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Forgiving Casual Games
By Corvus | January 30, 2008
I’m not sure that I’m about to say anything terrible new about casual games in this post, but rather explore a familiar debate with some new terminology.
I’ve been thinking about casual games since the topic was brought up in the Xfire Debate Club last week. My recent post on why the DS is my favorite platform at the moment also got the gears turning. The clincher was the arrival from Gamefly of LEGO Star Wars: The Complete Saga for the DS. As I played and loved the first game, enjoyed the second game well enough despite it’s many flaws and recently sold off the Wii version of the Complete Saga in a fit of Meh, I’m obviously comparing the gameplay of the handheld version to all my previous experiences. I’d have to say it’s holding up pretty well so far.
I’ve mentioned before that the failing of the LEGO Star Wars franchise involves the inclusion of more “hard core” design elements. The Wii version of Complete Saga did retroactively improve some of the rails shooter levels of the first game, but overall the improvements they made raised the commitment bar. In other words, you had to spend exponentially more time with the game to complete it, there were more hidden items meaning you spent more time backtracking in each level, etc. By comparison, I realized, Complete Saga in the DS is very forgiving.
That’s when it hit me–Casual games are typically very forgiving games. They don’t harshly penalize failure, they have gradual increases in difficulty, they don’t demand you spend large blocks of time in one sitting. They don’t have complicated control schemes or complex mechanics. Typically, you don’t even have to read to be able to play (excepting Bookworm and its ilk, obviously).
So casual games are forgiving if:
- You don’t have a lot of time
- You don’t have a lot of skill
- You make a mistake
- You get called away suddenly
- You don’t like to be constantly challenged
- You don’t want a lot of emotional investment
That’s a fun list, feel free to add to it in the comments (if you’re not arguing with me of course).
We can extrapolate this to a look at game mechanics as well. Game mechanics that are forgiving could be considered casual mechanics. This would include the ability to save anywhere, gradual difficulty ramps, non-complex plot lines, simple control schemes, lack of inventory or simple inventory.
Conversely, game mechanics that are punitive could be considered “hard core” mechanics (I’d like a better term than hard core, but whatever). Save points that are few and far between. Character death, long cut scenes, ‘innovative’ controls, complex plots, manual character progression (leveling in RPGs), level bosses, complex inventory management.
If we take that approach to classification, then determining whether a game is casual or not is pretty simple. If the forgiving game elements significantly outweigh the punitive elements, the game can be considered a casual game.
What do you think?
Tagged:casual-games, lego-star-wars, nintendo-ds. | 18 Comments »
January 30th, 2008 at 9:20 am
I would agree but I would also add time as a factor. Dying in a casual game is usually no biggie since you don’t invest so much in a game anyway. So even IF you have no save function, games like Tetris work ok for the “casual players”(there is no such thing). But when a game takes so much time as Star Wars does, you have to add all those features to make all that content appear commitment-less.
Think about THE causal game of all games: Brain Age. It is incredibly unforgiving, up to the point of latently insulting your intelligence if you aren’t able to perform some high-speed math calculations. However, every test lasts only a few seconds and the game discourages you to play too long at a time, so all that becomes less important, more casual.
I was considering buying the complete saga on the Wii. One thing I haven’t been able to figure out ANYWHERE: does it have co-op multilayer on the Wii too (I mean with two Wiimotes, not over the net)?
January 30th, 2008 at 9:29 am
Time is the first item on my bulleted list!
I don’t know that I’d consider Brain Age the casual game of all games (I think some of the PopCap titles would probably take that honor), but I do think that the vast majority of its game mechanics are forgiving. After all, even when you fail it doesn’t make you start over from the very beginning, right? You just keep going.
I’m also not absolutely suggesting that LEGO Star Wars is a casual title. Although the first game and the DS version do come relatively close, given that they have a great many forgiving elements.
And yes, the Wii version of the Complete Saga has co-op multiplayer.
January 30th, 2008 at 9:35 am
But you do underscore an important point, Krystian. It isn’t merely the individual mechanics that must be analyzed to determine their forgiving or punitive nature. The game dynamics must also be considered. Oblivion with no ability to save would be decidedly punitive, while Tetris’s lack of a save isn’t, thanks to the short play loops.
