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(Please note that even i talk in an assertive way, it doesn’t mean this is the ultimate truth about the casual gamer psychology, but only an opinion)
Casual Games = Immediate Progress = Immediate Feedback
That would be the equation. Casual players are impatient. They want to be congratulated with a high frequency, even for the slightest click of the mouse. Reward them with visual FX, achievements, points, badges, a nice sound or melody, a text between exclamations to tell them how cool is the object they have recently achieved… do whatever it takes.
And between each of these ‘boasting right’ moments, you should be able to grab their attention gently ushering them to progress throughout the game. Don’t let them fall behind because you didn’t give them proper feedback each lapse of time. The “nothing happens” moments must be avoided at all costs. If for example you want the player to go back 5 screens to get a necessary object, you better find a way to make her trip back interesting, and the same goes when she moves forward again the 5 same screens after having picked up the object.
Additionally, remind her during the trip how important is what she’s doing for the welfare of the character she’s roleplaying, otherwise she’ll forget the purpose of the action you prompt her to perform game design-wise.
Casual gamers are almost like fishes (please understand this within the context, not as something derogatory), as in some casual genres they tend to forget WHY they are doing WHATthey are doing, so a game designer must plan each game situation with that in mind.
A list of things to think about:
- Give meaning and purpose to player’s actions.
- Give rewards to reinforce the meaningfulness of the player’s actions and congratulate him for having performed them properly.
- Avoid idle moments when the player could dangerously miss the frequency of feedback and feels she’s a “nobody”, “unimportant for the world” or could forget why it’s so vital she must continue progressing within the game.
- Tied with the one above, casual gamers, in the end, are looking for some love, fullfilment and even tenderness, qualities that our fast-paced and goal-oriented society scarcely provides.
You must guide players, like a child expects from a father. When you see they’ve already learned the “invisible” game mechanics you’ve set up though, then provide them some hints, but don’t tell them the whole story.
Let them feel the sense of achievement of discovering by their own what you conveniently hid from them.
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Thanks for your comments. As i said in the beginning of the post, i'm stating only personal opinions, i didn't pretend to make a treatise.
When i talk about "she", it's a matter of deference to avoid using a chauvinistic language. Even though, it's true that what i say mainly applies to women, but please notice i'm not embracing all casual genres, that's why in the post i say "as in some casual genres they tend to forget WHY they are doing WHAT they are doing"
About what you state of "you wouldn't even have to worry about "rewarding them" every second", i'm not saying the contrary. I'm not pretty sure if you read the post in its entirety, so please let me quote something you'll find at the end:
"You must guide players, like a child expects from a father. When you see they’ve already learned the “invisible” game mechanics you’ve set up though, then provide them some hints, but don’t tell them the whole story.
Let them feel the sense of achievement of discovering by their own what you conveniently hid from them."
So what i mean basically is that great feedback is necessary during the first stages of the game, until the casual player has uncounsciously assimilated the game mechanics to go on her own.
"If you are talking about women, then make a game with an interesting plotline and characters. Forget that nonsense about using sounds and pretty colors to keep her interested in your game."
I assume that everybody understands that the core game design of a casual game must be good, because no matter how many FX you add, if the game is bad there's not much you can do to improve it. Having said that, i don't understand why you qualify as "nonsense" about "using sounds and pretty colors". It's like if you said that Peggle would have succedded without the many reward systems that go in hand with the game design itself (i'm pretty sure that those 9 months for QA that PopCap used where mainly to polish these reward systems).
In my post i clearly say that don't take the sentence of "casual gamers are almost like fishes" as something derogatory, even i knew it may sound crude at first. I hope that you agree with me that the first 5 minutes a casual gamer will spend playing a game will determine if she'll continue playing it or not. When a casual gamer "gives up", it means the game mechanics have not attracted her enough to make the extra effort to play more time. This "effort" the player does when she's playing must be sustained by the game mechanics until she eventually gets hooked. The comparison of the "fish" serves to say that the casual gamer will quickly quit and "forget" about your the game if you are not able to sustain her personal effort with good feeback.
