Category: a casual revolution

IBT has an interesting interview with Bas Seelen of Spilgames, explaining how the audience for casual games has expanded:

At first it was mainly women that played casual games online but now we have three brands to cater for a wide range audience because of the uptake from different demographics.

So we have come full circle, from catering to an audience that includes women, to catering to an audience that includes men.

It remains an open question how this will all play out with the new consoles. Has the time for consoles passed, or is there still a sufficiently large audience for them; an audience whose desires for games are not being fulfilled in mobile, browser-based or computer-based games?

People often ask me about the origin of the idea of the “gamer”, as something that you may or may not identify as.

I discussed this kind of “I am/am not a (casual) gamer” posturing briefly in A Casual Revolution, but what about the word itself?

Here is the Google Ngram viewer showing the frequency of the word gamer from 1900 to the present day.

I suppose the graph at first looks like what you would expect, but note how “gamer” only really becomes popular from 1990 and on – it was rarely used in relation to arcade games or early home computer games.

On a personal note this also explains why I never wondered that hard about whether I was or wasn’t a gamer: the word only became popular after my formative game-playing years in the 1980’s…

 

PS. Why is the curve flattening around 2005? Could it be that the rise of casual games is making the question moot?

Over at Joystiq, Karen Bryan is using some of the concepts from A Casual Revolution to discuss what is happening in RIFT: Enter at Your Own Rift: The casual revolution in RIFT.

It’s spot on in terms of picking up what I was thinking when I wrote the book, but then she is using it to discuss MMOs (and the development in a particular MMO),  something that I had not really thought the book to be about.

But that’s what’s so interesting (and a little scary) about writing theory: someone picks up on what you were thinking and applies it to something you hadn’t thought about … and what I wrote no longer belongs to me, but acquires all the meanings that is being put into it by other people. As it should be.

The Social Game Studies group have released their workshop report. This is some of the first academic research on social games.

I think academia tends to lag behind what is happening with video games outside the “core” space – even almost a year after A Casual Revolution came out, there is little writing on casual games. Even after Sony and Microsoft have changed their strategies to capture the new market.

Why this lag? I suspect that there is a typical selection problem that the people most likely to go into game studies are the people most dedicated to traditional game culture. But there really ought to be hordes of dedicated Facebook gamers doing PhDs on farming games.

The report in question is from a July 2010 workshop “Social Game Studies: What Do We Know, What Might We Learn?” under the following call:

“In tune with the relative newness of the hybrid medium that is social games, this workshop pursues two goals: One, to take stock of the academic and industry research on social games that has been done or is currently being conducted. Two, to identify what (if anything) makes social games different to video games on the one hand and social networks on the other: Which theoretical approaches and methodologies promise to capture these characteristics, which new data sources, methodologies and research questions do social games afford?”

Get the report here:

www.socialgamestudies.org/report

Nordic Digra 2010: Experiencing Games: Games, Play, and Players
August 16-17, 2010
Kista, Stockholm, Sweden

The programme has now been set for the Nordic Digra conference, and we would like to extend our call for participation to this exciting first-time event! The theme for the conference, ‘experiencing games’, places a particular focus on studying design for player experience and research on tools and methods for player-participatory design.

The event will feature
– Keynotes by Prof. Jesper Juul (Half-Real and Casual Revolution) and Christopher Sandberg (CEO and founder of The company P)
– Papers sessions presenting up-to-date Nordic research in the game area
– Two workshops, on Collecting and analyzing video data in game studies and designing and implementing pervasive games
– A social evening located in the new Digital Arts Centre in Kista, featuring music, good food and, of course, gaming

About the keynotes:
Christopher Sandberg is CEO and founder of International Interactive Emmy Award winning television and new media production company The company P. He has one and a half decade of experience in start-ups as CEO and as Executive Producer in television, online and mobile, ranging from drama to social applications and games. Sandberg is Executive Producer and Creative Director for the new project by Tim Kring (creator of Heroes), the Conspiracy For Good.

His keynote draw on experience from working with some of the leading showrunners in drama and having broadcast meet games, social media and live action street play. He will talk about the latest productions from The company P:  It is about letting the audience in to your world, and letting the shared experience out into the world”.

Jesper Juul has been working with the development of video game theory since the late 1990’s. He is currently at the NYU Game Center and The Danish Design School, but has previously worked at the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Lab at MIT and at the IT University of Copenhagen. His book Half-Real on video game theory was published by MIT press in 2005. His recently published book, A Casual Revolution, examines how puzzle games, music games, and the Nintendo Wii are bringing video games to a new audience.

He will be talking about The Casual Turn: Reinventing Video Games & reinventing Game Research

Registration fee includes coffee and tea breaks, lunches and conference dinner on Monday evening. The workshops have no registration fee but we need to know if you will participate.

Non Digra members need to become members, check http://www.digra.org/join

Early bird fees:
Regular – 130 Euro alt 1250 SEK
Student – 50 Euro alt 475 SEK

Registration after August 1:
Regular – 150 Euro alt 1450 SEK
Student – 70 Euro alt 650 SEK

For registration and further information, go to our website www.nordic-digra.org