magerette
Hedgewitch
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- October 18, 2006
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Australian gaming site Gameplayer.com takes a look at the impact of the success of casual games on the hardcore player in this article:
The author then gets into some definitions and whether accessability alone makes a game casual:We’ve all played the odd game of Snake on a mobile phone, popped a few crystals in Bejeweled, or made ourselves look extremely silly playing games like Cooking Mama in front of the family, but the rise of casual gaming is becoming a concern to a small but significant sector of the gaming community: the hardcore...
...hardly a day goes by when the games press does not mention some core developer that announces it is working on a new casual game.” So, are self-professed hardcore gamers right to be concerned about the influence that casual gaming is having on their hobby?
Jim Sterling, who writes a blog at Destructoid, summarises the paranoia that hardcore gamers have of the ‘casuals’ thus: “It’s just a shame that most of what they’re playing can barely qualify as videogames.”
Historically there have certainly been many examples of once great, feature-laden games getting diluted to appeal to a wider audience, especially from PC to console: Baldur’s Gate to Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance; the Total War series to Spartan: Total Warrior; Civilization to Civilization Revolution; the list could go on. But what’s notable now is that, with the PC market shrinking, publishers are increasingly stripping features from games to appeal to the masses from the outset.
And on some of the defects of traditional hardcore games:But it’s here where the lines between what is and isn’t a casual game become blurred...Is a casual game defined by how simple and accessible it is? Or is a casual gamer someone who plays for a few minutes at a time? Perhaps a casual gamer is someone who only plays ‘social’ games?
All of these definitions are problematic...The broader question is not whether hardcore gamers enjoy casual titles – they clearly do – but if casual gamers can be brought into the fold without damaging the existing hardcore experience. Indeed, developers are now turning the question on its head, arguing that the rise of casual games is actually benefiting game design across the board.
More information.Jonathan Smith, creative director at Traveller’s Tales, believes this: “True challenge comes when a player is provoked into learning something new. Some games, though, fit so closely within generic expectations, following so predictable a progression tempo, that players...can move through them half-asleep.
There’s a conventional ‘balanced’ path in many games, as an endless tutorial, which drip-feeds the player with novel opportunities at a more-or-less steady rate over a long period of time, and that loses the sense of unpredictability, danger, and self-motivated reward that provides the most memorable gaming experiences.”
This is an interesting twist because so many so-called hardcore games fail to offer anything truly new after the first level.
- Joined
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