Are casual gamers ruining gaming?

[serialver]

I consider myself a casual gamer but I do not play on the Wii. Not sure how where this concept of casual gamers ruining games comes from, as a child I remember games not being hardcore and the like and fewer people have time to commit all their time to games and there is no real 'professional' gamer really.

Of course people seek new challenges but the gamers who have the most time are general teenagers, unemployed, sponges and stupid rich.

I have no idea what my argument here is now. I do like depth to games and will sometimes go from a easy button mash wind-down game to one which involves thinking or takes time to play. I guess it is hard to really commit to an answer as I've yet to really understand the criteria for each brand of 'gamer' out there but publishers will go where the money is anyway. So if casual games are being made then there is a demand for them and the more hardcore gamer crowd has become a minority.

 

[Kpt._Rob]

My big problem with casual gaming isn't that it makes gaming easier. My problem with casual gaming is that it takes from gaming's image as a legitimate artistic medium. The very word "game" is one of the biggest problems that gaming has with being viewed as valid. People who don't "play games" (more problem words) hear the word "game" and think it's some silly little thing kids do for fun, like playing monopoly, etc... but it's not the sort of thing adults ought to waste their time on regularly. Needless to say, people who believe this haven't seen games like Bioshock or Oblivion (just to name a few), genuine artworks in interactive media. The games they do see, however, are games like Peggle, or [B/]the endless number of shitty Wii games[/B]. Games that really are just "games," nothing more than distractions. And as a result their opinion of gaming remains in the area where they view gaming not as legitimate interactive media, but as just a "game".

Yeah, 'cause the Wii doesn´t have games like MadWorld, No More Heroes, Deadly Creatures, Muramasa and World of Goo.

And remember that even if certain mediums like "literature" and "music" are art, that doesn´t deter people from thinking that Hip Hop and the Twilight novels are nothing but crap.

Thank you for automatically assuming I was trying to rag on the Wii, because really there's nothing I enjoy more than being the dick who starts a flame war. I was talking about the endless stream of quick cash-in third party games. All the "Carnival Games" nonsense type stuff that's just a bunch of packaged mini-games.

Secondly, literature and music are already established art forms, gaming is still trying to be established. My point was simply that when people hear literature they think of the classics and the genuinely good literature because it's an established form. But when people who aren't gamers hear the word "videogame" in their heads it's pong with better graphics, it's still the same pointless time waster. If the goal is to shift the paradigm so that when people hear the word "videogame" they do think of the good games, then the casual game phenomena can be damaging because it encourages thinking of games as just "games" as opposed to thinking of games as an artistic medium.

And all that is not to say that I don't enjoy some casual games myself, I love the guitar hero games, etc... But I also realize that they can be damaging to gaming's image in a time when it would be possible for gaming to shift from "games" to "artform," a shift that I believe is important if gamers don't want to forever be viewed as they are today.

 

[Amarok]

Casual gamers are not ruining gaming. Game is fine. There are quality games this year. There will be quality games next year. Quality games are something that will always exist.

Sit down. Shut up. Enjoy

Ps. I actually quite like Peggle.

 

[T-Bone24]

No... nothing is ruined, nothing will be ruined. Nothing's caught fire or sunk, or been fed to a squid, everything's FINE. Stop complaining, and play the games you want to play, no-one's forcing you to keep that pathfinder thing on Fable II on, it's quite easily turned off.

 

[SonicSoulstrike96]

Yeah, casual gamers are only killing Nintendo (but only half killing the DS). The rest of us still have Sony and Microsoft.

 

[Glademaster_v1legacy]

Yes this is what is happening to gaming but the thing I think it is just to suck them in as a lot of new gamers are kids and as soon as the average gamer age starts "greying" again if you know what I mean by that term we start seeing games with more challenges depth and length as when this generation of gamers grows up they put up with games 2 hours long they will want the kind of length games we had.

 

[asinann]

You're right I guess "ruin" is too strong a word. Perhaps "shape the games of the future" should be more appropriate.

Think of it like this, movies get made based on how many people the studio thinks will buy it. There are a ton of terrible movies being made because people have very low standards of the movies they want to see. It's all supply and demand and the casual gamers are a large slice of demand, so they are changing the games being made.

I see your point. The Wii and it's "casual gaming" label have really brought light on the shovelware issue. The problem with the "casual=shovelware" argument is that those games have always been there. We're just more aware of them now. The classic pillars (games like Half Life, Super Mario 3 and Final Fantasy 7) stick and the shovelware gets... well... shoveled into the bargain bins.

In a way, it's similar to the US auto market. The crappily run companies took stimulus money and then started asking for even more. Ford denied stimulus money, buckled down and made more headway out of the economic swamp than any of the rest. The gold standard remains the standard and everything else, no matter how brightly it shines for how long, will eventually fall off. Take heart, no matter how plentiful the "casual" teat's milk may be, it won't last forever and in the meantime, there's still fine examples of gaming being thrown into the marketplace.

Either that, or the companies will make more of those casual games (which they have been doing) because they can shove those games out the door fast and far cheaper than a quality game that will keep gamers playing. There are more casual gamers than actual gamers too, and the casual crowd generally has more money to spend so is more willing to buy lower quality games new instead of trading them in towards a new (or used) quality game.

