Chances are, you’ve played a video game.  If you’re one of my college friends, you almost certainly knew someone else with a console and played a random game at one time or another.  Or perhaps you have a DS on which you play something from time to time.  Or you enjoy the odd game of Peggle on your computer every now and again.  Or you occupy yourself in the spare minute while waiting for a bus by trying to beat you Snake high score on your phone.

Or, and here’s what I want to talk about today, someone sends you a link to a random flash game online and you spend a few minutes clicking on John McCain’s head or hitting the QWOP keys in frustration or something similar.

The industry has, of course, labeled this group as “casual gamers” – gamers who don’t necessary purchase gaming hardware and will play short bursts of things on their mobile devices or PCs.  Companies have also started to publish more casual games on the Wii as well, due to its continued popularity among people who haven’t been playing games for the past 10 years or so.

How did this happen?  How did a term not really even in use 5 years ago become a central tenet of most companies’ forward-looking plans?  The simple answer is that Nintendo took the small potatoes that casual gaming brought in on a collection of websites and turned it into big money with the Wii and DS.

The more complex answer is that everyone’s a gamer – they just might not know it yet.  All it takes to tip a person is two things: entertainment value and (as I mentioned in a previous post) difficulty.

A person who hasn’t played games before has to think that the entertainment value they get out of playing a game is going to be more valuable to them than the other things they could do with a similar amount of time.  This makes finding the right initial game for that person critical.  An action-oriented paintball-shooting sports fan with little patience for deep strategy is going to get easily bored with a deep RPG system.  Likewise, a strategic chess player who dislikes action movies is probably going to be disoriented and frustrated with an intense FPS.  This is where casual games help bridge the gap.  A new gamer is rarely going to plop down $300 before they can even play one game, so free or cheap online and downloadable games provide an easy way for them to find out what they like.  The production values are usually lower, sure, but the design and intent is all there.  It’s a great litmus test.

This is getting longer than anticipated, so I’ll continue tomorrow, along with some Oscar talk, probably.  In the meantime, enjoy this short list of online games I like:

  • The entire GROW series – cute artwork and fun with a touch of skill
  • I’m a sucker for Escape games, and 3wish adventures is good first escape game, with the Submachine series being a more challenging follow-up.
  • For those that remember You Don’t Know Jack, I need hardly explain.  For those that don’t, imagine getting to be in a new and well-written game show episode from the comfort of your computer, for free!