The future of mainstream gaming

From an excellent charlie brooker article:

But things are changing. The biggest growth area in videogames right now is the "casual gaming" market. For "casual", read "mainstream". Effectively, this means games the average human being can relate to: anyone who's lived in a house can grasp what The Sims is, for instance; anyone who's played tennis knows how to swing a Nintendo Wii remote. Grand Theft Auto might not look like a casual game, but it certainly appeals to a wide demographic, namely anyone who's ever fantasised about going berserk in a city (ie 98% of the population).

There are a million similar fantasies people experience on a daily basis that the games industry is yet to exploit. If it really wants to appeal to the population as a whole, I'd suggest some of the following:

Magic Agreement Party This is simply a game in which you sit at a dinner party table espousing your viewpoints on any subject under the sun, while everyone else slowly comes to agree with everything you're saying. Actually, this gives me an idea for an even better game, which is …

Super Squabble Champ IV This game consists of nothing but petty relationship squabbles in which your character is endowed with the mystical ability to zip back in time and record footage of your partner being a massive bloody hypocrite, then zoom back into the present to play it all back on a giant screen in front of their eyes until they quiver and break down and confess that you were 100% right all along. Then you get a million points and it plays a little song.

Boundless Libertine Plus Sims-style title in which you build a character that looks exactly like you, living in a house that looks exactly like your own, with a job exactly like yours - basically every detail is as close to your life as possible, except one: there are absolutely no consequences for your actions. So you can walk into the office and have sex with nine co-workers, then go home and eat doughnuts for 200 days without putting on any weight. You can even stamp up and down on your dog's head if you like, and it won't so much as bruise. The day this game comes out is the day the phenomenon of workplace massacres ceases for ever.

Peter Sissons' Tetris I've included this for my own amusement. It's basically just Tetris, but as played through the eyes and mind of Peter Sissons as he sits in his dressing room at BBC News 24 waiting to go on-air. It's precisely the same as usual, except occasionally you hear him clearing his throat, or someone saying "need you in the studio in 10, Peter" through an earpiece. And when you clear 100 lines, the viewpoint changes and he stands up in front of the mirror, drops his pants and shows you his bum.

You get the picture. The list could go on. Enough space operas and chainmail. We want more down-to-earth fantasies, and we want them now.

Hahaha…

I don't know who Peter Sissons is, but the other stuff sure sounds like ideas which could be developed into some interesting games!

Although they all seem to center around such negative emotions…