Add an aggressive time limit to the levels of LEGO Star Wars and it would make the once forgiving jumping portions of the game decidedly punitive.
January 30th, 2008 at 9:56 am
Okay! That’s a good, fairly measurable definition. Let’s look at some games. Now, I used to be fairly hardcore, and I still have a soft spot for shmups and other niche hardcore genres, but I’ve been having less time to play lately, and I think that pushes me towards the casual camp. So, hopefully, I won’t show too much of a bias in my categorization.
Tetris as a casual game:
Simple, physically-based controls
Gradual difficulty ramp
No plot
Can we include No Inventory in this list?
Tetris as a hardcore game(not Tetris -played- as a hardcore game, which is a different beast entirely!):
Extremely time-sensitive input
No way to cancel a failed action – all decisions are permanent
Impossible(for me at least!) to put down and pick up again a few minutes later
A single game over puts you back at game start
Tetris comes out looking pretty “hard”, but it’s also a pretty old game, so let’s look at something newer:
Mario Galaxy(Whoops, how did that get in here?) as a casual game:
Simple plot
Simple inventory
Short chunks of play time. A star can be cleared in a few minutes.
If you’re stuck on a star, you can move on to another one
Deaths only set you back a little ways in the level
Co-Star Mode lets people who don’t play games help, or lets gamers help non-players
Game over only sacrifices level progress
Mario Galaxy as a hardcore game:
Large number of deaths
Complex controls
Limited number of lives(for some reason)
I’m going to list complex controls twice – managing yourself in 3D is worth at least “Game over only sacrifices level progress” and “Simple plot” and “Simple Inventory” combined.
Complex controls again for good measure.
Hm. It seems like certain “punitive” or “non-punitive” attributes are worth more than others. Maybe that’s my fault for not breaking down punitive parts into enough subparts, but I think there are still measurable attributes – mean failures per hour, or something – that could be placed into this framework.
As a reply to your reply to my last comment, and as a little side note here, what Herodotus has to do with dynamic content creation and difficulty scaling in particular is hinted at a bit in my most recent weblog post, http://joe.garbagecollective.org/2008/01/learning-from-history.html .
Coincidentally, mean failures per hour is something that’s easy for Herodotus to track. You can use the data it gathers to enact more or less punitive mechanics, depending on how the player seems to be faring or enjoying him- or herself.
January 30th, 2008 at 10:00 am
I disklike false dichtomoy of “casual” vs. “hardcore” games. A lot of the time there seems to be an implicit sort of looking down one’s nose at the so-called casual games, and I see no reason for this (I am not accusing you in particular of this activity, just saying it happens).
I would rather break games down as those that hate me and those that don’t.
I came back to video games late in the Xbox 1 era, and I find most of the standard mechanics that you list in the “hardcore” area to be archaic and hateful, but apparently expected by the target audience. I play sometimes through games like that *despite* those problems, but only if some other aspect of the game is really interesting.
January 30th, 2008 at 10:01 am
Yeah, I think a proper estimation of a game’s casual nature would require a pretty systematic and complex assessment of the impact of any given mechanic or dynamic. Perhaps ironically, it’d certainly not a forgiving task.
I’ll be following Herodotus with great interest. It certainly overlaps with some of my plans/needs for the HoneyComb Engine.
January 30th, 2008 at 10:16 am
I don’t disagree with you, psu. In fact, that’s rather what I’m trying to get at. “Casual” is merely a label applied to games which contain significantly more forgiving elements than punitive ones.
January 30th, 2008 at 10:24 am
Most puzzle games (it seems this falls under your definition of casual) have a difficulty curve. the majority don’t penalise much if you lose, but some require you to replay levels all over again – which no doubt it a pain.
And no doubt the higher difficulty levels will keep the “hardcore” entertained while the casual player won’t reach that far anyway.
Hard to say, however, the categories of some games. I know for sure that I couldn’t even complete Peggle Extreme – I got tired of losing my lives and restarting it – that is a casual game right? It was pretty hardcore to me.