I hope that you now understand i'm not making any inference of the intellectual capacity of casual gamers. Anyways, i hope my post serves as material for thought, not controversy.
I appreciate you posted your opinions about it, otherwise i wouldn't have had the opportunity to clarify some points that may seem "shallow" or even "rude" on a first reading.
Want only to clarify one more thing about this quote of yours: "I just don’t think is fair to claim that women are more likely to forget why they’re playing a particular game."
Please, don't take things out of context, i'll insist on that. I said "casual gamers", not women. Even i'm mainly talking about female casual gamers, i'm NOT saying women are forgetful by nature, rather than their attention will diminish quickly if not properly grabbed by means of in-game "rewards". This quick loss of focus and interest is one major feature in the psychology of any casual gamer (independent on their genre).
There are many layers on what one could say regarding games design. We could analyze all this deeper and deeper and never reach the bottom. For example, i do agree in the MONOTONOUS PLAY. But now, if i recall my experiences as a gamer, i was able of playing for hours any game on the Atari VCS, even its monotonous play, because for me it was amazing that i could move a spaceship on a TV... i was completely mesmerized. It was a novelty. After playing for so many years any possible game in any genre, my conditioning makes it difficult for a game to surprise me and attract me so easily as before. The kind of feedback that i will require for a game to attract me won't be the same as that needed by a casual gamer, because her repository of experiences is not as saturated as mine, and there's many more chances that something "cute", let's say a fireworks effect, grabs her attention easily. In my case, as i've seen this effect in so many games, the impact would be quite redundant.
If you check some famous casual games and dissect them, you'll see that they actually have a monotonous gameplay, but they avoid a monotonous "play" (without the "game-" affix) thanks to all these myriads of rewards we are talking about. I mean, it's not only "not wrong" to use them, but even essential for a game to succeed amongst a certain public.
Anyways, i do agree with you, the ultimate goal of a game designer is to provide FUN, that's the whole point.
The points in this article apply to every game. Not only casual ones. Although we must concentrate on them a lot more for the casual games.
By definition, casual players tend to value other things higher than gaming; so basically they have other things to do than playing games. So they need to accomplish something in less time; "win faster". So the reward/feedback arguments that Abel suggested are pretty relevant IMO.
Hold on a sec. Define "reward". I would like to argue that a good game is a good game, is a good game. Now I know marketers out there are all enraged to put people into boxes because that's what make them good at predicting trends and ultimately do their job rights.
But I think there is a lot to be said, from the point of view of game design, about the candor of focusing on game mechanics that are rewarding by themselves. Not because they "give" the user a prize, but because they are enjoyable to do as you're doing them. Mario bros used to be a pretty hardcore game. Now if each level was a proper stand alone, people would call it very casual.
Jumping on monsters and platforms is fun. It's not casual, or hardcore, or segment A, or B, or women or men-only. A great game, in my humble opinion, takes a bunch of people who consider themselves "non-gamers" and wakes up the long-lost child in them to have him/her repeat a behavior that he/she previously dismissed as irrelevant.
I just wanted to offer that perspective to your nice article. Nice to see you're doing well, Abel! /wave
Take care,
Matt
I share Jerry's opinion that this post is full of Casual Fallacy. The paragraph under the equation says a lot. "Casual" gamers don't feel rewarded by those things...except if they're male and 13-23 years old...no wait, that's the sheephead hardcore.
People feel rewarded when playing games that they have
1) control (example: player-death comes from player control, not some design flaw in the level or something)
2) can sense improvement in skill within the game
3) grasping deeper layers of the gameplay/game challenge(examples are Diablo (2), WoW, Legendof Zelda and so forth). When a game is able to attract a new audience, a good portion of that audience will have become rather skilled in the game and will want a deeper experience. They move "up-market" seeking out more complex games.
4) being able to recognize or reflect their life-expercience onto the game. Games are most succesfull when they carry people into worlds or activities that don't exist/they can't do in real-life/ want to be part of. Super Mario is about being able to move in a cartoon world, Mordern Warfare is about...modern warfare without being shot at, Gran Turismo is about driving all those nice cars really fast...without the costs and crashes and so forth. This is also called the content or experience of a game. Not the story as some linguists and narratologists will claim. That's because they don't know better really.
