[Note from Kotaku: The following excerpts are from a series of interviews published in A Casual Revolution, a new book that chronicles and studies modern styles of gaming, challenging the notions of "casual" and "hardcore," and examining how and why gamers play what they play]

Type 2: These are the stories of players who used to intensely play video games and now have switched to more casual video games.

Survey response from a 40-year-old female player.

Q: Have your game-playing habits changed over the years?

A: I used to only play RPGs like Guild Wars but you can start and stop casual games easier during the day.

Survey response from a 42-year-old female player.

Q: Have your game-playing habits changed over the years?

A: Started with text-only adventure games, moved toward RPG video-games & simulations, most recently I stick with time management-type casual games.

Survey response from a 29-year-old female player.

Q: Have your game-playing habits changed over the years?

A: I no longer play shoot 'em ups or beat 'em ups or two-player games with my sister on the Amiga. I've less patience with poor games and am less inclined to persevere. My shelf's full of games I've bought then never even bothered to play, or those I've only played for an hour then given up. At least with casual games the free trial makes that less likely. I've always played casual games, even before they were called that though (Tetris, pinball, card games, Nuclear War, Rockstar Ate My Hamster, they were all casual) and I've always played traditional games too.

Survey response from a 38-year-old male player.

Q: Have your game-playing habits changed over the years?

A: As I grew up and had more obligations my time and patience became limited towards investing in epic games. Though I still love the idea of playing epics like Civilization or Warlords or SimCity, the time required is just more than I can provide. Every so often I try to get a game going only to be pulled off it by various obligations and [I find] it difficult to return.

Survey response from a 30-year-old female player.

Q: Have your game-playing habits changed over the years?

A: Having a baby really changed my game playing habits. When she needs my attention the game must stop. This is why World of Warcraft has been hard to play as of late.

Survey response from a 43-year-old female player.

Q: Have your game-playing habits changed over the years?

A: I've been an active computer gamer since 1989. I've always loved the adventure games. But as I've grown older, got married, had kids, I find it hard to concentrate too long and get too involved in an adventure game, since the time that I spend on the computer is so inconsistent. A casual game is now perfect for me ... it helps me to relax and ‘‘stimulate the gray matter.'' I love them!

Players Discovering Casual Games
Type 3: These are stories of players who have discovered video games through casual games.

Phone interview with the father in a Wii-playing family, the parents in their early thirties with two twin girls aged three and a half.

Q: You compared the Wii to Parcheesi?

A: We don't play Parcheesi [Sorry!/Ludo] with the kids, because it is too complicated for them-they are only three and a half years old. With the Wii, on the other hand, the way that you do something and see a reaction on the screen, the way you tilt the controller and see something on the screen-that is something different. You cannot give them PlayStation controllers; those are a little too advanced with too many buttons. With the Wii, we can see on the kids that it just works for them, they can use that immediately. We play the Wii with friends, at social events. We have also played it with the in-laws who are both around sixty. They play it eagerly, and they ask if we shouldn't play the game one more time.

Q: Do you personally play other computer or video games?

A: Ah yes. I have started playing Call of Duty, and I used to play Counter-Strike a lot. I am into first-person shooters, we have a clan, and so on. But nothing related to the Wii.

Q: You haven't tried converting your wife or family to computer/videogames?

A: Not to traditional computer games. I know they don't like those, so it hasn't come up. We play the Settlers board game with the in-laws. The computer is not so good for something like that where it becomes strategic and you play for several hours. When I was a child, we played Parcheesi and chess, or perhaps Pong. That could be played with the family.

Q: What Wii games do you play?

A: Mostly Wii Sports and Wii Fit. We have bought some others, but we don't play them. We just held a summer barbecue with eighteen guests. Everybody was playing the hula hoop on Wii Fit. We bring out the Wii at social gatherings and when friends come over.

Phone interview with a player of downloadable casual games in her fifties.

Q: Have you played board games or card games?

A: Lots. Checkers, Nine Men's Morris, and lots of card games.

Q: And Solitaire games?

A: Yes. Playing casual games actually feels similar to playing Solitaire. You are totally relaxed, you cannot concentrate on anything else, but at the same time you can be thinking about other things in the back of your mind. I often play when I face a difficult problem. In my company I face various tasks that are hard to get started with. I already have the knowledge I need, so I play a game rather than go read a lot of books. Then the solutions come. It is like the game brings out a lot of tacit knowledge, as if the problem solving in the game maintains that skill, and that is a skill I need.

Q: How were you introduced to casual games?

