casual games

Hi, thanks for dropping by. If you are interested in a lively community around mobile casual games why not register to play, score and make friends. Please go to http://www.playyoo.com/common/registration.html

David had the idea of the game creator as a means of enabling everybody to be creative. And he has such a disarming voice according to the girls next door. Please watch and enjoy the walk-through. You never know and end up creating casual games and winning the contest.

PS: and please don’t forget those games are going to be played on a mobile handset.

Thirty-five years ago, Nolan Bushnell and Atari brought us the world’s first successful video arcade game: Pong. I came across a short radio interview (PONG: The Ping Heard Round the World) with Bushnell where he talks about the “rebirth of casual games,” likening it those early days.

“The rebirth of the casual game structure is very reminiscent of the early days of pong where pong really was every man’s game and then it went to Street Fighter where you had to push 13 buttons with all 13 of your fingers and rip the spine out of somebody. Violent games lost the women; and the complexity lost the casual gamer. Now we’re coming back full circle to games that are casual that can be played over the Internet.”(and over mobile phones, of course)

Leaving aside any social comentary on violence in games… At Playyoo, we wholeheartedly support the rebirth of the casual game- and renewed interest in developing high quality games that anyone can pick up, play, and enjoy. Simple doesn’t have to be boring.

But where I might deviate from Bushnell (at least how Bushnell was portrayed in this interview) is that the resurgence of casual games does not have to be at the expense of their complex counterparts. It’s not an either-or situation. People have diverse preferences and ideas for entertainment. And individuals themselves are too complex to play one game type day in and day out. If I pull out a deck of cards to play solitaire, it doesn’t mean I don’t like playing Risk (I haven’t actually played Risk in years, but that’s not because of any card playing).

In short, the world is big enough to accommodate strong markets for casual, complex, and any other genre of games. The key is to make sure there are high quality games of all types to meet the wide range of preferences.

So, just who exactly is playing A Cat’s Life? Well, according to a recent study by the Casual Games Association, those who play “simpler games involving shiny gems or lines of colored balls” are equally split among the species — that’s 50-50. The report found that women buy more casual games, but men are just as likely to play them.

“Everyone always thought that casual games were something that only appeal to women,” said Jessica Tams, managing director of the association. “We knew these guys were playing these games, but the hardcore gamer who is playing Halo with his buddies isn’t going to brag that he just beat the next level of Zuma.”

Much to the dismay of machismo, interactive entertainment is unconditional. In other words, task a human with a compelling on-screen objective, and they’ll oblige.

This is my step into the game. I’m with Playyoo here in Lugano since last week. Welcome to everybody following us already.

I spent the last 5 years being heavily involved in the social media sphere; I remember back in early 2002 when I got into blogging I was sure that this is a sign for a more mature, promising and socially engaging web. I won’t continue this sermon. But I tell you to be here at the intersection of a web and mobile platform that supports all we know about user generated content plus augmenting it into the former specialized area of casual games publishing is fantastic.

Gaming On The Go: “The DS killer for the casual market is not the PSP (t d f) — though Sony would love for this to be so — but the mobile phone.”

I will be responsible for community building and marketing at Playyoo. So if you have any input/ideas please contact me live.

What we are aiming at is providing not only an easy-to-use platform for downloading games and socializing around it. Additionally and this is a first: we will provide you - and I mean you as in everybody - with an easy-to-use game creator thus encouraging play and fun on both ends. We will support game creation on a normal user - that means you and I can do it - level with our launch in December.

Ah yes I almost forgot - let me point you to our contest. We really strive to launch in December with a compelling offer. We encourage Flash developers to be among the first to put content on Playyoo and get user feedback (and win prizes ;-).
Let’s see - once we are live- what gamers with our game creator can achieve. As you know the notion of democratizing the means of production (thanks for that post Suw) is what keeps the Web 2.0 phenomenon attractive.

What I’m really curious is how a technology like that - compare how YouTube changed the way videos and recently advertising are understood - will change the way we conceive of casual games.

Casual games have certainly received their fair share of attention recently. The Casual Game Association recently published their 2007 study on casual games — where they projected casual games to be a $2.25 billion a year industry and found that men and women play casual games in roughly the same numbers (although women make up 74% of those actually paying for these games). And on Gamasutra, casual games were likened to the proverbial one-night stand (see: Persuasive Games: Casual as in Sex, Not Friday).

According the Casual Game Special Interest Group, casual games are defined as: “Games that generally involve less complicated game controls and overall complexity in terms of gameplay or investment required to get through game.

The casual game experience has often been compared to “snacking” (David Gosen of I-Play used this phrase in a 2005 Gamsutra interview). Like a snack, one can pick up a casual game quickly. There’s no need to clear out the day’s schedule like you would before sitting down to a four-course meal. There’s no lengthy preparation time. And there’s not the same impact on the wallet.

However, while casual games don’t demand the same time commitment as their “hard-core” counterparts, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the casual game experience must be short and fleeting. After all, the snack industry would not survive at its gargantuan levels if we all just ate one or two chips at a time, then neatly closed the bag and tucked it away. So-called “casual” gamers can be easily sucked into the electronic black hole of the casual game — and soon find that their three-minute game has turned into a three-hour session. And “casual” gamers can become obsessively passionate about their high scores and statistics.

Accommodating both heads of the coin, and making games that provide an equally compelling experience whether the participant only has three minutes or ends up playing for three hours, offers an exciting challenge for game designers.

First, casual games require minimal directions. Computer Space, the first computerized video game from Atari’s co-founder Nolan Bushnell failed to reach mass production. Why? In Scott Cohen’s Zap! The Rise and Fall of Atari, Bushnell explains, “You had to read the instructions before you could play, people didn’t want to read instructions.”

But that just addresses on side of the coin. The box for the cult two-player board game reads: a minute to learn, but a lifetime to master. And while the “Easy to learn, hard to master” mantra has become a little cliché in the game design world, the message is critical: casual games need to be fun from the start without becoming boring no matter how many times they’re played.