If you are in New York City, please join me for the book launch and panel debate for A Casual Revolution: Reinventing Video Games and Their Players.
Thursday, December 17, 2009
6:00pm – 8:30pm
Tisch school of the Arts, room 006
721 Broadway
New York, NY
In this evening of debate, Jesper Juul (New York University Game Center) will introduce the new book, followed by a panel discussion on the rise of casual games and the future of video games. The panel consisting of Mia Consalvo (MIT, author of Cheating), Nick Fortugno (Playmatics, formerly Gamelab) and Wade Tinney (Large Animal) will discuss topics such as:
- What are casual games, and where did they come from?
- Are casual games saving video games from cultural ghettoization, or are they preventing video games from dealing with serious themes?
- Are traditional gamers right to feel threatened by casual games?
- Do game developers have an obligation to make games for everybody?
- How should video game studies deal with new game forms and different types of players?
Refreshments will be served. Hope you can make it!
[Update: The event podcast can be downloaded here.]
Will the debate be available later in any format?
There believe there will be a podcast at the http://gamecenter.nyu.edu page. Will blog when it is up.
Sounds really interesting. Push it back two days! :)
I have to confess that I haven’t read the book so I don’t know if some of these points have been discussed, but I hope to share some of my thoughts.
I’ve been working with casual games commercially for the past 2 years and have been noticing the casual crowd gradually becoming more “educated” in the genres they play and demanding more and more depth in the gameplay of casual games. In this sense, they are actually becoming more “hardcore”.
We can see this especially in the Hidden Objects genre, which has become a lot more complex compared to the first Mystery Case File, and now incorporates a multitude of minigames and metagames on top of the core mechanic.
On the other hand, hardcore games are becoming a lot more casual, hand-holding players into the gameplay in contrast to earlier games like Contra, which was impossible to beat in comparison. I’m interested to see if this self-moderation will eventually make the two types of games meet in the middle and lose their original meaning and intent.
It would be interesting if this issue was brought up in the debate, but I can’t be there to raise my hand unfortunately, being physically 19 hours away.
Hi Zhou
I agree completely. In the book I quote a player who loves the challenge of Jewel Quest II because she has been playing Jewel Quest I for 4 years – she is clearly becoming more demanding and, if you will, “hardcore”.
Conversely, several players talk about how having kids and jobs makes it harder for them to play traditional “hardcore” games and want something they can play easily. So there definitely is movement in both directions.