what they mean. They mean the Wii.
How you define “casual gaming” depends greatly on who’s doing the defining. If you’re in favor of smaller, more compact “mini-game” style gaming, then “casual gaming” is a videogame experience that need not envelope you in order to please you. For proponents of this style of game, the gaming experience is enjoyed in the immediacy of the event, and its appeal is somewhat fleeting. You needn’t stare directly at the sun for hours on end then return the next night to get the full experience of enjoying a setting sun.
Conversely, you also get people like Rockstar’s Dan Houser, who was quoted in the New York Times thusly:
“Yeah, f— all this stuff about casual gaming. I think people still want games that are groundbreaking.”
And if I’d just laid out nearly $150 million producing, promoting and selling Grand Theft Auto IV… you bet your sweet controller I’d be saying the same thing.
Dan isn’t alone. Gaming message boards and magazines frequently decry the rise of the casual game as a “non-gaming experience.” The argument is that a videogame should be an immersive experience, one that captures the imagination and takes you into a world unlike your own. Your ears should ring with the momentary PINGGGGG of a flash grenade. You should feel the vertigo of climbing and soaring to great heights. You should smell the city itself, breathe its air, and lose yourself in the role of a soldier. Gangster. Criminal. Adventurer. This is the way of a REAL gamer.
But the problem with that line of thinking is simply this:
Dan Houser, and every one of those people raising this kind of argument, are wrong.
Videogaming as an art form is at the pinnacle of its influence in North American society. Games like GTA IV and Call of Duty can bring in revenue that stretches into the billions of dollars. Today, the Associated Press is reporting that Take Two Interactive has posted nearly $100 million in profits for their previous fiscal quarter, a result of selling over 11 million copies of their newest opus to retailers. A game that, incidentally, has only been available on the market for a little under 60 days.
Filmmakers no longer look at videogames as faulty source material, and instead collaborate with developers to produce properties that will extend themselves naturally upon the silver screen. As I speak, games currently being developed for the screen include Bio-Shock, Assassin’s Creed, Kane & Lynch, Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune, as well as the ubiquitous Halo franchise. This is to without even mentioning some of Uwe Boll’s “finer” work to bring gaming to the masses by subjecting them to terrible, terrible exercises in futility.
Gaming consoles are also no longer being shoved into spare bedrooms, hooked up to disused secondary televisions. They are front and center in the primary living room, working double-duty playing Blu-Ray movies or doubling as exercise machines. They are becoming as vital a television component as the cable box or home theater system.
And I’m here to say the Nintendo Wii is instrumental in that cultural shift. It is a pivotal piece of hardware that should and, in fact, MUST be encouraged in order to further gaming penetration into homes that might not otherwise experience them.
Dan Houser can decry casual gaming, but it has become an integral part of the industry he himself seeks to further. Rockstar can choose to not compete in this space — and, based upon their experience shoehorning arbitrary Wii functionality into Manhunt 2, I’d say that may not be a bad decision. But going on public record to bash a vital and necessary extension of your industry brand is simply bad business. Moreover, qualifying a game as “casual” or “serious” in a business that can’t even figure out how to rate its titles properly is what I’d call a slippery slope. And in doing so, you risk alienating future gamers that might not enjoy the Online Deathmatch style.
Let’s not forget that the gamers that once sat around the living room playing the Atari 2600 are the ones largely responsible for introducing videogames to their children. As those gamers get older, the amount of time they have to spend playing decreases. Casual gaming becomes one of the ways they can continue to play. The propensity to play won’t diminish entirely so long as games are introduced that cater to that demographic… which increases your market base. This is good for everybody, right?
When you get down to it… all gaming is “casual gaming.” And it’s these people — the ones that feel the need to create a rift where none exist — that most need to understand that.
Posted on 6th June 2008
Under: Grant's Rants | 1 Comment »