Anyway, a special interest group created for casual games tells you casual games are good? Shocking! A company that companies pay to find creative ways of telling them what they want to hear, told them what they wanted to hear? Amazing!

Go back and read my original post. If you have any comments of your own that don’t come from some party with questionable financial interests in the field, in response to what I wrote I will be glad to discuss them with you.

The only thing I will add to my initial statement at this time is that development of “casual games” is a backwards approach to a straightforward problem.

Morgan Ramsay said on August 31st, 2006 at 8:55 pm:
quiet420 wrote:

a real problem we’re having now is the focus on “casual gaming” which is completely unviable

Says the anonymous user whose alias includes the term “420″…

The IGDA Casual Games Special Interest Group published a 119-page whitepaper (PDF) detailing the casual games market, industry, and products. In addition, Parks Research has also identified three segments—Social Gamers, Leisure Gamers, and Dormant Gamers—that account for 53% of the online gamer population and 56% of the retail revenue.

As described in the whitepaper, “Over the past few years, casual games have gone from a cottage industry to one of the highest growth areas in the overall video games sector.”

To say that games cannot do whatever other media can do, that they are “just for fun” and have no other purpose, is to betray a profound contempt for games.

Conversely, I would argue that to say that being “just for fun” betrays a contempt for games is to betray a contempt for fun.

People play games to have fun, not to make the world a better place to live.

Yes, people do play games for other reasons than just to have fun. I can experience Guernica or a Bach Cello Suite purely due to a school assignment on them, for instance. However, if I’m not seeing what makes them unique pieces of art during that experience, I’m unlikely to return to them, or to their art forms.

“People read books only for enjoyment, never to learn anything.”

We can just scratch off all those books — yes, entertaining books! — that we read because they introduce us to new things, give us a glimpse of different lives, teach us a little bit, challenge us, and so on.

Reading and playing games aren’t at all the same thing, so that comparison isn’t particularly useful. Of course people read for other purposes – taking in information is basic to just about every human activity.

The theory of play has entire educational disciplines devoted to it, most of which have as their basic lesson “learning can be enhanced by a sense of fun.” That doesn’t mean that people will necessarily play educational games purely for learning purposes, unless that’s the only method of learning a topic available. The educational games that lose sight of the fun factor tend to be dreary and boring, which hardly helps the learning process.

Much of the point to educational and “serious” games is to inject a sense of fun into a cognitive process, and thereby enhance memory and cognition for that process. If there’s no sense of fun, what you’re doing isn’t a game; it may be a tutor, a complex mnemonic, a financial contest or a simulator, but it’s not a game. The point of “serious” games is to make the desired activity fun enough to enhance it.

(The comments often made when competitive games turn serious reinforce this sense of the word – “He’s not playing anymore”, “It’s not just a game to him”, etc. are used when competition has overwhelmed the sense of fun.)

“People look at pictures only because they are pretty.”

Oops, Picasso, toss that Guernica thing. Goya, quit doing those paintings about the Spanish Civil War.

“Movies are just entertainment, for fun, not to make the world a better place to live.”

Good, we can discard everything from All Quiet on the Western Front through Schindler’s List.

Now we get to the meat of the argument – whether games are identical to other art forms. Art and creative expression aren’t defined by whether they’re fun, but on their beauty, the message they convey or the feeling they produce in the observer.

There’s just one problem with defining games that way: it doesn’t fit any dictionary definition (and, since dictionaries are mostly descriptive these days, any common-use definition) of the word “game” that encompasses MMOs. The analogies to Guernica and Schindler’s List don’t fit, because there’s no definition of painting or cinema that says they have to be fun in addition to being awe inspiring or thought provoking.

Games are an art form that requires fun as part of the mix. That’s not to say they can’t convey information, or be as beautiful and inspiring as any other art form, but if it’s not fun, what you’re doing isn’t a game.

Ender’s Game

a real problem we’re having now is the focus on “casual gaming” which is completely unviable

Says the anonymous user whose alias includes the term “420″…

The IGDA Casual Games Special Interest Group published a 119-page whitepaper (PDF) detailing the casual games market, industry, and products. In addition, Parks Research has also identified three segments—Social Gamers, Leisure Gamers, and Dormant Gamers—that account for 53% of the online gamer population and 56% of the retail revenue.

As described in the whitepaper, “Over the past few years, casual games have gone from a cottage industry to one of the highest growth areas in the overall video games sector.”

several of the large development houses recognize this, but they tend to take shortcuts at the expense of the consumer…games are more expensive then other forms of media, and for many consumers, once they have been badly burned once, they will not go back for a second helping.

a real problem we’re having now is the focus on “casual gaming” which is completely unviable….it is a cottage industry that big names have their eyes on, targeting the masses with the expressed intent of making games that to use an analogy, would be like making a movie with the intent to have viewers say “yeah, I watched it, didn’t really pay too much attention though, I guess there are worse ways I could have wasted a few hours”

I’ve played alot of great games over the years, and most of them taught me things, sports, strategy, history, culture, deep thinking, precision reflexes, etc etc…..in recent years however, it seems there a much smaller number of games out there….there are just as many (if not more) different boxes in the stores, but many are just carbon copies of other games, that really add nothing to the art, and are simply the digital entertainment editions of the car porn, tough guy, and prop comedy movies.

and although off topic, I agree with Cael…prohibition is a really, really stupid idea.

If you walk away from a game refreshed, you are more likely to be able to concentrate on your “real” work, whatever it might be.

It seems fairly straightforward to me.

Incidentally, the same goes for the illegal drug industry. Prohibition was and will always remain a really stupid idea.

[...] Playing for fun on Raph Koster Playing for fun on Raph Koster People play games to have fun, not to make the world a better place to live. “People read books only for enjoyment, never to learn anything.” We can just scratch off all those books — yes, entertaining books! — that we read because they introduce us to new things, give us a glimpse of different lives, teach [...] via Raph Koster [...]

Hmmm, that was an intersting gliche in english grammer, just now.