Reading the recent game reviews for Velvet Assasin it’s hard not to feel roundly depressed. The story of Violette Szabo is compelling, but even in the well known territory of a World War Shooter the designers seem to have failed to make anything from such a good story. Given that the vast majority of games these days are war-based shooters, it’s somewhat surprising to see such a comprehensive failure to go beyond anything amounting to tittilation and violence.

With such a great story turned into so bland a game, it begs the question, are complex stories even suitable for a game? Or, more pertinently, is there a game genre that could have pulled it off, successfully and tastefully?

Well, perhaps. In the next-generation video gaming world, the growth of Adventuring Gaming seems to have been stunted. Interactive fiction appears to be a doomed genre, most probably because it is so hard to write or adapt complex stories in an acceptable, playable format.

Pleasingly, though, comes this quote from Chris Crawford:

I dreamed of the day when computer games would be a viable medium of artistic expression — an art form. I dreamed of computer games expressing the full breadth of human experience and emotion. I dreamed of computer games that were tragedies, games about duty and honor, self-sacrifice and patriotism. I dreamed of satirical games and political games; games about the passionate love between a boy and girl, and the serene and mature love of a husband and wife of decades; games about a boy becoming a man, and a man realizing that he is no longer young.

That’s right, it’s the ‘Are games Art?’ question again. Answer: they’re not. Of more plausible concern is whether games can be considered affecting. Games still pack less emotional resonance than tv soaps, after all. Wouldn’t the story of Violette Szabo have been better served as an adventure game? What you trade in for cutting edge graphics you reap in terms of an engaging story. Whilst you won’t be shooting people point-blank in the face, you might experience a well-paced, unfolding drama.

Looking at the explosion of Virtual Worlds fused with Casual ethics and mainstream, almost bland themes and locations, it’s hard not to feel that an opportunity has been missed. So many Virtual Worlds, so few stories between them? How can you create a massively multiplayer game and watch as little or no stories emerge? Adventure games could be just as ‘massively multiplayer’ but, moreover, they could be filled with stories.

The recent rise of Virtual Worlds was a pollution of the MMO genre with Casual Games. Given that so many exist with so few genuinely different succes stories, it’s time to try something new. Adventure games could be truly episodic, they would have season-long story arcs baked in. Adventure games would be casual without blandness, educational, interactive and fictive. If comics can try something different, if children’s books can tackle difficult themes and use the medium for education, then why can’t games?

Who cares about Duke Nukem, let’s play a game of Kes.

On top of that, we’ve got portabable gaming, episodic gaming, emotive gaming, passive gaming, user-generated gaming and story-driven gaming, all of which sound highly, eminently, *casual*.

Now, before we start labelling the Xbox a casual games platform (not ubiquitous enough), and even before we do the same with the PS3 (too expensive for casual, too expensive for the mainstream, even), here’s what a ‘proper’ casual games look and play like:

Cave of Despair Help Dr Carter beat the Lava and swing his way to safety.

Play this free game now!!

Via MiniClip, who gave up being YouTube before YouTube was invented.

Core game design elements to note:

* One button, in fact, one action, a mouse button click, is all that’s required to play. It requires no aiming skills, little in the way of reaction or twitch skills, and nothing in the way of learning a new ‘action’. The rules of play are exceedingly simple and pretty much already known. Escape, swing, go faster.

* Easy to pick up, hard to master – the hallmark of casual games. The ‘one more try’ test. Everyone is going to get bored on this game, eventually, but whilst you’re hooked and whilst the game feels new and challenging, the rules of the game permit you to rattle through a number of attempts in next to no time.

* Seamless – not a lot of people pick up on this but the game tutorial and game play are seamlessly integrated. One click to start a game, one click to confirm you’re seen the instructions, and that’s it, the game has started. There’s no loading screen, no scene-setting, no *wait between plays*. The title screen tells you everything you need to know. Escape, now!

Miniclip is pretty much the biggest online games portal – whenever flash gaming is mentioned, Miniclip is namechecked as the best example. It has plenty of traffic too, it’s possibly the only Flash gaming website that can claim to be anywhere near touching distance of Youtube.

