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EMPIRE: TOTAL WAR TOTAL DOMINATION 20/2/09 12:21:52 pm
Casual gaming
A serious look at casual games
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Casual gaming
C
asual game. It’s such a horrible, snobby little phrase. There’s something so patronising about it – as if just because it doesn’t offer 70 hours of story, or a hundred rendered cut-scenes, that makes it somehow less of a game. It completely ignores the fact that many of the people playing them can burn through more hours in their company than any World of Warcraft player, not to mention show up any hardcore gamer in a direct competition. Guys, take this as a top tip: never, ever, ever challenge your mother, wife, sister or girlfriend to a game of Worms or Tetris. If you win more than two
rounds you’re being hustled. Run! Run before she suggests making it ‘interesting’. The biggest problem with ‘casual’ as a definition is that it means nothing. You can fire up Fallout 3 for a casual amble around over lunch, but that doesn’t matter. A lack of complexity doesn’t make a game more casual than a more complicated one, as proven by
the fact that we can teach a computer to play Chess at grand master level, but we don’t have a prayer right now of getting a good game of Go out of one. Pick up and play? Quake Live lets you jump into a game straight from the web browser, but nobody’s going to call its twitch deathmatch a good casual time-killer. Instead, when we say casual, what we’re thinking is ‘I know it when I see it’. What we don’t necessarily see is just how big a market it is. Over 70 per cent of the people who play and pay for the likes of Peggle are female, and wouldn’t count themselves as gamers. Their games are there to fill a few boring minutes here and there, not to become a lifestyle. Even so, we guarantee you’ve got one of the world’s biggest casual games on your PC right now.
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Casual gaming YES. MINESWEEPER.
Interestingly, Minesweeper and Solitaire were never intended as the productivityassassins we all know and love, but as that most hated of genres ‘edutainment’. When Windows first hit the streets, everyone was used to command line interfaces, and needed to be trained in how best to use the mouse. Minesweeper was built as an easy to understand application that used both mouse buttons (left-click to uncover a square, right-click to place a flag), while Solitaire demonstrated the art of dragging and dropping. The fact that they were on every desktop when office workers got bored was simply a bonus, and not something that went unnoticed. Several games of that era, including the original Leisure Suit Larry games, featured a ‘boss key’ which the player could press to pretend to drop out of the game at a moment’s notice. (We have something similar in the office, which makes Microsoft Excel look like Team Fortress 2, just in case someone catches us working instead of playing games.) Aside from these early dalliances, casual games never really found a home on the PC at this point. There were simple games, usually distributed shareware, but they were thought of in different terms. As systems became more powerful, several problems became obvious. Early PC games could be an absolute nightmare to get running, and tended to be expensive. Arcade games looked prettier on damn near everything else, and the PC’s perceived role as the computer that helped with the homework
Bejewelled was far from the first casual game of the internet age, but it was the one that made people sit up and pay attention
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the Zoo that could never have held anyone’s attention for more than a few minutes had a purpose. We’re still not at the point where we can do that with our PCs, but in recent years, we’ve seen something almost as good. Instead of handheld consoles, we have web browsers. Instead of paying £20 to £30 for a console, the world is our oyster. There were casual games before the internet – puzzlers like Supaplex, or The Incredible Machine, or Pipemania – but it was the internet that really created the genre. Above Tetris on the Gameboy – the world’s favourite waste of time
and did the accounts didn’t exactly help. When we went in search of games, we wanted meatier fare – adventure games, role-playing games, strategy games. If you wanted something simple, you bought an Amiga, or God help you, an Atari ST. Or of course, a console. Even now, the mere words ‘casual gamer’ may as well mean a random person on a train, staring intently at a Gameboy, lost in the world of Tetris. Portable consoles were perfect for casual games. No set-up, no high-end hardware, nothing to lose except a few minutes of your time. You could switch them on, play until you didn’t need to any more, and shove the whole thing back in your pocket. Simple games like King of
“Minesweeper and Solitaire were meant as ‘edutainment’”
GLORIOUS TIME WASTING