January 30th, 2008 at 10:33 am
@ Corvus: Yeah I realized too late that you’ve mentioned time as well. But what I ment also more along the lines of: Time is the catalyst here. All of the points you’ve mentioned aren’t so important if the game is short anyway and are EXTREMELY important as the game gets longer.
Also, adding an aggressive time limit on a game can make it more casual. I mean if it’s REALLY aggressive and the goal is to score points instead of achieving something to proceed. Like kill as many bots as you can in two minutes.
@ Tetris as a hardcore: That makes me laugh because I have this saying that Tetris is the ultimate crash test dummy for every games theory. You can destroy just about every theory by applying it on Tetris.
@ Mario Galaxy as Hardcore: I wouldn’t call it casual. It is true, collecting a star doesn’t take much time but that star is part of a large, overall structure. With short games I mean something like Dolphin Olympics where you are back in the Main Menu after just 2 minutes. In Mario, that never happens, the game continues until you have all stars.
January 30th, 2008 at 2:42 pm
You know, it dawns on me that while we may be tempted to lump Tetris into the ‘casual game’ genre, and therefore use to to bust up attempts to define what makes causal games casual, it really isn’t a casual game at all.
It was ultimately produced to keep quarters flowing into an arcade machine and it’s success lay in the fact that it was simple and compelling enough to keep non-traditional arcadians doing just that. But as you say, there’s very little ‘casual’ about its pace. Compare that to… say, Chuzzles and you’ll see what I mean. Casual games today are designed for easy web play. Tetris was not.
January 30th, 2008 at 2:57 pm
Some interesting thoughts here… First of all, I too think that the “casual vs. hardcore” is a false dichotomy. I think it’s always been a spectrum, if anything, and it’s just that now “casual” is a (goofy) Marketing term.
If you take those bullet points out of context all but one of them (”emotional engagement”) were reasons that I (and others like me) became fans of LucasArts’ adventure games more so than many competitor’s offerings (particularly ex-top dog Sierra) at the time. No one put it as a “casual” versus “hardcore” thing (”we were all in it for the emotional engagement”, I think), it was merely seen as a preference in play style: should I be safe to explore randomly and do whatever seems fun (or funny) at the time, or should I save often and worry about making a wrong turn somewhere in Albuquerque? Both styles had their fans and each style had an impact on emotional engagement. For me, I was more likely to see the end of the story of a LucasArts game and enjoy the story for itself, but I was much more ecstatic to see the credits rolling on a Sierra game because I knew I had actually conquered some rough challenges.
Again, at the time it was seen more as philosophical differences rather than “casual” vs. “hardcore”, and I think giving it those labels doesn’t really add anything to the discussion of the distinction in play styles there…
I like the idea of thinking along the lines of punitive vs. non-punitive, though. I’m just not certain how useful it is in defining “casual”, just as I’m not certain how useful it is to even bother defining “casual”.
@Krystian: Sure, all of those stars in Mario Galaxy are tied into a larger framework, but so are the unlockable stages in Peggle, just to grab one example. Many games with low time requirements still have those bars that you can try to reach for if you are able that “fit within a larger framework”. Sure Mario’s world seems more persistent, but something like Club Penguin is also a very persistent world and few would call it anything but “casual”.
January 30th, 2008 at 3:07 pm
Interesting that you should mention LucasArts adventure games, Max. I’ve just replayed Full Throttle and that, the bike combat portion on the Mill Road in particular, also factored into this post.
Edit
I also find these sorts of “define a genre” exercises useful. Not because I think “casual” or “RPG” or “hardcore” ultimately need defining, but because I they keep us thinking about the structures of the games we design and play. As an artist of sorts, I feel you can always stand to take another look at a space with fresh eyes, no matter how useless or well trodden the space seems.
January 30th, 2008 at 3:57 pm
It may be useful to define casual and hardcore as more of a scale really. With a game being completely casual as one you can play for five minutes and put away without penalty. When perceived from that context then a lot of your statements about Lego Star Wars introducing more “hardcore” elements certainly makes sense.
My issue with ramping up the difficulty level or introducing more complex modes of play throughout a series is that sometimes you leave behind the very audience that loved your game so much. I loved Lego Star Wars because not only was it fun for me, but my two children who were 4 and 7 at the time, could also play it. Lego Star Wars II introduces some gameplay elements that even I find frustrating. It has not gotten near the playtime the original did despite some nifty features like running around in a scout walker or riding jetbikes. Did the developers just forget that the original game was fun despite its fairly non-traditional gameplay?