Another equally important essay (to my mind, at least), is "The Theory of Cycles." It's a very elegant theory on the long history of video games. It fits in with Thomas Kuhn's notion of the Paradigm, and recognizes that the history of videogames is the history of fads. Instead of a linear progression, we have four major paradigms - board games, arcade games, cinematic games, and social games.
Someone really should go to depth on both essays, because they're so essential to understanding where video games are today, and where it may be evolving.
Matthieu: i do agree in all what you say, i think those "rewards" can be, and must actually be, within the game mechanics. Even though, there are rewards that are outside it and at the same time complementary, and i truly think help to enrich the game experience. The thing is that a casual game, normally due to its simplified game mechanics, needs of all this external rewards to grab the attention of the player. I think that's the difference between a prototype and a game, otherwise, why the need of creating a beatiful wrapping? Even the many sketches Miyamoto did of Mario until finding his definitive form mean there's a need of taking care about aesthetics to attract players... is this kind of "reward" in the game mechanics themselves? no, it's in another layer, but equally important for the overall result.
Nice to see you man, glad to see you're still alive =)
Tim: if you think "casual gamers don't feel rewarded by those things", ask any developer that makes Hidden Object Games for example. You might be a bit mistaken about the age range and genre also, as there are many mature people that play HOGs.
I do agree with the first three points you stated (even would not be applicable to many casual games, i can give you some examples if you request me), but i don't see why the rewards i'm talking about can be mutually exclusive with the ones you state.
I do not agree with the 4th point though. There are many games that reflect a life-experience but are not necessarily rewarding or even fun.
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(http://seanmalstrom.wordpress.com/2009/09/21/email-sports-games-are-pioneering-w
iis-upmarket-shift/)
In order to make a game for Wii’s audience, they [game designers] need to leave behind the Next Generation baggage of ‘narrative’ and ‘zOMG, I’m a movie director!’ as well as making good use of the Wii capabilities. I don’t see games like Red Steel, or RPG or other titles doing this.
It is so frustrating because their problem isn’t so much of what they need to do, but the bad habits they are carrying over. All their Next Gen habits or last generation habits are major turn offs to the Wii audience. For example, tons of gore is a major turn off to females which is half of Wii’s audience (and many men as well).
They aren’t interested in making family games. Or they think family games is ‘casual games’ which means ‘retarded games for retarded customers’. The games need to be child friendly and family friendly. Not child focused or family focused. But they should not be turn-offs in them that send the customers going the opposite direction (like that arachnid game for Wii. Who wants to buy something like that?). A game like De Blob has none of those turn offs and did fairly well. The sports games also lack those turn offs as well. Every Nintendo game lacks those turn offs.
Just as the Wii reduced the barriers between the new audience and gaming, the “Game Industry” needs to look in itself to reduce its software barriers, things that they do not notice. These would include:
-Tutorials of any kind
-Blood and violence (is this necessary for a game?)
-Too much text. (no one wants to READ a game…)
-Cinematics (movie director syndrome from the designer)
-Blasphemy of any kind (why would someone put into a game something that attacks other people’s religion? It is still not common, but shocking that anyone would include such an unnecessary element to their game)
-Anything that would cause children to leave the room.
-Anything that would give fuel to Mom to turn it off.
-Taking control away from the player.
Well, those developers are then doing it all wrong, again because of Casual Fallacy. If you look at the games that are the most proficient in bringing in new audiences (WiiSports, WiiFit and their sequels, Mario Kart DS and Wii, NSMB DS and Wii, Nintendogs, Animal Crossing DS and so forth). Those games reward players using the four points I just used and they do a bang-up job of it. There isn't much fluff or effects or whatever that you suggest going on in any of those mentioned games (there is some and only limited). If you want to use an example within the expanded audience, make sure the example atleast sold around or over 10 million copies. Only then can you assume the game has reached a wider audience in a highly significant way.
