Casual gamer
Oct. 16th, 2013 03:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livThere's been a lot of virtual ink spilled on the snobbery and sexism that permeates which kinds of video games are taken seriously. I think where I'm at is that actually, the industry has woken up to the fact that they can make serious money out of casual games, and it hasn't necessarily made my life as a casual gamer better (even though I am reasonably willing to spend money on games I enjoy).
Like lots of people my age, I discovered computer games in the 80s. Specifically, I had a BBC Micro and spent a lot of my childhood waiting for tapes to load so I could play the sort of simple games that a computer of the era could run. Even then, my favourite genre was what I loosely classify as Donkey-Kong style games, the kind where you have to run up and down ladders and platforms and collect objects and avoid hazards and you play through a single screen at a time. I did play the classic Chuckie Egg (and got very good at it), but my favourite game was a really obscure one called Felix Meets the Evil Weevils. I did play the cutting-edge games of the time, really innovative and complex games, notably Elite, but I mostly watched my brothers, cousins and friends playing them, because I basically couldn't be bothered to learn the skills needed to pilot a virtual spaceship or remember all the data about the complex galaxy with its detailed trading system.
A few years later, I fell deeply in love with Tetris. Original Gameboy version, and my siblings and I pooled all our birthday money for years to acquire a second-hand handheld console, but basically all I did with it was play Tetris. Tetris is how I discovered flow, and that's probably the primary thing I want from a computer game. It's as much meditation as it is fun (I am really rubbish at real meditation, so active puzzle games are the closest I get). For years I was sure nothing would ever match Tetris, but actually I think Zuma comes pretty close. It introduced a novel game mechanic, it requires you to be constantly making decisions at speed, each of which is individually very simple. And it's simple and for me pretty much limitlessly replayable. I do have the same problem that I do with Tetris, that eventually the only way to make the game harder is to make it faster, and at some point my ability to progress is limited by the physical speed at which I click things.
I am almost totally uninterested in first person shooters or any sort of game where the aim is to run around the world killing enemies. Those make up, of course, most of the headline games! And yes, I know some of them are really good, beautiful graphics, detailed world-building, interesting and original missions. But I can't be bothered to invest dozens of hours in a game in order to find out what happens next in the plot. I would rather read a book, which takes me 10 hours or less, and which I can do more or less anywhere without needing complicated hardware. And if I want to look at pretty things and admire excellent storytelling in a more passive way, I would rather watch a film (which takes 2-3 hours) than play a game. I've quite often acquired cutting-edge games when they seem to be more plot or exploration driven and less explosion / shooting driven, but I still have the problem that I can't be bothered to learn the skills needed to control my character or put the time in to actually play through the game. Things like Myst, Baldur's Gate, Black & White, Oblivion: over the years I've never been able to stick to them long enough to get past being useless and incompetent and actually start having fun.
There are precisely two games I have actually enjoyed enough to spend time learning a complex set of skills to be able to play. One is Civilization II, which manages to combine flow state (managing resources in each of my cities in turn) with making decisions which actually take thought and strategy. And I think the reason I got far enough to enjoy the strategy aspect is precisely because of the former aspect. I have never been able to get into the other similar games; even Civ III I've started and given up a few times because it felt just too complex and too steep a learning curve.
And I think Terraria is turning out to be a second such game. I play it on softcore (which basically means that dying is an inconvenience), and I like the combination of simple repetitive stuff like fighting, with the brain-requiring bits of exploring and building. Even so, I haven't managed to progress past the first couple of bosses and I quite possibly never will, because I still can't quite be bothered to think hard enough to come up with a strategy for eg remodelling the landscape to make the harder bosses manageable, or to spend time practising repetitive motions so that I can fight and dodge well enough to defeat them. Terraria is in the Steam sale this week, by the way, and the new update to 1.2 has really added some depth to the game. I recommend it if you like the idea of a completely non-linear game with some amount of fighting monsters but mostly exploring and terraforming the world with goals that you set for yourself rather than a pre-defined plot.
