Casual games for casual players

Today’s post is about one of my favorite subjects: casual game design. Undoubtedly, the contemporary multiplatform environment, with so many connections between different devices, becomes a privileged ambient for games, especially casual games.

Casual games are everywhere: in the console, in the smartphone/tablet, inside Facebook and even in analogical card/board games.



To discuss some essential points about casual game design, we bring Jesper Juul into the discussion. In his awesome book Casual Revolution (2010), Juul points out (2013, p.50) that casual game design has five components:

1.Fiction: “The player is introduced to the game by way of a screenshot, a logo on a web page, or the physical game box”.

2.Usability: “The player tries to play the game, and may or may not have trouble understanding how to play”.

3.Interruptibility: “A game demands a certain time commitment from the player. It is not that casual games can only be played for short periods of time (…)”

4. Difficulty and punishment: “A game challenges and punishes the player for failing. Casual games often become very difficult during the playing of a game, but they do not force the player to replay large parts of the game.”

5. Juiciness: “Though this was not predicted by the description of casual players, casual game design commonly features excessive positive feedback for every successful action the player performs.”

All these topics help us think how to develop better games and – in some way – how to reinvent video games for a broader audience.

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Reference:

JUUL, Jesper. A casual revolution. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2010.

The casual experience of DOTS

Created by Betaworks One Studio DOTS is a minimalist abstract game about connecting small dots in a 6x6 grid. DOTS is an excellent example of casual game category for mobile media (iPhone and iPad).

The idea of the game is very simple: join the little dots orthogonally and try to create a big chain, more dots equals more points. But DOTS has a special detail: each game lasts exactly one minute.



And the best part of the ludic experience is to try to be the number one in a global ranking. Many players are trying to overcome the score within the same amount of time.

Check the video below to understand the mechanics and gameplay:



Matching games are a great success since the early years of video games. As Trefay (2010, p.79) remembers us “we like to pattern match – our brains crave it. Games are essentially complex systems of patterns. (…) Games are comprised of pieces that can behave in unique, but prescribed manners. (…) Matching and sorting games provide a very basic form of pattern matching and bring it to the surface of the game. This makes them very accessible and well suited to casual games.”

The elegant gameplay of DOTS brings us a good reference to study casual dynamics. The simple interface and sound design offer us the idea that the basic could be, sometimes, better than the complex.

So, what are you waiting to play DOTS and be number one in the global ranking?

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Reference:

TREFAY, Gregory; KAUFMANN, Morgan. Casual Game Design. Burlington: Morgan Kaufmann, 2010

Keep it simple

By Vince

This post is a kind of an advice for new game designers and game developing enthusiast.

Nowadays, we have a broad market for many categories of games and this is very good because we can target different kinds of players. Every game designer one day, possibly, dreamed about the chance of developing a complex console/PC game for a very specific type of player: the heavy user gamer.

But, don’t forget that a wide part of gaming consumption comes from casual gamers. The high numbers of casual/simple game downloads from platforms like App Store (Apple) and Play Store (Google) give us a clue of the enormous potential in this area.

More than 200 million people worldwide play casual games via Internet, and it’s impossible to forget the high numbers of casual gamers in mobile devices too.

The essence of the success in this area is the mantra: keep it simple. But “simple” (or casual) is not a synonymous of “poor”, and creating good simple/casual games is a great challenge for game designers. The “Angry Birds”, “Temple Run” and “Draw Something” are good proofs of this idea.



Keep the casual player on your mind all the time and don’t forget that a casual game requires good content, intuitive mechanics and well defined interface. It must be wonderful to create the new “Battlefield” complex FPS game, but it must be wonderful to create the new “Angry Birds” casual game too.

To finish this post I have a good hint for you: visit the site of the “Casual Games Association” (LINK HERE) to get more information about this growing entertainment market.

And I want to share this excellent presentation from Newzoo: the “Trend Report: Casual Social Games - February 2012”

View more presentations from Newzoo

Go (casual) gamers!