A game is rewarding if it sticks to being a game, not some eliptic-inducing kiddy-friendly lightshow with exclamations marks up the wazooh. If it is the latter, then your falling into the Casual Fallacy trap.
Also @ Daniel, is Malstrom paying you or something? :p Not that I don't mind, the more people read up on basic theory, the better. Also, "The Theory of Cycles" sounds like a very Schumpeterian/Disruptive-like theory
Interesting article. As you ask me, i'll try to answer what i think about the quote: as it refers specifically to the "Wii audience", all the points seem to me quite correct.
The only thing i would point out is that it talks about the "negative" aspects to remove in games, rather than the ones to include to appeal the Wii audience, which are more difficult to find (there would be many hits on the Wii otherwise!).
Two "positive" examples are given though: "De Blob" and "sports games". Maybe not all sport games would appeal to Wii gamers. I don't know if Fifa sold well on the Wii, but it's hard for me to imagine the prototypical Wii player spending much time on this game, as the controls might be too complex for them.
For De Blob, we can see that the game mechanics are VERY clear and direct. I haven't played the game tough, but i can imagine controls might be very simple. It seems also the polishment of the game is excellent, and that the camera movement it's well executed.
One interesting thing on the original article that wasn't quoted here is that Malstrom says "Until I see companies focused on eliminating those ‘turn-offs’, I don’t have much hope for any upmarket move."
But the thing for me is that there can't be any "upmarket" move taking into account the social and "casual" reasons why Wii players end up buying a Wii. And if it happens, i don't expect it can't go much further the ladder, specially because i don't think there's a constant delivery of "hardcore" games for this system.
@Tim
We are talking about Nintendo... Nintendo! i mean, not all game companies have the potential of I+D that Nintendo has, come on. Who better than them to know how to materialize all the potential the Wii has? They were the ones that revoluzionated the way we played some years ago, so they know how to get the most out of their technological sons.
Tim, i would say you and DanielThomas look Malstrom associates, repeating up to 4 times the "Casual Fallacy" as in any good marketing advertisement, haha! joking =)
About moving upmarket: movements upmarket are a constant in any new content-based industry. The first movie-goers were the labour masses who couldn't read or write. The first european theater plays were reconstructions of the passion of christ performed in front of churches by and for the peasant masses who couldn't read and write. Videogames has its roots in the "casual" audience.
This is the historical basis for the Casual Fallacy (sorry for the repeat...again :p ): The "Casual" has always been the base. It's from these people that the hardcore are born trough moving up-market. The Wii is building up a new hardcore, one soaked in the values and principles behind the Wii. Companies will have to adapt to these values or die since the "old" hardcore is too limited and declining.
And may sound be unfair to use Nintendo as a basis because of the huge succes the company has known the last...3 decades. But Nintendo, at one point, wasn't as exceptional as it is now. In earlier days, SEGA, Konami, Capcom, Square and so forth were giving Nintendo a good run for its money in terms of game quality. Nintendo has only managed to maintain (somewhat) its quality in games. All the rest dropped dramatically. That Nintendo is now seen as the huge exception says more of all the rest then Nintendo quite frankly.
The historical examples you pose don't tell anything about the "quality" or "complexity" of the "content", but of the "status" of the people having access to it. If you mean that people that knew nothing about "films" or "theater" become more and more interested in the genre, then i do agree, once upon a time everybody has been a "casual", but that's not the common definition of "casual gamer", and it doesn’t necessarily imply a casual gamer will “evolve” through any ladder of complexity in games whatsoever.
I don't think that the first games that appeared when the industry started off were casual. Maybe the concept was "casual" or without much complication, but many games were horribly hardcore and difficult to beat. The consumer though kept playing that game because he wasn't tempted by the ilimited offer that exist nowadays. There wasn't many more options. Cassettes were expansive, so you played the game until being fed up, literally.
So people step up from casual to hardcore almost forcefully without being aware of that.
But today there are many more options, cheap games, games to rent, many consoles, myriads of online free games... so if players don't like a game, they quit playing, they won’t have so easily the patience to keep trying to learn how an MMO works. How then you think these players will naturally evolve to a "higher ladder" in this supposed "upmarket"? This can't happen unless certain conditions are given, in which the “community” of gamers plays an essential role i think.
