Who are you calling casual?

I was thinking last night, is being referred to as a casual gamer a put down? Are casual games less important than hard-core games?

Labels are funny things. By adding casual to the title does it make us sound less serious, less committed? Well the statistics being released of late seem to indicate the opposite.

Casual gamers are some of the most dedicated gamers out there. And unlike the young male dominated world of the ‘hard-core’ gamer, casual gamers are made up of all demographics and all ages. The dominant group of casual gamers are in fact women over the age of 30, a fact that comes as no surprise to those in the industry. However it’s not the demographic or age group that immediately jumps to mind of the general public when you talk about computer games.

The beauty of the casual game is its simplicity, and that’s why the worldwide audience of 100 million* continues to grow. Sometimes you just need a little diversion to get through the day.

We at 3RD sense are extremely proud of the games we create, and we thank the lord that people like them and keep coming back to visit. We don’t consider our games casual, and I bet to the majority of Playaholics gamers out there, casual is not even a term they use.

Of course casual games are as important as the more traditional hard-core games. If they were not, then people wouldn’t play them and our industry wouldn’t exist. I just wish we had a better name.

* source: Jupiter Media Metrix

quick links 16-Oct-06

We keep telling whoever will listen that girls like games and a lot of smart game productions have come through recently targeted squarely at them - here’s a couple:

Kiss Chaser - created for Tampax

Action Impulse - created for Unilever’s Impulse

Our Web 2.0 awakening

If you were talking to marketers and you wanted a sound bite, you’d probably say Web 2.0 was about unleashing the power of the community. This is a grand statement, but what does that mean? The best way we can explain it is by drawing on our own experience.

Some time ago, we decided that we wanted to create a directory of online casual games. There were two ways we could go about that, really. The first route would have been to try to build and create that directory ourselves. The second route — and the one we chose — was to build an environment that allowed the users to create their own directory.

We launched Millions Of Games (MOG) five or six months ago, using techniques that were pioneered by sites like Delicious and Flickr. MOG is still in beta. It’s not finished. We haven’t really launched it at all yet. But in that period, over 1400 people have created what is now the world’s biggest directory of online games — something that would have been impossible for us to achieve on our own.

So how does that work? When they come to MOG, players have the opportunity to sign-up for free and create a list of their favourite online games. We call this “mogging”. What makes MOG a Web 2.0 application is that this list is shared with other people. Very quickly you can see who else is playing the same games as you, and you can see what else they are playing.

Very quickly, users create a powerful array of data that would have been impossible to assemble in any other way. That’s an important part of Web 2.0.