 

[gamepopper101]

The real question is when will people stop asking this question. The Playstation almost killed gaming by bringing it to adults and teens, but that was passed away, this will do the same.

 

[Zelist]

Yes they are, case being MW2, with the surge in casual gamers the developers ignore the hardcore gamers, the PC version of MW2 is crippled and almost considered a flop, and its because Activision decided to drop dedicated servers, if you want to enjoy the game you have to play it on xbox360 and ps3 and with the consoles they have shoddy controls compared to the PC, if all you ever play is xbox360 or ps3 you will say the controls are fine, but they are not, try playing Quake 4 for 360 and try playing it for PC within a few matches with the pro's on PC you will quickly see something is wrong with the controls for xbox360, the controller will never be as accurate as mouse and keyboard, but the developers are gearing there games to the casual gamers on the consoles. why? because there is three hundred million casual gamers in North America, and for hardcore gamers there is probably less then a hundred thousand hard core gamers per title, the developers want money, they don't care about the Hardcore gamers.

the upside is if you don't like it, like my self you have the choice not to give them money, or you can start your own game, maybe by using something like the unreal developers kit which has just recently been made public for non-commercial use.

 

[mikecoulter]

No, don't be silly. Casual gamers if anything allow the growth of the gaming community. Nobody starts out as an expert gamer.

 

[FolkLikePanda]

Yes, I think the Wii could have better games but no Nintendo has to license all these fucking games that 7 year olds keep begging their parnets about even though it's a piece of shit which will be shoved in the corner to rot within a week.

 

[Sandwich Man]

Nah, most 'casual gamers' (which is a stupid term, as most have pointed out), will either quit when they get bored or turn into 'hardcore gamers'. Hell, my own mother is an example of this. She started playing Bejewelled on Facebook and a few months later, she's refusing to give my copy of Bioshock back.

 

[cheywoodward]

I think casual gamers are perfectly fine for gaming. Most of them stay in their corner of the gaming universe and who knows? Some may even join us as hardcore gamers later on.

 

[Thaius]

I think this problem is overstated. Admittedly it is annoying, but there are plenty of developers out there still making fantastic and complex games. My only real complaint in all this is Nintendo's turn to the dark side. Hopefully they'll turn back to the core audience at some point...

 

[ChromeAlchemist]

"Casual gaming" is as old as the hills, surely everyone knows this.

They're not ruining gaming, they're just annoying.

Don't worry, when the Wii's popularity dies down, so will the casual gamer population and everything will be back to normal. Unless Nintendo decides that they want to make another casual gamer system and continue being another branch of Playschool...

You realise who Natal is being marketed towards right? There's no such thing as a casual gamer system that costs hundreds of Pounds/Dollars, the Wii is marketed towards everyone and is for everyone.

 

[ChromeAlchemist]

I think this problem is overstated. Admittedly it is annoying, but there are plenty of developers out there still making fantastic and complex games. My only real complaint in all this is Nintendo's turn to the dark side. Hopefully they'll turn back to the core audience at some point...

When did they turn away from their core audience?

 

[Angel Emfrbl]

*Pulls out a spectrum ZX*

You know half the games on this thing are causal gamer games?

*Pulls out an Atari STE*

It was them that made this computer worth while.

In fact, the causal gamers didn't become a problem from my opinion until the Playstation came along. Suddenly theres also the "serious gamers". Not saying they didn't exist before, but they weren't driving the entire industry. I think the Playstation brought out this idea. Heck I remember playing Golden Axe and not taking it so serious but now that sort of thing is considered serious stuff.

 

[Thaius]

I think this problem is overstated. Admittedly it is annoying, but there are plenty of developers out there still making fantastic and complex games. My only real complaint in all this is Nintendo's turn to the dark side. Hopefully they'll turn back to the core audience at some point...

When did they turn away from their core audience?

Quite a while ago, actually. A good example was when they had a huge announcement to make at E3 a couple years ago. Everyone expected a new Zelda game or a new IP or something, and what did we get? Wii Fit. Nintendo caters to the core audience in their new installations to old franchises, and in very few other ways.

 

[Julianking93]

"Casual gaming" is as old as the hills, surely everyone knows this.

They're not ruining gaming, they're just annoying.

Don't worry, when the Wii's popularity dies down, so will the casual gamer population and everything will be back to normal. Unless Nintendo decides that they want to make another casual gamer system and continue being another branch of Playschool...

You realise who Natal is being marketed towards right? There's no such thing as a casual gamer system that costs hundreds of Pounds/Dollars, the Wii is marketed towards everyone and is for everyone.

Yes, I get Natal is done by Microsoft and that casual gaming has been around forever but the Wii just seems to have made casual gaming more mainstream. I see the Wii in Rent-a-Center commercials now.

 

[GrinningManiac]

The thing that's ruining games, apart from stagnation in creativity in the main markets, is developers mistaking "challenging" for "stressful", and "Scary" for "Grotesque"

Sort of an interactive version of the problems we have with films, particularly "horrors", which I use in the loosest possible terms these days