A: My 75-year-old friend introduced me to Zuma and Collapse, the predecessor to Zuma. It was after I had handed in my PhD thesis, so my brain was completely offline. Then she invited me over for dinner and told me she had something interesting to show me. She also had a computer Mahjong game that was very beautiful and exciting, I really liked that. Later I have begun to buy them myself, because they are not that expensive.

Q: How do you feel about difficult games? Is it a problem to be stuck on a level?

A: Level twelve of Zuma is really fast. I think I gave up after fifty attempts. Zuma has a game mode called Gauntlet where you can practice different levels, so I switched to that and practiced becoming faster. That helped, but I was still too slow. It was important for me to finish the game-I believe that is important in life, to finish things, no matter what. I like competing with myself, to see development and progress. ‘‘No matter what,'' is really the point for me. I googled for solutions and found a site with a cheat code to make Zuma slower. It worked!!! For me, that was even more satisfying that beating the game on its own terms: to modify the game to fit my own limitations and capacities.

Survey response from a 52-year-old female player.

Q: Have your game-playing habits changed over the years?

A: Until I discovered casual games on the computer I used to spend a lot of time with traditional crossword puzzle books and other puzzle-based paper-based activities.

Survey response from a 49-year-old female player.

Q: Have your game-playing habits changed over the years?

A: I play more now that they have made games to suit women. Not the fighting, killing, kicking ... etc. games.

Survey response from a 29-year-old female player.

Q: Have your game-playing habits changed over the years?

A: I only discovered ‘casual games' about a year and a half ago. Of all things, my Mom had bought Insaniquarium and a puzzle type one (I want to say Penguin Puzzle, but I don't remember the name for sure) for my son for Christmas. Regardless, after the entire family got hooked on Insaniquarium, I ended up checking out the website of the company that put it out, and things went from there. Before ‘casual games' entered the house, I'd gotten to the point where I mostly played MMORPGs-EverQuest, at the time, though I usually ended up giving new ones a try as they came out. That, and Sims 2. But like I said above, ‘normal' computer games don't come out all that often. At least, not ones I was interested in. With the whole new world of casual games that can be downloaded and tried in just a few minutes, it let me have a much wider variety of games to play, so that I now have something to play no matter what my mood is and what I want to do.

For more on A Casual Revolution, go to the book's official site or purchase it here.

Pulsipher analogizes video games to chess. Not only do the masters play a great deal of it, they study it. When the game became too much work, Pulsipher gave it up.

I felt the same way when I lost momentum in Batman: Arkham Asylum. There was something I wasn't getting about the Bane fight, sure, and realizing I'd have to study, wait for a FAQ or just trial-and-error it for another hour was so unappealing I put the controller down. And more than that, I resented knowing that I was worse at, or poorly prepared for, a brawling game challenge that most gamers could tackle in their sleep.

In these excerpts, Pulsipher argues that game development should move in a direction of inclusive accommodation. That rather than build titles that are either/or, core or casual, innovations that manage one's state in a game would allow more skilled gamers the challenges and fulfillment they seek, while allowing players less invested in that to still experience the title and its story.

Are Games Too Much Like Work? [Gamasutra, Sept. 4, 2009.]

Movies that resemble video games are often panned by film critics, but recently the well-known critic Roger Ebert said, about the movie Terminator Salvation, "It gives you all the pleasure of a video game without the bother of having to play it." (He gave it three stars out of four, quite a bit better than the Metacritic average — this was not a criticism.)

Is a future of video games actually movies like this? Or can we enable video games to challenge those who like to be challenged, but accommodate those who just want to ride along?

This requires us to find some way to either remove the disadvantage of failure from the game, or make failure less likely.

[...] Games can do something like Photoshop and 3ds Max: Let a player hit the "undo" key (usually Control-Z) when he gets in trouble or fails, and go back a few actions, or a minute, or five minutes, whatever interval he chooses, to resume the game at a point before the failure.

Yes, it'll take a lot of computing power. Initially, the "constant undo" capability might extend back only to the second-newest save. Nonetheless, if a game can record a movie of everything that is happening, as some games can, a player should be able to, in effect, rewind that movie to where you want to restart. And we've removed some of the work.

"Undo" will help reduce the tedium of game playing, but doesn't do anything for the people who just aren't interested in being strongly challenged by a game. For them we need an "autopilot" mode — like Nintendo's upcoming Demo Play feature.

[...] So we remove work from games, we remove "failure" from games. The hardcore will be disgusted at such wimpiness, but we've been working toward this in video games for decades, why not finish what we started? After all, they're games, not tests of manhood (or womanhood).
- Lewis Pulsipher

Weekend Reader is Kotaku's look at the critical thinking in, and of video games. It appears Saturdays at noon. Please take the time to read the full article cited before getting involved in the debate here.