So the obvious reason I prefer casual games over "serious" games is that I want something that gives me 5 minutes or half an hour of flow state, not something that requires serious investment of time and brain power. But there's a second reason too, which I think boils down to a difference in approach or attitude. Serious games require you to manage split second timing and pixel perfect pointing to avoid DEATH. Casual games kind of give you the benefit of the doubt, often giving you credit if you're nearly right, they tend to default to "yay, you win" any time the outcome is marginal. And also, in serious games, your reward for doing well is very often stuff that is simply not rewarding for my brain. In-game money or high score points, meh. And all too often your reward in serious games is... sexy women. "Sexy" as in scantily clad with tiny waists and pneumatic breasts and a sort of vaguely soft-pornish "please abuse me" attitude. Even though I'm attracted to women in principle, that particular style of sexy I find a complete and utter turn-off, and honestly when I'm playing computer games I'm not looking for sexual thrills anyway. Conversely, in casual games, your reward for doing well is often cuteness. Playing a little fanfare or displaying a colourful animation or giving me achievement badges and medals are much much better at pushing the reward buttons in my brain than just racking up a bigger number. And little cartoonish cute creatures make me smile, whereas sexy women making kissyface just makes me feel vaguely dispirited or reminds me forcefully that I'm not the intended audience.
A few years ago, if I wanted games that were fun, with a shallow learning curve, and colourful, cartoony graphics rather than an uncanny valley attempt to be realistic, I could find abandonware games from my childhood or from 15-20 years ago, or I could play indie games that were sold relatively cheaply and were more about showing what the programmers could do than winning big awards. Then the entertainment industry started noticing that casual games are actually big money-spinners, and they got more and more mainstreamed. This was a good thing in as far as it led to really high quality casual games like Plants vs Zombies, and any number of good games that are small enough, both physically and in terms of processor requirement, to be played on mobile phones or in browsers. But a bad thing in that, well, these games are getting more expensive. There's a huge market in retro games now, and much less in the way of old games just floating around online.
But I think even worse is the phenomenon where games companies are trying to distil out the aspects of games that make them psychologically rewarding, leaving behind the part where they're also fun. So they're taking the principle of having difficulty that ramps up gradually and the idea of giving achievement badges, and making that the whole game. There are lots of games which are really just grinds for rewards, keep clicking to keep getting a steady flow of cute things and reward animations, but with no actual point. And of course, the whole awful free-to-play thing of giving away the game but making players pay real world money and personal information for in-game items that make it actually possible to get the rewards. Which in turn means that casual games are more and more geared towards manipulating or outright tricking the player into making in-game purchases, than towards actually being fun.
The other thing is that everything seems to be converging towards a few tropes that have been shown to be psychologically effective. Everything has the same cartoon-bright colours, the same cute anthropomorphic animals with implausibly huge eyes, and / or a candy theme. Those are all very well, but I'd like to see a bit more variety.
I've got fairly hooked on Candy Crush lately. And no, I haven't spent any actual money on it, I'm neither daft nor young enough to be that much biased in favour of immediate rewards over longer-term intentions. The worst thing about it is that it's about 90% of an actually really good game, which has been deliberately broken to try to bleed money out of players. It has several features which are explicitly anti-flow, in the hope that people will pay to continue rather than breaking flow. The difficulty is on this really weird curve where a big proportion of it is just that sweet spot of difficult enough to keep you interested without being frustrating, with sudden spikes of COMPLETELY IMPOSSIBLE unless you pay for special powers, go on, it's only a few pence... Similar with Alien Hive on my phone; it has a really cute mechanic where you match three in sliding-puzzle style rather than swapping adjacent cells style, and the matched items turn into one bigger item, which can then be matched again. But it's deliberately wrongly balanced so that the only way to get anywhere is to spend money on in-app purchases.
I would be very willing indeed to pay £5 as a one-off for a version of games like that that actually works, and I would keep on paying that for several different such small casual games, but as far as I can see nobody's making any such thing. And I am deathly disappointed that Plants vs Zombies 2 has been released as a free to play game; means I'm not going to get to play it, and I would totally have dropped "serious" money on a sequel to something as well made as PvZ. But I am pretty sure that the game companies are making more money out of kids and people who don't really understand how in-app purchasing works than out of selling the games directly as a single purchase. I do still buy pocket money games, particularly through Steam sales and GOG, but it really seems like the best games aren't being made for that market any more.
So, any recs for casual games where the version you buy or download actually works properly out of the box? I'm willing to pay actual money if I know what I'm getting for my cash, I'm even willing to deal with in-game ads these days if I am getting a complete game in exchange for my eyeballs.
