Chasing The Golden Goose
In a recent post I mentioned that not all casual games are bad. These are not those games.
Today, under the news column for Gamasutra, the top four stories concern themselves with the oncoming casual marketplace onslaught. Three of the stories are from the Casual Connect conference. One is just a general press release from Sony, although I would guess its release was timed with the conference in mind.
The golden goose at one point were real-time strategy games. Then it became MMORPGs. Now, casual games.
Bleh.
On the same day there’s an article about Civilization, with an interview with Sid Meier, also at Gamasutra. Here’s a quote from that interview that I believe makes an interesting contrast to casual gaming:
“Sid: Yes. It’s always fun to make computer games, but I think in those days we really hadn’t come up with the idea of a genre yet, so we would say, “Let’s do a game about pirates!” “OK! There will be sword fighting and there will be ships!” or “Let’s do a game about civilization.” “Yeah! We’ll have economics and diplomacy. There will be military…” We didn’t say, “What category are we going to fit this into?” There was a lot more experimenting. The graphics and the sound technology were limited, so the investment wasn’t so high to make a game.
You could only make it look so good, or sound so good. So we didn’t have to spend the millions and millions and millions of dollars like we do today. It was a little less risky, so we could take a chance with games because they didn’t cost as much money. That was fun; It was exciting.”
Experimentation. Chance. Excitement. Words that you will never hear uttered about mainstream casual gaming.
The sad thing is when you consider how young digital gaming is compared to other forms of entertainment, there’s absolutely no reason why it had to go down this route of pop music/reality TV/brainless $200 million dollar special effects orgies. Ah well.