Whatever genre a casual game falls into, it’s going to share a few basic traits. You’re always able to try before you buy – either a selection of levels, or 60 minutes worth of the full game. It’ll be cheap, so that you can finish a trial, say “Yeah, okay,” and buy it without any great soul searching. If it’s successful, it’s going to be surrounded by a billion almost identical clones. The portal sites that house these games online, either playable directly as Flash applets or managing the online stores, always choose quantity over raw quality, and developers are always looking out for the next big thing. Popular targets include Diner Dash (seat and serve an endless stream of customers), hidden object games (the challenge usually being to spot that the candlestick or whatever you’re looking for is actually 20ft tall and makes up part of the skyline) and anything involving making words out of a jumble of letters. These games may look good, but they’re hardly difficult to churn out – especially if someone else has done all the hard work of coming up with a fun premise. The most common clone in recent years is the ‘match-three’ game; a board of mixed symbols which you have to put into horizontal, diagonal or vertical lines of at least three. This sounds simpler than it is. Bejewelled popularised the basic game, while the follow-up, Bejewelled Twist, switched the action from swapping coloured gemstones to spinning them clockwise. This apparently minor twist instantly makes the game more tactical, and puts the focus on getting certain colours in the right order instead of simply racking up the points. A more advanced variant is Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords, which wrapped the same basic idea into an RPG world, threw in spells and inventory items, and made the gems do different things when matched. Matching the colours charged up spells, diamonds added extra experience at the end of the battle, and skulls dealt damage to your opponent.
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Casual gaming
‘Perfect casual game’ or ‘deep, strategic puzzler’? Trick question. It’s ‘Lemmings’
Same basic idea as Bejewelled, yet different enough to be its own thing entirely. The sequel, Galactrix, does something similar by swapping out the square board for a hexagon, adding gems from any direction, and being set in space rather than a fantasy kingdom.
demonstrated the art of casual games like few others, not least by making it clear that what gets removed from a simple title is every bit as important as what gets added. The original ‘clear all the orange pegs’ mode was originally only going to be one of many, in a much larger game that took in several ball-shooting activities. The extra time and attention turned a minor diversion into the most addictive game of the year by a good long margin. It spawned a sequel, Peggle Nights, and a Half-Life/ Team Fortress 2 themed spin-off made free as part of the Orange Box. Needless to say, this hardly hurt its position as the casual game of choice around the ‘proper’ gaming world.
THE GOLDEN GLOW
Of the many casual game developers out there, Popcap is easily the most impressive – and least casual. Its early games were standard fare, but the first, Bejewelled, caught the attention of the internet (and in particular the comedy site Old Man Murray) in a big way. Popcap quickly made its name by taking relatively well-worn concepts, but polishing them up until they shone. Rocket Mania was simply Pipemania with rockets, but the added explosions and extra speed made it more fun to kill a few minutes with. Zuma, which was little more than an older game called Puzz Loop (something that the original developer wasn’t too happy about), switched the action to firing coloured balls around Aztec theme tracks. As the games rolled on, the production values became better and better, until Bookworm Adventures raised the stakes for the whole genre. It took two and a half years to create, and a budget of $700,000 – nothing compared to a mainstream game, but phenomenal money for a casual title. Five minutes play shows that the money wasn’t wasted… but we’ve been talking too long without getting to the big one: Peggle. Please, bow your heads. Peggle is easily the best casual game in years – a beautiful mix of pinball, pachinko, glorious graphics, and the most heartwarming chorus of Ode To Joy ever seen in a game about unicorns shooting silver balls at silver pegs. It
FINDING GREAT CASUAL GAMES
DIAL-A-GAME
Below Peggle is more than a game. It’s a way of life. It’s like religion, only with a few more balls
As casual games have moved away from being simple puzzles, we’ve seen an unusual trend – games that try to feel more than simply a quick diversion. On PC, this is usually done by adding a story mode of some description – or at the very least, a campaign. Gabriel Knight designer, Jane Jensen produced two of the more narrative focused offerings
Where else are you going to find them? That’s right. The internet. It churns out more casual games in a single day than anyone can play. Many are rubbish, some are simply one-trick ponies (even if it’s a good trick, like the gag game You Have To Burn The Rope), and every now and again, you find one that’s absolutely brilliant. Your first port of call should be the standard games sites you go to on a regular basis, and better still, the attached forums where people who find cool stuff want to talk about them. These won’t report on every game out there, but you don’t usually want them to - that would be completely overwhelming. You want the ones that have excited people – letting them act as a filter between you and the million match-three/Diner Dash clones looking to waste your time. If you want to play something now, now, now, head to a portal site. Popcap has one of the best – www. popcap.com – but there’s no shortage. RealArcade, BigFish Games, Kongregate… they’ll often have the same basic stack of games, in design, if not necessarily name, but usually presented in different ways. Kongregate for instance focuses on simpler Flash titles, with live chat windows. Every casual game worth playing features a demo. So do many of the others. Be sure to check the demo’s limitations however. You don’t want to start playing, go for dinner, and get back to find that your trial has expired.