The "upmarket law" doesn't exist. It's only an arbitrary categorization. It's the "Upmarket Fallacy" :P. There are people that started playing strategy games from the very beginning and have been doing so for many years without being interested by other genres. It also doesn't mean that people that play platform games will eventually play RTS or other more complex games. It doesn't signify either that people that play platform games and eventually play MMOs from time to time will stick to the latter and will forget playing platform games. Also people who play more complex games can have a great time playing casual games from time to time, but once again, it doesn't necessarily mean it will happen the other way round.
This is only to explain that the concept of "upmarket" and "ladder" seems to be a bit loose and can't be taken as an exact categorization, even it holds many interesting and thruthful insights either.
Anyways, i think we start derailing! =)
We're not derailing if we're discussing the very core of what something is, even if it does not look like it. You're talking about casual game design, i'm saying that it is full of wrong dogma's and distortion. Explaining why is not derailing.
Upmarket movements are historical recognized and documented by many historian and economic studies, Disruptive Theory is even based on it, so please don't call it arbitrary or false without some serious proof. It's not a law, it's a constant dynamic that does happen. How these market layers are defined (by class, sex, identity, income or any other) are idealtypes and arbitrary to make research easier of said dynamic, the dynamic itself isn't arbitrary or false. And also please do not distort history as many are doing all the times. Pong started the industry commercially, Pong would so be labelled "supercasual" if it was released today, Pac-Man the same (actually, it was labelled "casual" in the days it was released).
To escape the casual fallacy you have to embrace one principle and inject into your games "easy to learn, hard to master". People like to start out easy but want increasing challenge as time passes. Pong was incredibly easy to get into, it was incredibly hard if you kept playing. WoW literally teaches people how to play MMORPG's by introducing aspects at set intervals (when reaching level x), Blizzard has allready recognized that the most hardcore WoW-players are actually people who started playing videogames with WoW and grew into it. Nintendo's games also have a simple outlook but a devious hidden depth that people access by repeated play. Nintendo has also recognized that people who started playing with WiiSports or Brain Training are trying out more complex games by shifting to Mario Kart DS/Wii of NSMB DS/Wii. Nintendo even called them "bridge games" connecting the new players with seasoned ones. Sales numbers of those games prove they're right. The so-called "casuals" are moving up-market, by the millions (since all those games sold over 20 million, NSMB Wii will probably reach that too, that's a lot of potential millions moving upwards).
The conditions of moving upmarket does not need the "essential role" of some community of gamers, that's you projecting your believes and social identity as a gamer. You want a community of gamers to do that because if it can't, it proves your social indentity group is useless. it allready is useless, get over it, adapt and improve. Conditions of moving upmarket is set by a very simple but fundamental principle inside a market: supply. If there's no supply, then people won't move upmarket. Simple, clean economics 101. Don't even try to counter-argument it, you can't without toppling every economic LAW in existence.
That supply is created by people becoming better at making their products, reaching out to new sources of inspiration. Movies reached out to hunderds years worth of theater plays to make more interesting movies, the people went up-market. Space Invaders was influenced by upcoming sci-fi, Donkey Kong and Super Mario used cartoons. There are cases where a industry moves too fast up-market leaving a lot of people behind (people adapt slower then the ratio of innovations happening). This is when a industry starts overshooting it's market, losing it's core. This core will then revert back to non-customers. Gaming also had such exodusses of millions of gamers just leaving gaming. With the US-market implosion of 1983, millions left, because there was no supply. During the 2D-3D transition, again millions left. Now again with the HD-consoles, millions have left gaming. Remember, this is a dynamic process, there's a lot of giving and leaving and also the introduction of radical new elements that re-news the dynamic (this is Schumpeter's dynamic of Kapitalisms Creative Self-Destruction) in a given market.
Nintendo decided pulling in new people because it saw that people were leaving and a lot of people weren't being reached. By doing that, with the DS and Wii, it re-newed the dynamic within the videogame industry. These new people will move upmarket if the right games are made. If the Nintendo moves too fast up-market, these people will leave. Do not mistake this as repeating cycles, they just look like cycles. It's just that certain dynamics are a constant and when you do not take these dynamics seriously, you get bitten in the ass.