Another example, not for a casual or hardcore standpoint, but just in terms of introducing more “hardcore elements” was the Soul Calibur series. I loved Soul Edge, Soul Calibur, and Soul Calibur II all because they had a simple to learn but hard to master style of fighting. The game could be challenging without being punishing. It was accessible to anyone who wanted to play it. Soul Calibur III? Ridiculously difficult even on easier settings and it introduced a control scheme that was similar to the older games but just different enough that someone who had a more casual approach to the earlier games was simply frustrated by it. This in spite of SCIII’s many new features. Interesting that the PS2 version of Soul Calibur II sold 1.8 million copies while Soul Calibur III, a PS2 exclusive, sold about 800,000. Still a success by any means, but an interesting drop off in sales.
Furthermore, I found it interesting that a common complaint about Crackdown, a Grand Theft Auto style “Sandbox” game was that when you died you didn’t lose any progress. The only thing you might lose are any weapons you are carrying that you have not previously stored at a supply point. I wouldn’t call Crackdown “casual” by any means after doing some of the boss battles, but I find it an interesting complaint that some gamers and reviewers have criticized it for not punishing the players enough when they die. I also found this a little off-putting at first but over time I realized that it was kind of silly to expect to be punished. It was certainly better than having to redo a mission over from scratch like you do in most games of its type. After awhile I actually began to appreciate the fact that the game was not punishing me for not being a uber-gamer who could breeze through every challenge on the first attempt. Plus there was plenty of challenge in the actual missions.
Certainly I understand that designers may not always want to have an accessible game necessarily, but I think the success of companies like PopCap also demonstrates that a game does not need a multi-million dollar budget and years of development time to attain the simple goal of giving people enjoyment.
Incidentally, I’m going to agree that PopCap are the rulers of Casual Gamesville. If you can get my non-gaming wife hooked on Bejeweled you’re clearly doing something right.
January 31st, 2008 at 1:02 am
@Jason O:
I liked Crackdown quite a bit, and some of that was indeed from the
less punitive nature of a death, which gave me more incentive to
explore and toy with the game’s physics engine than I’ve felt in many
other sandbox games.
It’s interesting that you mention PopCap as the rulers of the casual
space. If you don’t mind me reiterating a rant I’ve had before, and I
apologize, Corvus, if it should appear too much of a tangent to the
discussion at hand:
PopCap’s domination appears both a good thing and a bad. On the one
hand they’ve certainly made some amazing inroads to get
“non-traditional” game players involved in computer and video games.
On the other hand, they are now the ridiculously over-sized ogre on
the path of progress for the genre of casual gaming and I think they
know that. The Zero Punctuation review for Peggle is a must watch,
mostly because it mirrors many of my own sentiments. PopCap has the
income and staff that some hardcore studios might envy at this point,
seems to hate the term “casual” (not because it’s a useless term as I
believe, but because people use it around them as a euphemism for “not
real gaming” or “games my mom/wife/sister plays”), and makes it a
harder world for (us) independent developers (whom have
“traditionally” used “casual” games as springboard to larger ventures)
because we can’t afford the production values of Bejeweled 2 or
Peggle. (It’s hard to explain to, for instance, my mom why its tough
for a small operation to create a look as polished as, say, Chuzzle.)
January 31st, 2008 at 6:09 pm
I broadly concur; instead of “hardcore” in this case, you could say that punitive mechanics suit a “challenge-oriented” player – or a fiero-seeking player, if you dare being accused of using “jargon”, as I am.
Best wishes!
November 3rd, 2008 at 6:11 pm
[...] Traditionally this sort of sandbox exists, usually as the only game mechanic, in decidedly more forgiving games like The Sims. Here, however, it is used to encourage the player to explore the motivations, [...]
November 21st, 2008 at 8:26 pm
I totally agree. And it completely makes sense for all these games to be so forgiving. If people had hours of free time, they’d be more likely to get into some serious gaming, rather than some short point and click gaming.
December 30th, 2008 at 1:41 am
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