But, going back three or four years, Miniclip used to promote itself on the back of ‘Free Games And Shows’, at a time when Flash games weren’t in such a great abundance and viral videos, like the ever-popular Star Wars Kid, were beginning to show the way. Miniclip capitalised on the birth of viral content and hosted videos, it’s very name is a statement of what Youtube has since come to represent – short video clips.

Noticeably, there hasn’t been a video clip on Miniclip for a long, long time. The recent redesign seems to indicate a definite focus on games, with no real community features present on the site either. So the question remains: Miniclip – Ahead of their time or missed the boat?

Casual Games, though, don’t seem to be fading in such a manner, as can be seen by two recent news items. Firstly, Allen Partridge has published a book on Casual Games, Creating Casual Games for Fun & Profit. Secondly, Big Fish Games are auctioning off the chance to appear in one of their most successful games – Mystery Case Files. For an industry that has estimates sales of $76 billion by 2011*a lot*, like $1.15 billion in North America by 2011, it’s great to see that both traditional and innovative ways to generating revenue can apply.

Update
Thanks to Brian Robbins for correcting my revenue figures link – the $76 billion figure was referring to the entire mobile industry, not the Casual Games portion.

Needless to say, the recent news that Half Life 2: Episode 2 has been delayed into the Autumn, bringing it’s total delay time to one year, seems to signal the end of the episodic gaming buzz. They’re just expansion packs, that’s all they are. (See that expansion pack, that’s you that is.) We’ve had expansion packs for plenty of time, they work just like sequels for the big movies, bringing in the punters, making more money from the same IP. We’d all much rather be doing something new and different but it’s a quick fix for gamers, audiences, actors and developers alike.

However, maybe episodic gaming isn’t really dead. Maybe it’s been kicking around in a thin disguise for some time now. This post on the consistently useful Casual Games mailing list points to plenty of release date figures for the big portals:

  * A few sites release 7 or more games per week (TryGames, Big Fish,Reflexive)
  * Some major sites only release 2 or 3 games per week (Real,Shockwave)
  * Most sites release closer to 5 games per week

Granted, the kind of games these portals are releasing on such a frequent basis aren’t closely thematically related, but then, one puzzle game is pretty analogous to another, right? I’m a fan of abstract puzzlers so if I play a coloured gem-swapper one day, and a coloured fruit crusher the next, that’s good enough for jazz, as my Dad used to say. So, isn’t it fair to say that episodic gaming exists and is doing some healthy things over on these portals? Can’t we turn the problem of casual game clones into a feature of episodic casual games instead? I think so.

Can someone remind me what 3D has got to do with it?

Why make 3D such an integral part of something so simple? We’re on the cusp of merging games and social software into a compelling new medium of interaction and play, and you want to world to wait whilst we cook up a 3D interface to it! Wow, Second Life and Eve Online are all fantastic MMORPGs with differing strengths and weaknesses, but to suggest that a mainstream one must be 3D is to be led by technology.

Who knows why so many people began signing up at MySpace before it was so well known? I’ve read plenty of theories but none of them really convince me that everything I know about design and interaction can be negated by an ugly, user un-friendly website like MySpace. Especially one created by people with a dubious track record that started out as nothing but a glorified questionnaire. What MySpace does prove is that design isn’t everything. It’s not too hard to draw a line from there to here and realise that the metaverse will work out just fine in 2D. Imagine….

Massively. Casual. Online. Games.

(n.b. for Casual also read Classic)

However, having just read this O’Reilly article that links together the Google Image Labeler with this video presentation by Luis von Ahn, I’m beginning to see Casual Games in a new light.

It seems that the ESP game, which became the Google Image Labeler, is not an attempt to make a game out of a boring, repetitive task (labelling images on the web which not even Google can write software to do better than humans), but it’s a prototype – a way of determining whether humans can experience a Casual Game and yet have that ‘downtime’ converted into something useful. Just like the idea of harvesting footsteps through turnstiles to create energy, this is Distributed Casual Gaming – a kind of Seti@Home for games. So, does this mean that the rumoured Google Earth MMO is going to be a way to suck up hours of gameplay where users are encouraged to label the world and everything around them (for fun and profit), as a kind of Mechanical Turk of Identification? Woah!

