There has always been a sort of gamer/developer pride regarding game genres, pride which made people blindly dive into arguments trying to decide for example whether an FPS can be considered a better or a more valuable game than an RPG. Pointless discussions really because there is no way to compare the two without doing a great injustice to one of them – it’s like comparing apples with oranges while stating from the start that the color orange is a must have for every decent fruit.

This kind of arguments have been going on for years, decades even, but not without beneficial results. That’s because when trying to decide which one is better and why, people involved in the debate pointed towards the unique qualities of each game and offered them sometimes exaggerated values in the overall equation. Like, let’s say the visceral, quick, easy fun of first person shooters, or the deeply rewarding experience of a lengthy gameplay session of a role-playing game, both regarded as a must-have by one side or the other. For those that had ears to listen, eyes to see and brains to understand, these arguments were made out of gold and that’s because they helped them realize that a shooter doesn’t necessarily have to be just a point and click experience, with no story depth, no choices for the player to make outside the do-or-die pattern and finally with no emotional impact. Those that understood that one genre’s qualities can be successfully grafted on the body of another without killing the patient or transforming it into a disgusting abomination, have made millions. Don’t take my word for it, take a look at BioWare and the Mass Effect series and decide for yourself.

Nowadays this sort of debates took a more serious turn and one certainly surprising if we are to take history our best teacher. With the recent rise of casual games, we’re witnessing an unexpected clash between two industry sectors (casual on one side and hardcore on the other) with key figures from both sides predicting the demise of the other or of the entire gaming industry if one side is allowed to develop further. Recently we have quoted the creator of Angry Birds stating that “console gaming is dying” while on the other side of the barricade we have a loud crowd of doomsayers stating that casual games lack substance and they are hurting the industry as a whole. In my opinion both sides are completely off target. If what Mr. Vesterbacka was looking for was free publicity I can only congratulate him for drawing so much attention with such a statement – cheap, yet highly effective tactic. If however he was genuinely convinced that console games as a gaming industry sector are getting closer to their end, I can only hope that medical science has or will soon find a cure for his illness.

Console games aren’t dying and will not die, at least not in the foreseeable future, and they aren’t hurt by casual games either. Those who are hurt are the console/hardcore games developers/companies who look at a market they have so strongly controlled for so many years and notice that a competitor they have looked down upon and neglected is now at their heels, making extraordinary profits with minimum investments. So the agonizing screams we recently heard (blogs, conference speeches, etc.) are a natural, instinctual response of a threaten industry sector towards its attacker – much like an animal defending its territory. But the threat is not real, on the contrary, in the long run, console games might even profit from current casual game’s consumer sector.

Hardcore gamers will never switch to casual gaming. It’s absurd to even think the two can replace each other. First of all the time investment required from the player differs from one to the other and a so-called hardcore gamer will never choose to play one of its favorite games if he has only five minutes to spare. Instead he will turn to his hand held device and quickly finish one or two levels of a casual game because he is sure he can dive deep enough into the game in order to reach the its layers of fun. A console game sometimes requires more time than that just to get it to run, let alone play it. Second of all, the rewards the two game types offer are fundamentally different. Casual games, in their current state, don’t have enough substance to be able to offer players a deep, meaningful, emotional experience. Sure, they can make you laugh, they can even make you cry if a brilliant designer is behind them, but once play time is over and the game is closed, there is a minimum or no residual effect of the gameplay session on the player.

In order to replace the emotional splash with an emotional ripple you need to invest time, time which casual games can’t afford to waste. In order to relate to and feel for a video game character, the player needs to spend time “in the company” of that character – the more time he/she spends watching or participating in that character’s development, the stronger the bond between the player and the character will be. Once that bond is created the feelings can then be mirrored from one side to another: hurting the video game character will implicitly hurt the player, rewarding the character in one way or another also rewards the player. If you wish, it’s like trying to control the puppeteer through his puppet: if you gently and patiently pull on the puppet the strings will make the puppeteer follow, but pull too fast or too hard and the strings will break.

In conclusion casual games can not deliver such a level of emotional depth, and not because the developers behind them do not wish or are unable to take their game to such levels, but because it goes against the current definition of what a casual game is. However, these games can deliver something the classic console game is currently unable to provide: small, easy to swallow, cute and brightly colored fun-pills. Gameplay sessions that last a couple of minutes and are as fun and rewarding as two hour long one. Easy to understand and easy to master controls and game mechanics. Simplicity and accessibility. In these concepts resides the explosive success of the casual games genre. With this in mind, let’s see what can be borrowed from casual games and introduced into console games without “corrupting” their hard-core.