You say "these market layers are idealtypes and arbitrary to make research easier of said dynamic, the dynamic itself isn't arbitrary or false."
If these layers are arbitrary and ideal (and very, very subjective), the particular dynamic we are discussing here, that's the movement between layers, must be of the same nature and can't be otherwise. That's way i maintain the "upmarket" categorization can't be but inaccurate.
"Pong would so be labelled "supercasual" if it was released today, Pac-Man the same (actually, it was labelled "casual" in the days it was released)."
It couldn't be labelled "casual" at least in the sense we understand it today for one simple reason. The videogames play-time habits were not yet instaured in people's lives, so the frequency of daily playing couldn't be measured yet due to the lack of data over time.
"The conditions of moving upmarket does not need the "essential role" of some community of gamers, that's you projecting your believes and social identity as a gamer. You want a community of gamers to do that because if it can't, it proves your social indentity group is useless. it allready is useless, get over it, adapt and improve".
You quoted Blizzard, and that's a great example of the power of propagation of a game thanks to its community. Many veteran players taught "newbies" how to make the most out of the game, so the success it's not only because the way Blizzard designed its game. Blizzard, with their game design, made the community stay playing its game, and the latter attracted more community... people go where people is). Farmville, without its viral propagation amongst the Facebook community wouldn't have reached such number of "casual" players. Many gamers play online because their friends play online, be it in Facebook, Xbox or in F2P MMOs.
Communities developing Mods, Plugins, etc, help introduce many new people to a variety of games. Even if you play solo, you need somehow to share your experiences with somebody. The very definition of "game", in most cases, isn't possible without sharing with somebody.
About the dynamics you state, i'm not sure if nintendo succeeded due to discovering that many people was being left behind because the upmarket was moving too fast... i can tell you that many of my grown-up friends that have now a Wii have never been interested in videogames. And the way they use the Wii isn't much for the games themselves but for their "social" involvement (not their kids though). There are also many once "hardcore" players that quit playing due to their increasing responsibilities with their work and kids, so now have a good excuse to play again and at the same time sharing leisure time with their families (and once again introducing these new "casual" players to the market).
The thing we have to question is if this supposed "heaven" that is the top of the ladder of this "upmarket" means the summum of fun and playability in videogames, and if every gamer should move always upwards. I doubt it. Many of these "top upmarket" games that introduce players so smoothly and then make them become "hardcore" players, are really funny? Or maybe it's because players have invested so much time and efforts that even they are almost fed up of the game, they became "hardcore" out of compulsion rather than because of a good design and so well measured increasing difficulty?
If we study it more carefully, the "supposed complexity" of these games it's all about making the player repeat the same actions over and over again but simply changing their outer form, their skin. Many MMO players for example, can tell how tedious and boring are quests in MMOs. That doesn't seem to be complexity nor upmarket.
You raise some pretty good points on casual gamers, and I certainly agree on your analogy of fishes (One wrong move and you find them all swimming away).
I would like to add to the list, avoid teaching causal gamers every single thing that they can do in the game at once, and just slowly introduce the casual gamers to the game. Let them get the feel of the game, which could then ultimately make them enjoy the game more or just quit.
Also, adding to your definition of reward in your previous comments, I would say now-a-days rewards tends to come in many different forms, but no matter the form, rewards end up doing the same thing. Getting the gamer to play more. For example, one form of a reward are achievement points, they may sound silly at first, but when a player gets an achievement, it can put them in a mindset where they are saying to themselves, “If I can do this, I could probably do the other”. One great in the wild example is WoW. They have achievements for basically everything, readings a collection of books found around the world, etc.
On the topic of WoW, it can be said for certain that “causal gamers” can also play games as big and complicated as WoW and still enjoy it. One example of them catering for causal gamers is the amount of changes they did concerning a particular area where they give players a buff only in a certain area where they feel were a bit hard for casual gamers.
Have a nice day :)