Like lots of people my age, I discovered computer games in the 80s. Specifically, I had a BBC Micro and spent a lot of my childhood waiting for tapes to load so I could play the sort of simple games that a computer of the era could run. Even then, my favourite genre was what I loosely classify as Donkey-Kong style games, the kind where you have to run up and down ladders and platforms and collect objects and avoid hazards and you play through a single screen at a time. I did play the classic Chuckie Egg (and got very good at it), but my favourite game was a really obscure one called Felix Meets the Evil Weevils. I did play the cutting-edge games of the time, really innovative and complex games, notably Elite, but I mostly watched my brothers, cousins and friends playing them, because I basically couldn't be bothered to learn the skills needed to pilot a virtual spaceship or remember all the data about the complex galaxy with its detailed trading system.
A few years later, I fell deeply in love with Tetris. Original Gameboy version, and my siblings and I pooled all our birthday money for years to acquire a second-hand handheld console, but basically all I did with it was play Tetris. Tetris is how I discovered flow, and that's probably the primary thing I want from a computer game. It's as much meditation as it is fun (I am really rubbish at real meditation, so active puzzle games are the closest I get). For years I was sure nothing would ever match Tetris, but actually I think Zuma comes pretty close. It introduced a novel game mechanic, it requires you to be constantly making decisions at speed, each of which is individually very simple. And it's simple and for me pretty much limitlessly replayable. I do have the same problem that I do with Tetris, that eventually the only way to make the game harder is to make it faster, and at some point my ability to progress is limited by the physical speed at which I click things.
I am almost totally uninterested in first person shooters or any sort of game where the aim is to run around the world killing enemies. Those make up, of course, most of the headline games! And yes, I know some of them are really good, beautiful graphics, detailed world-building, interesting and original missions. But I can't be bothered to invest dozens of hours in a game in order to find out what happens next in the plot. I would rather read a book, which takes me 10 hours or less, and which I can do more or less anywhere without needing complicated hardware. And if I want to look at pretty things and admire excellent storytelling in a more passive way, I would rather watch a film (which takes 2-3 hours) than play a game. I've quite often acquired cutting-edge games when they seem to be more plot or exploration driven and less explosion / shooting driven, but I still have the problem that I can't be bothered to learn the skills needed to control my character or put the time in to actually play through the game. Things like Myst, Baldur's Gate, Black & White, Oblivion: over the years I've never been able to stick to them long enough to get past being useless and incompetent and actually start having fun.
There are precisely two games I have actually enjoyed enough to spend time learning a complex set of skills to be able to play. One is Civilization II, which manages to combine flow state (managing resources in each of my cities in turn) with making decisions which actually take thought and strategy. And I think the reason I got far enough to enjoy the strategy aspect is precisely because of the former aspect. I have never been able to get into the other similar games; even Civ III I've started and given up a few times because it felt just too complex and too steep a learning curve.
And I think Terraria is turning out to be a second such game. I play it on softcore (which basically means that dying is an inconvenience), and I like the combination of simple repetitive stuff like fighting, with the brain-requiring bits of exploring and building. Even so, I haven't managed to progress past the first couple of bosses and I quite possibly never will, because I still can't quite be bothered to think hard enough to come up with a strategy for eg remodelling the landscape to make the harder bosses manageable, or to spend time practising repetitive motions so that I can fight and dodge well enough to defeat them. Terraria is in the Steam sale this week, by the way, and the new update to 1.2 has really added some depth to the game. I recommend it if you like the idea of a completely non-linear game with some amount of fighting monsters but mostly exploring and terraforming the world with goals that you set for yourself rather than a pre-defined plot.