Above If there’s one downside to portal sites, it’s that great games often get lost in the cracks between all the flashing lights
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that you don’t need to be a big developer to come up with something interesting and inventive. You can also make fart apps and flashlights, but that’s besides the point. Some of the best include Trism (a match-three derivative), the liquid-manipulating Enigmo, and Topple, where your growing Tetris structure has to contend with physics as well as your own careful building. It’s the closest the iPhone currently has to the phenomenal World of Goo – easily the best commercial casual game since Peggle. Unless you count Peggle Nights. But that would be gratuitous. (Peggle!)
WORLD OF GOOD
If only all casual games were as good as World of Goo
– Inspector Parker and BeTrapped – which met with a decent amount of success. Inspector Parker was a Clue-style game which charged you to solve mysteries via very literal deduction – removing possibilities until all that remained was the truth. BeTrapped was effectively Minesweeper, with the twist that the levels were rooms in a house, and there were conversation-driven adventure bits between stages. Another popular style was invented by the mainstream industry, and about as snobbish as things get. Assorted developers would produce a (usually barely quarter-arsed) tie-in to a PC game that you could play on your mobile
phone. How seriously was this usually taken? Five words. Prince of Persia: Harem Adventures. Want to hear the plot? Of course you do: “The Sultan’s wives have been kidnapped by the Vizier in order to carry out experiments on abstinence. The Sultan’s real mad! He no longer knows how to express his desires. Seven female prisoners - and only you can set them free and bring them back to life!”
NO, BUT SERIOUSLY: DIE
There are fantastic casual games on phones, especially when the iPhone enters the picture. A combination of touch screen interface and the goldrush taking place in the iTunes Store means
Outside of web browsers, the biggest boost to the PC casual games market is the Xbox 360 – more specifically, the Live Arcade. Microsoft’s XNA development platform (see page 70 for our ‘Become a game coder’ series) makes it easy to develop for both PC and console simultaneously. Simple games tend to do the best in the Live Arcade – polished, low budget, ideally based on something that stimulates the nostalgia glands until they throb – making the jump across to PC a no brainer. The time-warping platform game Braid is one of the most exciting of these, and you can’t beat a quick blast on Geometry Wars. World of Goo is however the current state of the art as far as casual games go. It’s simultaneously as simple as things get – sticking lumps of goo
THE CASUAL GAMES INVASION The simplicity of casual games makes them easy to integrate into almost any system, and developers haven’t been slow to take advantage. Facebook, already banned by many sensible companies around the world, has become one of the best places to gather up good casual games. Not only can you play them anywhere, they can hook into your social network to let you show off your abilities. Challenge friends. Beat friends. Gloat at friends. All without leaving the page. In our office, Text Twirl was the game of choice – creating as many words as possible out of six Scrabble style letters – but it’s just one of many on offer. They range from borderline pyramid scheme games where you try to persuade friends and family to become a zombie/mobster/ninja 110
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and they try to persuade other people to do likewise, until eventually the the whole scheme disappears in a puff of pointlessness, to complete recreations of better known games. The most famous of these was the phenomenally popular Scrabulous, which recreated Scrabble directly, until Hasbro caught on and sent in the lawyers. Arguably the most entertaining crossover however appears in World of Warcraft. As any player knows, flying from point to point can take forever – unless you’re a mage, in which case you get to teleport around with a smug grin on your face until everyone decides to kill you with a soft slap. To pass the time, one imaginative developer coded up a version of Bejewelled that ran within the WoW interface directly. It pops
Witness the beauty and majesty as you fly across Azeroth. A perfect five-gem bonus. Score
up automatically when you get onto a flying taxi or snuff it in battle, and works pretty well. The addon wasn’t built by Popcap, but when the company found out about it, it did something very unusual: got the creator on board and made it an official release. Download it from www.popcap.com/promos/wow/.
