The rise of casual gaming: What me worry?

Any excuse to include Patrick Stewart will immediately be taken advantage of.

In a word (ok, not a word, more of a short sentence, but ‘in a short sentence’ doesn’t flow quite as well): I don’t rightly care one way or the other about the casual gaming movement. There really isn’t much to be said that hasn’t been said already. Maybe I think casual gaming is bad because all the money those genius bastards at Zynga are making is causing the big time publishers like Activision and EA drool at the mouth like hungry dogs. Or maybe I think casual gaming is good for the industry because it helps draw gaming into the mainstream, along with the ranks of other major media. We've seen what fellow editor Jun thinks on the matter. Hit the jump if you're looking for a second opinion.

If casual gaming was bad, Patrick Stewart would not be involved. God bless you, sir! 

To definitively say whether or not one of these opinions is correct would take much too much research and effort, and even then a concrete viewpoint seems as yet intangible.So I say fuck it. Good or bad for the industry as a whole, what are we as ‘core’ gamers poised to lose to the scourge of the casual menace? Is it because we’re losing all the quality games we used to have before these filthy casual whores started knocking on our doorstep? I don’t know about you, but I haven’t actually lost anything yet. Speaking personally, I think that the era of the FPS, instigated by every fratboy’s favorite game, Call of Duty, has done more to creatively stunt the industry than trying to ‘pander’ to casuals by making games more accessible. Beyond that, if it weren’t for the wild popularity of World of Warcraft, I might actually be getting a proper sequel to one of my favorite RPGs ever, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, instead of this MMO trash that is Star Wars: The Old Republic (Goddammit I hate MMOs...). People who get their panties knotted up over the ‘casual’ gamer, playing Angry Birds on an iPhone, FarmVille on Facebook or  are exactly the kind of gamer I wish would crawl in a hole and die, which, incidentally, literlly millions of gamers are doing with the help of Blizzard’s digital cocaine distribution service World of Warcraft. Keep it up Blizzard, at this rate if starvation won’t kill them all then they’ll at least go broke and have to offer lonely bj’s to strangers in dark alleys to feed their addiction as their genes blissfully filter out of the gene pool.

I secretly (read as: openly) hate one of these two people. Can you guess who?

To look at this another way, one has to think about what the word ‘videogame’ has come to represent in this day and age. Of course your big AAA titles like Halo and Grand Theft Auto are unanimously considered to be videogames, whether or not they are unanimously played.  However, Tetris, Bejeweled and Solitaire are also videogames, and these games are unanimously played. Dollars-to-doughnuts, a lot of the people who say they don’t like videogames can be caught playing some manner of videogame. The term ‘videogame’ has become rather nebulous. 

There is the standard distinction of ‘casual’ and ‘hardcore’, which lets us ‘core’ gamers lift ourselves up on a pedestal above those lowly “casual” players. These are games with difficulty, that require skill and talent to complete, not these pussy games that hold your hand and never give you the chance to learn from your mistakes. But  I defy you to prove that any one game requires more skill than another. Every game requires skills, just different kinds. Go ahead, tell me that you’re better at minesweeper than this guy. If you’re a ‘core’ gamer, please do show how much better you are at Devil May Cry 3 than this guy. Hell, as much as I bitch and bitch and bitch about MMOs even I will admit that they require a talent I do not possess (a talent for memorizing spreadsheets, skill trees, number crunching and all round pointless minutiae that completely degrades one’s worth as a person). There are yearly competitions where hundreds to thousands of people compete to see who is the best at games like Madden, Call of Duty, World of Warcraft and even Pokemon. Skill is relative and challenge is what one makes of it. 

The answer is both. I hate both of them. 

Every media has its ‘casual’ connoisseur. Last year at the movies one was able to watch innovative new films like Black Swan, pure Oscar bait like The King’s Speech, mindless action like The Mechanic, or silly comedies like Hot Tub Time Machine. Music is just as varied, with ‘serious’ classical or opera music, pointless throw away pop/modern hip-hop, crazy and frenetic techno, and more. 

It's still relevant because there's a DS and an old lady in the picture. Fuck you.

If you don’t like the mainstream, you are always free to support the alternative. Indie games have something from everyone. If you’re looking for challenge, the indi platformer Super Meat Boy will more than likely help you to break a few controllers. If you’re looking for pure horror, give Amnesia: The Dark Descent a go. What you want is out there, and if you don’t like what the big boy publishers are making, don’t blame the casuals for saturating the market, blame the damned greedy publishers for focusing on a new and fickle demographic of users and ignoring their core clientele. Besides, them casual games sure can be mighty good fun I'll tell ya what.

Pictured: The best way to kill time on the toilet yet discovered.