So the obvious reason I prefer casual games over "serious" games is that I want something that gives me 5 minutes or half an hour of flow state, not something that requires serious investment of time and brain power. But there's a second reason too, which I think boils down to a difference in approach or attitude. Serious games require you to manage split second timing and pixel perfect pointing to avoid DEATH. Casual games kind of give you the benefit of the doubt, often giving you credit if you're nearly right, they tend to default to "yay, you win" any time the outcome is marginal. And also, in serious games, your reward for doing well is very often stuff that is simply not rewarding for my brain. In-game money or high score points, meh. And all too often your reward in serious games is... sexy women. "Sexy" as in scantily clad with tiny waists and pneumatic breasts and a sort of vaguely soft-pornish "please abuse me" attitude. Even though I'm attracted to women in principle, that particular style of sexy I find a complete and utter turn-off, and honestly when I'm playing computer games I'm not looking for sexual thrills anyway. Conversely, in casual games, your reward for doing well is often cuteness. Playing a little fanfare or displaying a colourful animation or giving me achievement badges and medals are much much better at pushing the reward buttons in my brain than just racking up a bigger number. And little cartoonish cute creatures make me smile, whereas sexy women making kissyface just makes me feel vaguely dispirited or reminds me forcefully that I'm not the intended audience.
A few years ago, if I wanted games that were fun, with a shallow learning curve, and colourful, cartoony graphics rather than an uncanny valley attempt to be realistic, I could find abandonware games from my childhood or from 15-20 years ago, or I could play indie games that were sold relatively cheaply and were more about showing what the programmers could do than winning big awards. Then the entertainment industry started noticing that casual games are actually big money-spinners, and they got more and more mainstreamed. This was a good thing in as far as it led to really high quality casual games like Plants vs Zombies, and any number of good games that are small enough, both physically and in terms of processor requirement, to be played on mobile phones or in browsers. But a bad thing in that, well, these games are getting more expensive. There's a huge market in retro games now, and much less in the way of old games just floating around online.
But I think even worse is the phenomenon where games companies are trying to distil out the aspects of games that make them psychologically rewarding, leaving behind the part where they're also fun. So they're taking the principle of having difficulty that ramps up gradually and the idea of giving achievement badges, and making that the whole game. There are lots of games which are really just grinds for rewards, keep clicking to keep getting a steady flow of cute things and reward animations, but with no actual point. And of course, the whole awful free-to-play thing of giving away the game but making players pay real world money and personal information for in-game items that make it actually possible to get the rewards. Which in turn means that casual games are more and more geared towards manipulating or outright tricking the player into making in-game purchases, than towards actually being fun.
The other thing is that everything seems to be converging towards a few tropes that have been shown to be psychologically effective. Everything has the same cartoon-bright colours, the same cute anthropomorphic animals with implausibly huge eyes, and / or a candy theme. Those are all very well, but I'd like to see a bit more variety.
I've got fairly hooked on Candy Crush lately. And no, I haven't spent any actual money on it, I'm neither daft nor young enough to be that much biased in favour of immediate rewards over longer-term intentions. The worst thing about it is that it's about 90% of an actually really good game, which has been deliberately broken to try to bleed money out of players. It has several features which are explicitly anti-flow, in the hope that people will pay to continue rather than breaking flow. The difficulty is on this really weird curve where a big proportion of it is just that sweet spot of difficult enough to keep you interested without being frustrating, with sudden spikes of COMPLETELY IMPOSSIBLE unless you pay for special powers, go on, it's only a few pence... Similar with Alien Hive on my phone; it has a really cute mechanic where you match three in sliding-puzzle style rather than swapping adjacent cells style, and the matched items turn into one bigger item, which can then be matched again. But it's deliberately wrongly balanced so that the only way to get anywhere is to spend money on in-app purchases.
I would be very willing indeed to pay £5 as a one-off for a version of games like that that actually works, and I would keep on paying that for several different such small casual games, but as far as I can see nobody's making any such thing. And I am deathly disappointed that Plants vs Zombies 2 has been released as a free to play game; means I'm not going to get to play it, and I would totally have dropped "serious" money on a sequel to something as well made as PvZ. But I am pretty sure that the game companies are making more money out of kids and people who don't really understand how in-app purchasing works than out of selling the games directly as a single purchase. I do still buy pocket money games, particularly through Steam sales and GOG, but it really seems like the best games aren't being made for that market any more.
So, any recs for casual games where the version you buy or download actually works properly out of the box? I'm willing to pay actual money if I know what I'm getting for my cash, I'm even willing to deal with in-game ads these days if I am getting a complete game in exchange for my eyeballs.
(no subject)
Date: 2013-10-18 02:18 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-10-18 03:34 pm (UTC)I go with the Combat line on practically all military units, which saves time.
(no subject)
Date: 2013-10-24 08:53 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-10-21 12:41 pm (UTC)