At the moment much of the console game’s accessibility is lost in the intricacies of the controllers through which we play and the control schemes mapped on them. With every game having its own control system, lengthy and most of the time boring tutorials are unavoidable. So instead of starting the game and playing the game immediately after, we need to go through another step: learning how to play, or if you wish, learning how to have fun. Much of the blame would seem to lay with us game designers as we are the ones creating game that can be tackled only through such contraptions. However, in our defense, it’s fair to say we work with what we have. Abraham Marlow said that “it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.” I believe this concept, known as Marlow’s hammer, perfectly encapsulates a game designer’s dilemma: “I want to make it accessible, but how can I do that when the basic controller is so inaccessible.” So we must first teach the player how to interact with the environment and the characters we created through the available controller. Because of this unavoidable step a lot of potential gamers lose their interest in the game before actually playing it.

Casual games have no such problems. They’re easy to install, easy to access, easy to understand, easy to control and thus easy to play. This unprecedented game accessibility makes for most of the casual games’ success and because of this feature it is common to find among the casual games consumers individuals who normally don’t fit the traditional description of a gamer – like a fifty years old lady who spends most of her time watching soap operas and the shopping channel. Anyone can play a game whose goal is to match colors or move a ball through a maze – we all played those games in one form or another when we were kids and we liked them. The only reason we no longer play them anymore is because we, the hardcore gamers, found more intricate designs to challenge ourselves. But for people who never played a video game before, such a game can prove to be a highly entertaining experience. Giving it enough time we might see many of the current casual gamers moving towards the hardcore sector as they will search for new and more complex experiences and this is why I believe that console games developers can benefit from the evolution and success of casual games. If only they can rise up to the challenge and understand what this new market sector is looking for.

There is a lesson to be learned here and the sooner the industry giants learn it, the better it will be for all of us. For too much time developers created games with the idea that players can learn, adapt and generally accept what the game demands of them, from adjusting to complex control systems to calculating success chances by taking into consideration countless variables. In other words, developers leaned on and took for granted the consumer’s ability to overlook product flaws and focus only on the intrinsic value of the game. Those that couldn’t do that were ignored. Those exact “outcasts” are now coming back with a vengeance, showing that they are interested in video games and they can certainly play them. They just don’t want to invest time and effort into learning the “how to” lesson. Why should they? Especially now, in a world in which every second has an enormous value, investing minutes and sometimes even hours into learning something that applies most of the time to only a small fragment of what the industry has to offer, is a colossal waste. Console games developers must readjust their way of thinking and developing video games to take into consideration what the consumers already know.

Let’s expand this a bit. Tilting a controller forward to make an arrow dive (Heavenly Sword) comes naturally – if you tilt a flat surface objects on that surface will begin to slide due to the gravitational force pulling them towards the ground. Controlling the same arrow with the help of a joystick is no longer natural because it requires understanding of a control element which we are not using on a regular basis: in our everyday activities we don’t normally use joysticks to move things around, do we? Here’s another example: what is the most natural way to parry a downward (sword) attack? The answer is simple: you raise your hand/weapon and hold it horizontally above your head. This parry movement comes naturally and is made out of instinct. Our history has countless years of conflict which have taken such reactions and embedded them our natural reaction patterns. Pressing the “A” or “triangle” button to parry is not a natural response to an attack, so learning to react in this particular way takes time and goes against our instinctual behavior.

What else do we know? We know that red is associated with “wrong” or “evil”, while green stands for “right” or “good”. We know that metal is stronger or more durable than wood or cloth and taking a wooden club against a metal armored enemy can only lead to failure. We know that darkness is filled with perils while a fire or sunlight keeps us safe – don’t try to apply logic to this one, it has none, but hundreds of years of hiding in caves have programmed us to think this way. And the list of things we know and take for granted can go on and on. The idea behind it is that game developers and companies producing consoles should use these already learned lessons to their benefit while taking into consideration that the less time is wasted learning how to play, the more people will be interested in playing.

Getting back on track, casual games must be simple in order to be successful so casual games developers were forced to rethink the way games function and appeal to consumers. When scaling everything down to a hand held device you must remove as much unintuitive and redundant information as possible to make room for the actual game and its fun elements. So, maybe unintentional at first, casual games became accessible without being less fun. Without this level of accessibility console games can not evolve. They will not go quietly into the night, they will not crumble and die, but simply stop evolving while casual games will gain more and more ground until the revenues they produce will begin to ridicule the enormous efforts that go into creating a hardcore/console game. At that point we should being to worry. We are already witnessing signs that point towards this unfortunate outcome, with old studios closing their doors while small companies make millions over night. We are all poorer because of it. The industry should regard this as a most serious wake up call.