Author: Michael

All games are casual. Computer games are no exception. Games have been casual for centuries. There is no distinction, in terms of structure and mechanics, between a first person shooter and a game of pop the bubbles. Casual games are nothing new. And they are everywhere.

Contrary to popular opinion in the video games industry, everybody plays games! People play scrabble, they play chess, tic-tac-toe, cards, etcetera. People have always played games, casually. And now they play them on computers. The so-called rise of casual games does not exist. It’s simply people using computers (and other techno-gadgets) more.

Some computer games, however, offer more than casual entertainment. These games simulate believable environments and feature interesting characters, artificial intelligence, deep stories, sophisticated soundtracks. Games like this show us a glimpse of the future of the interactive medium.

But to this day, sadly, even most of these games still contain a mind-numbing layer of casual gameplay. Get the keycard, kill the boss monster, solve the puzzle, collect the gold, win some stupid game. Go to the next level, start again. Ad nauseam. Completely destroying the delicately woven layer of fiction and simulation that can be so rich and meaningful.

While we can play games with computers, we don’t need computers to play games. But to create an interactive illusion, an immersive and believable environment, a fiction that responds to your every move, requires a computer. This is where the heart and soul of computer entertainment lies. This is what we need to focus on.

The casual designers can continue to explore the myriad constellations of “interesting game mechanics” and “cool level design”. As they have been doing for centuries. We can even learn a thing or two from them. Accessibility for instance. While there may not be much difference in terms of structure and mechanics, the interfaces of explicitly casual games are often simply much better designed. Because casual games target everybody, their interfaces need to be intuitive and simple. There is no reason for interactive entertainment to be complicated.

Casual gameplay is universally appealing. Even on a computer. Everybody plays casually at some point. But these experiences are not meaningful. They are not important to most people. Casual game experiences are nowhere near as significant as experiences with film, literature or music.

If we want to realize the enormous potential of the interactive medium, we need to get rid of casual gameplay! Move on. And concentrate on the unique things we can do with this technology. Less casual, more ambitious, deeper, interesting, new.

When fantasizing about the future of computer games, we often think of the Holodeck: an area from the Star Trek science fiction universe where reality can be simulated in extremely convincing ways. The residents of the starships that house these Holodecks, however, do not use them for games.

Games on the Enterprise, on Voyager and in Deep Space 9, are generally more like electronic versions of our current board games than anything resembling a simulation.

Kal-toh is a Vulcan puzzle game.

Continue reading “Games in Star Trek”

I very much enjoyed reading Steve Gaynor’s insightful article about the future of games. There’s a lot of good points in the article, so I recommend reading the whole bit as any kind of summary would not do it credit. His main point is that

video games will never become a significant form of cultural discourse the way that novels and film have

I find it interesting that he isn’t talking about the medium as an art form but simply as something with cultural relevance, be it good or bad quality, high or low brow. The main obstacles for games, according the Mr. Gaynor, are high barriers to access and a certain attitude within the industry to continuously cater to the same incrowd. He likens this situation with that of comic strips which, despite of having produced several master pieces, are still by and large regarded as juvenile.

The one thing that I think Mr. Gaynor is overlooking is that the new medium that he is talking about, is not “games” as such but a much wider field of interactive entertainment. Games are a subset of the interactive medium. Almost as much a genre as action movies are a genre of cinema (and perhaps even comic strips a genre of literature).

Games have been around for millenia. They are neither new nor are they a medium. They have their place in society but they have never had a cultural impact like architecture, painting, music, literature or movies. The mere fact that games are made with and enjoyed through computers will not change this.
Games are not what is interesting and new about this medium! What it is exactly, we haven’t quite figured out yet. But we’re working on it. Some of this work is done within the games industry. Some of it outside of the games industry.

I share Mr. Gaynor’s pessimism about games ever becoming widely culturally relevant. In fact, I don’t find this pessimistic at all. It would worry me to no end if the human race would suddenly start playing games en masse. But I don’t believe his pessimism applies to the entire interactive medium. The small group of games that do reach further, may very well be the first steps into a much more accessible and widely relevant interactive medium. But that medium will probably not be called “games”.

Unless, perhaps, some smart business people in the games industry follow Mr Gaynor’s advice:

Who do you want to be backing further down the line: an insular, stunted medium like comics, or a full-grown, culturally-relevant, and hey, PROFITABLE, medium like film? We aren’t going to reach that point by catering to the current hardcore. And we’re not doing ourselves any good by assaulting the casual gamer with the deluge of crap that’s been thrown at the Wii audience so far. We’re going to expand our customer base by trying to give them new, subtle, interesting approaches to interactive experiences that are universal and human.