If WoW is the new golf then country-based restictions must be the MMO equivalent of plus fours.

Eve Online gets plenty of mentions in the comments too – Eve is a single shard so there are no restrictions on where you’re from and where you can play, but it also seems to get a bit of stick for separating players over huge distances:

But that’s the nature of *Massively* multiplayer online games. It’s a virtual world – it’s just like the real thing. I have friends in real life that it would take well over two hours to visit – don’t blame the virtual world when its approximation mimics real life so closely. However, this is a game. It’s hard to complain about reality when you’re an Orc with funny ears and an virtual existence that self-evidently proves you’ve neglected real world relationships. This sort of thing is the Uncanny Valley of MMOs – the closer they get to reality the more the bitty details of our real worl lives replicated in game will offend us. What we need are MCOs – massively casual online games where the world is a much an illusion as our powers within it. Let me meet up with my friends, wherevery they’re from, and go questing until I’m bored. Let my actions have consequence and my avatar remain in-game even when I am not, but please don’t make the virtual world too serious. Casual Games are showing hardcore games that fun and replayability are still better than graphics and technological trickery. Casual Games exist in part because traditional games lost their fun. MMOs should be wary of the ‘casualization’ of their genre because it will happen, on a smaller budget and with less restrictions too.

To obvious place to start would be Mochibot, but they’re keeping that data to themselves for now, understandably. The Viral Chart have opened up their data to create a popularity list, but there’s little in the way of usable data. Elsewhere, this viral games chart at Kerb offers some interesting statistics. My suspicion is that casual games would have a ‘long tail’. However, looking at these stats it is clear that advergames in particular have a long and steady flow of traffic that is anything but viral. Naturally, any new advergame peaks when it is released, but there’s nowhere near the equivalent trought that I’d expected to see. Viral content seemingly thrives on its’ new-ness, but it seems that advergames are exploiting the two-speed nature of word-of-mouth on the web, making them an appealing and stable choice for any big brands that want to market themselves using games.

So are PC games the Picture of Dorian Gray to Casual Games? That is, has the blockbuster nature of PC game titles shortened their lifespan and handed the durability to Casual Games? According to ZDNet, even a game as massive as WoW is potentially growing old, but with MMOs you can upgrade the engine and the content, as EVE are doing with their expansion packs (which upgrade the politics, trade and adventures) and DirectX 10 fork. There’s strong possiblity that PC games are headed the way of the 36-hour news item, in the same way that blanket news coverage has led the trivialisation of everything. PC games, with their mutli-million dollar budgets and sequels, do seem to be heading in that same direction.

So what about Casual Games? Where are they headed? A quick straw poll of development times for casual games suggests that 9 to 10 months seems close to the average and, for that, the unpopular games seem to die away quickly, whlist the popular ones just keep earning.

So, if a popular game has a long lifetime, what about the most popular games? For this question, Games Sales Charts was invented. Games Sales Charts takes data from Real Networks and creates an archive of historical Casual Games performance.

Starting with a game I particularly like, Word Slinger from GameHouse lasted just a month in the top 10, as did another well produced Casual Game, Plantasia. The hugely successful Mystery Case Files – Huntsville lasted 18 weeks, and Insaniquarium Deluxe 14. Moving on, Luxor lasted 25 and Dinner Dash 33 weeks.

Of the 30 – 40 new games released each quarter, around 60% make it into the top 10, which seems a fair number. If you get your game on one of these portals, you’ve a good chance of a burst of massive exposure. In terms of Casual Game lifetimes, a game good enough to feature on a portal like Real Networks has a very real chance of appearing prominently in the top 10 for anything between a month and six months, significantly better than 36 hours.

All of this is moot, however, since getting one game on Xbox Live Arcade is going to earn you millions:

Update: Via this announcement from PopCap, it looks like working these sort of figures out should become much easier thanks to the Casual Games Data Reporting Initiative

Player makeup

Player habits

Player habits by Gender

Player goals

Player habits

PopCap are really pushing the health benefits of Casual Games, too: