This is my second Patch Wednesday post where I discuss a question about video games that I think is unanswered, unexplored, or simply not posed yet. I will propose my own tentative ideas, and invite comments. 

The header does sound a bit like Ash Wednesday, so we can reaffirm our faith in the idea of examining video games, but I also call it Patch Wednesday to mark the sometimes ragtag and improvised character of video game studies. It falls mostly on the day after Microsoft’s monthly Patch Tuesday. Time to patch things up and start again.

Question #2: Do Casual Games still Exist?

It seems a long time ago, but I once wrote a book called A Casual Revolution (2009), where I talked about the expansion of the video game audience, and focused particularly on the downloadable casual games, the Nintendo Wii, and music games.

I had picked the most important platforms, genres, and distribution channels of the day. I knew that these things come and go, and they did, quickly. The Wii is all but gone, and the Wii U is doing poorly and not even built around motion controls, and Sony’s Move didn’t take off. Music games are all but dead. Downloadable casual games is not as important a channel as it used to be.

So do casual games still exist? Is it still an important category? Since publishing the book, I have liked to tell the big-picture story like this (some of this material was also published in the Korean translation):

There was a period of time, roughly from 1980 to 2005, when we knew what video games were. Video games, we knew, followed a standard model: they were fairly involved activities that you had to spend hours and days to play; they were mostly sold in boxes; new games and game platforms were always promoted on technically better graphics; games were mostly targeted at young males. (We knew, of course, that video games were in actuality played by men and women, young and old, but most video games were still targeted at the traditional “gamer” demographic.)

This standard model fell apart around 2006. At that time, video games distributed online became a major factor; the industry woke up to the fact that women and adults are perfectly interested in playing video games; the most successful console of the generation, the Nintendo Wii, wasn’t even promoted on better graphics, but on a new easy-to-use interface; game developers began experimenting with games that could be played in shorter sessions.

When I originally wrote the book, these changes were most clearly visible in music games, the Nintendo Wii, and downloadable PC games. Since then, the casual revolution has continued. The trend is still towards new distribution models, a broader audience, and video games arriving in new shapes and sizes, only the revolution has moved on to new platforms. Much of today’s innovation is happening in games for cell phones where the selling point is rarely the latest graphics, but much more about style, about game designs that fit into the lives of players. Furthermore, games on social networks are showing new ways in which games can be integrated into our lives, allowing us to keep contact with distant friends, still playing through every busy day. Games find a way.

The Tally

To score my own efforts, the book was correct in seeing the casual revolution as an expansion of the audience, and as a series of design principles that made games available to people who would not otherwise play them. I was also correct in seeing it as a change that would continue to reshape the industry.

In retrospect, the book put too much emphasis on particular platforms (notice the controller on the cover), but it is hard to tell such a story in the abstract.

I also described five principles of casual design (this was inspired in part by conversations with many industry people):

1. Positive fiction. Set in a situation you would actually want to be in.
2. Usability. Easy to use.
3. Interruptible and with low required time investment.
4. Difficulty that can become high over time, but always with lenient punishment for failure.
5. Juiciness. Excessive supportive feedback to the player.

Does this still hold? Time investment remains the most important barrier to play, and most of the principles hold, with significant footnotes for 1) and 4):

1) Positive fiction: Plants vs. Zombies showed that you can make a mass-audience game that is gross and violent, if the representation is sufficiently cute.

4) Punishment: with the recent popularity of Candy Crush, Canabalt, Super Hexagon or Flappy Bird, some of the casual-hardcore distinction seems to collapse. “Casual Games” were never just easy, even if they have sometimes been discussed as such. But the endless runner genre is hugely successful, even though it actually punishes players strongly for failing since you go back to the beginning. This is, in many games, just offset by an accumulation of powerups and resources.

What I failed to see here was the way in which high difficulty and punishment can actually lower the required time investment. Super Hexagon or Flappy Bird are so difficult that the required time investment becomes minuscule, and the individual game session is only a few seconds long.

Things also not predicted:

1. That the Wii would fade out so quickly.
2. That the Xbox One and PlayStation 4, though being delayed as predicted, would still be promoted on better graphics, and would sell well (at least initially).
3. The popularity of smart phone and table gaming.

*

Ironically, the casual revolution in video games is making the term “casual games” less central that it may have been: the audience has become larger and more diverse, and the distribution channels are becoming less distinct. It used to be that the big-budget “hardcore” games could be found on consoles, and the small-budget “casual” games could be found the casual sites, but this is less clear-cut than it used to be, so where do some of recent hits even belong?

So this is the big picture: we used to know what video games were, and now we don’t. We remain in a space of uncertainty: video games can be so many more things than we thought they could, and they continue to change and confound our expectations.

This is my inaugural Patch Wednesday post where I discuss a question about video games that I think is unanswered, unexplored, or simply not posed yet. I will propose my own tentative ideas, and invite comments.

The header does sound a bit like Ash Wednesday, so we can reaffirm our faith in the idea of examining video games, but I also call it Patch Wednesday to mark the sometimes ragtag and improvised character of video game studies. It falls mostly on the day after Microsoft’s monthly Patch Tuesday. Time to patch things up and start again.

Question #1: What Determines how a Game is Played

That is, is the player ultimately controlled by the game, or is the game ultimately controlled by the player? I am working on a small piece on this subject.

I believe that there have historically been four central conceptions of the act of playing a game: freedom, submission, subversion and creation.

1) Freedom
The idea that playing a game is a type of freedom, where the game creates a space in which players have a freedom that is enabled by the game design.

• Salen & Zimmerman (Rules of Play) say that, “Play is free movement within a more rigid structure”.

2) Submission
The idea that playing a game is a type submission, where the player is bound by the limits set forth by the game rules.

• Gadamer (Truth and Method) argues that, “The real subject of the game  … is not the player but the game itself. What holds the player in its spell, draws him into play, is the game itself.”  (For Gadamer this is not negative as such.)
• Many traditional critical views of video games follow this model but rate it as profoundly negative, describing players as being led or controlled by the game. Loftus & Loftus compared video games to Skinner boxes.
• Newer critical opinions on social games and free-to-play games also tend to assume that there is a particular type of design that reduces players to mindless automatons.

3) Subversion
Playing as subversion, where the player overcomes both the intentions of the designer, and the apparent limitations of the game object.

• Mikael Jakobsson (“Playing with the rules”) examines players of a Smash Brothers variation called Random Smash and argues, “that the very nature of a game can change without changing the core rules”.
• Linda Hughes (“Children’s games and gaming”), studying Foursquare players, argues that, “players can take the same game and collectively make of it strikingly different experiences”.
• Mia Consalvo’s book Cheating also stresses how players may act against designer intentions.

4) Creation
Playing as creation, where the game is ultimately created by the activity of the players.  (I discussed this stance in an article on Zero-Player Games.)

• Ermi and Mäyrä (“Fundamental components of the gameplay experience”), say that “Yet, the essence of a game is rooted in its interactive nature, and there is no game without a player.”
• Anne-Mette Thorhauge (“The Rules of the Game”) claims that game rules are in actuality created by players. “The player culture is not just something taking place ‘‘on top’’ of the game, it rather defines the game as a product of the continuous communication and negotiation among players.”

Hybrid and prescriptive ideas
The four positions above are generalizations about how the playing of a game works, but there are also arguments made for the benefits of particular types of design. Calls for emergent gameplay (like those of Harvey Smith) argue for the value of games that leave room for the player.

Conversely, some people who argue for games as expressive devices claim that games should control the player in order to facilitate the designer’s ability to communicate a message. (This discussion would be worth a separate post.)

I have also personally been interested in the examination of how particular game designs can be more or less open, saying that we cannot generalize and decide between the positions outlined above (Emergence and Progression, Without a Goal, Flexible Games). It could sound like this is already present in Roger Caillois’ Paidia-Ludus distinction, but Caillois emphasizes that paidia are unstructured activities, rather than structured activities that give rise to freedom.

Anything else?
Is this a complete list?