For a while I have been saying that “The Sun Always Shines in Casual Games”: Casual games, especially the downloadable ones, have tended to be colorful and bright, with a weather that was always good, with themes that were always cheerful.
Righteous Kill breaks with that: It is a hidden object game, but this time your job is to find a serial killer.
About time – after all, we can find lots of dark themes, tragedy, and murders in mainstream entertainment as well as in the entertainment for the presumed female audience of casual games.
The game seems to be doing reasonably well, so perhaps we will be seeing more thematic variation in the future.
(There have been detective and mystery casual games before, but Righteous Kill is a lot darker than other games I have seen.)
It might be worth exploring how the target markets for casual games and gritty, dark cop movies might overlap, if at all. You’re right on the money about how the “presumed female audience of casual games” may inform the decision to feature Erica Dean as the game’s main character, but it’s interesting that the movie itself seems to be marketed on television to /men/, with the main characters being the two grim, gritty characters played by Robert De Niro and Al Pacino. Is this game evidence that casual games are now being considered as an explicitly gendered advertising channel?
Also, what does it mean that this game is ostensibly a component of a marketing campaign that is elsewhere built largely around De Niro and Pacino — but neither De Niro nor Pacino appear in at least the marketing copy for the game? Do they appear in the game itself? Is that just a hint that the actors wouldn’t release their likenesses for use in the game, or is that an explicit decision on the part of the game designers to target the game (and by extension the film) to women?
I’m somewhat disappointed, because I thought this was going to be a click management game in which the player got to BE the serial killer. You know, like, “Ripper Romp” or something.
Wow, maybe I should make that.
Yeah, that would be interesting. My feeling is that the portals have been overly strict about the content they allowed, forgetting that cop shows and murder mysteries are really mainstream.
I find a differentiation occurring in how games are played amongst my own students. They have their “hardcore,” skill-intensive, highly competitive, time-enduring games while still playing short games that are often more based in distractive entertainment or sociality than performance. Often the darkness of casual games is more stylized and tongue-in-cheek as in Go Go Happy and Smile. The exploration of variety of length, theme, performance demands, etc. and the permutations of these in combination has been a long time coming.
As for the portals being overly strict, this may largely be a result of the persistence of the myth of games as children’s toys. The convergence of event awareness in our culture (school shootings etc. that occurred when I was in elementary school, but never made it past local or maybe regional news); the emergence of the media of the web and digital games; and the play element of games that involve a performance as actor rather than the passive witnessing of an actor in performance lead to rather incongruous presentations of reality. It’s always amusing to compare the discourse on the web concerning games to the discourse on broadcast media, particularly broadcast television.
Nonetheless, the portals as businesses are called to answer the paranoid demands for protecting our children that seem to serve as a justification for all forms of censorship/inhibition/(re/o)pression. Often it seems these calls come from more of a fear OF children than a fear FOR them (but that’s an essay waiting to be written ;-)
You should make that game! I’d be curious to see how that would be received in relation to the reception/reaction to television shows like Dexter. Maybe something playful in the style of the Emo Game but with serial killers rather than band members. You could even keep the extras as targets (frat boys in white baseball caps listening to Dave Mathews with carabiner key chains, schoolgirls on pogo sticks at Hot Topic, etc.). I’d play that.
casual games are the way to be! hehe but I like hidden/puzzle time games like this as well