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Casual gaming
PLAYING WITHOUT PLAYING
Forumwarz. You know it’s going to be good when it makes you type ‘I am not easily offended’ just to get in
Left Hidden object games can be hell on your eyesight. Can you spot all the items listed on the left? No cheating now…
“World of Goo is the state of the art as far as casual games go” together to solve problems – and phenomenally complex, with its level designs acting as metaphors as much as challenges. It’s the perfect example of how sweating the details can create something truly compelling, whether it’s the way the mouse cursor stretches and deforms as you fling it around the screen, or the ease with which it trains you to think in terms of imaginary physics. Whether it meets your personal definition of a casual game or not, we don’t know. For us, it’s proof that there’s nothing casual about them. For more rough and ready fare, the Flash portals are always on hand. The games are usually simple to the point of sounding banal, until you see the fiendish strategy behind something as simple as rolling a cube around a grid, or the satisfaction of beating a friend’s high score. Auditorium (www. playauditorium.com) is simply the latest in a long line to catch our attention in the office. All you have to do is turn light into music via carefully redirecting its streams – but ‘all’ isn’t quite the word.
CASUAL FRIDAY
The future of casual games is in no doubt. Like all indie releases, no individual title is guaranteed a giant slice of the big cash pie, but there are so
Below BeTrapped isn’t much more than Minesweeper, but reusing a basic gameplay mechanic doesn’t mean playing by the same rules
many developers looking to be the next big thing, and so many customers willing to drop a few quid on something to distract them, that the major portal sites and successful companies aren’t going anywhere. In some cases, they’re even eating seemingly bigger developers for lunch – PopCap acting as a publisher as well as developer, and Mumbo Jumbo acquiring former FPS stalwarts Ritual (Sin: Episodes) to produce simpler entertainments. In many cases, the games that we get out of the process are nothing but bland rubbish that really, the world didn’t need another copy of. When it works however, magic can be born. We’ve all got dead time on hands to fill, we’ve all had moments where our screens simply stared back. When you’re only one click away from the perfect distraction, the perfect distraction’s going to find you soon enough. ¤
While identifying casual games is difficult, we can safely say that if you’re expected to devote hours of your day to a game, it doesn’t qualify. RPGs are usually the biggest timesinks, closely followed by strategy. Online however, things are different. Games like Kingdom of Loathing and Forumwarz enforce casual play by only giving you a certain number of moves or options per day. These two games are worth a look just for their basic concepts. Both are MMO parodies, but in completely different styles. Kingdom of Loathing ramps the silliness up to maximum (and then some) with its armies of Pastamancers and sentient Random Number Generators. Forumwarz turns forums into monsters – not that this is too difficult – with your weapons including sexy pictures and devastatingly incoherent put-downs. Both are free to play and run from your web-browser. It’s a shame that more developers haven’t come up with ways for our characters to progress. World of Warcraft lets you build up ‘rested’ time for faster progression when you do get back, but that’s nothing compared to Eve Online, and the way that you can set your character to learn something and check back to see how they’re getting on several days later. City of Heroes recently added something similar with its jobs system – when you log out, your character is assumed to drop cape and help the community based on wherever you left them. Transposing this kind of system into a direct levelling mechanic is problematic – if you don’t feel like you’re needed, you’re probably not, but it would be one way of smoothing off the inevitable grind in a new MMO – as well as explaining how the hell the local shopkeepers got to Level 66. April 2009
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