Throughout the event, panelists Joel DeYoung of Hothead Games, Jennifer Mercurio of the Entertainment Consumers Association, James Portnow of Divide By Zero Games and moderator/journalist Aaron Ruby tried to define what "gamer" really means. There were some arguments made that we don't need that term anymore, or at least that it no longer means 1) fat, 2) unwashed or 3) male. But ultimately nobody could quite put their finger on what made every single person in that room different from every single person over at the Bumbershoot festival.

Then, a man who'd been waiting in line for nearly half an hour for a turn at the microphone put it something like this: "[I define] ‘Gamer' as someone dedicated to the perfection of fun. You can't do that in 10 [minute intervals]."

There was an audible hiss from the crowd and the panelists shifted uneasily. Was this guy saying casual gamers didn't count as gamers, or just classifying all short gaming experiences as casual games?

Either way, it pissed a few people off. My QA tester friend who'd been sitting next to me put down her DS and loudly said, "Have you ever heard of The Sims?"

I'm pretty sure most of the women in the crowd were annoyed, plus a few of the panelists. I imagine especially so DeYoung who'd made a point about the need for episodic gaming experiences that family-minded gamers could work into their busy everyday lives.

The statement was wrong-headed, though, not just because it alienated all of casual gamers, but because it implies that short games are somehow not really games.

Alright, fine, people who play Bejewled exclusively probably aren't "gamer" enough to comment intelligently on Mass Effect 2. However, it's not fair to say that Plants vs. Zombies doesn't contribute in some way to the perfection of the real time strategy genre, or that the storytelling in Portal didn't have an impact on the way longer games construct their narratives.

Come to think of it, lots of what we call "core" games (that is, the kind aimed specifically at "gamers" and not at anyone else) are short or episodic experiences. Games like Ico, Uncharted, Rez, Shadow Complex and even Batman: Arkham Asylum were all on the short-ish side at or around 10 hours each – and yet all contribute in some way to the "perfection of fun" somehow, don't they?

Ruby responded to the question right away with, "Those are fighting words." Sadly, though, there wasn't enough time left in the panel for a discussion to kick off.

So, Kotaku, I leave it to you to weigh in on the casual versus core debate with respect to the term gamer. Is one flavor of gamer somehow less gamer than the other? Does length have anything to do with it, or is that a penis joke waiting to happen?

Former MTV boss Peter Einstein is behind the show, and he thinks he knows why video game shows "have failed in the past."

From what we've seen in the past a lot of the focus has been more outside of the games, with presenter reviews, stats, interviews with creators and only a bit about the games themselves – as one assumed that you only ‘play' games you can't ‘watch' them.

So, wait a sec. This means we're going to be watching people play games? Casual games? Sounds like it.

By taking the rich production values of many games today, using the story line or game objective, [production company] Ginx creates a TV production from a TV viewers point of view. We feel this concept provides a fun, entertaining TV event which is appealing mostly to the casual gamer.

Has anyone gotten a look at this yet? Is this really what's going on? Like, a documentary of one man's struggle to master Boom Blox?

Update: UK reader The A Drain says he's seen the show and files this report:

I managed to catch the first episode of this entirely by accident while browsing channels having breakfast the other day.

It's the same old drivel other shows are, but without as much talking. A 20-something girl bounces around the screen making sexual allusions for 5 minutes, then you get a 5 minute clip of a game, no commentary, simply game footage that's all.

Then you get two 'reviews' if you can call them that, in which a random dude voices over uninterrupted game footage, they reviewed both Ghostbusters (failing to mention that it's PS3 only for now in Europe, and called it multiplatform) and Red Faction Guerrilla. Essentially, they took a typical casual standpoint while doing the review, they gave no review score, avoided any and all technical aspects, and spent roughly 10 minutes saying "It's great you can smash stuff wiv a hammer!/Trap ghosts!"

Same typical uninformed drivel as other shows, except with a different girl bouncing around.

Ex-MTV Boss Targets Games TV [MVC via Joystiq]

Alexey Pajitnov developed the puzzle game while working at the Soviet Academy of Sciences in 1985. In 1991, he and Henk Rogers founded the Tetris Company to prolong the life of the casual classic.

"I expected it to be a good game, not worse than anything else," Pajitnov told Kotaku recently. "I never expected this."

His hand in creating not just Tetris but the casual games market has earned him, of not money, than at least a sort of fame.

"People ask me, 'Are you still alive? I think you are a legend,'" Pajitnov said about his experience wandering the halls of E3 this year.

While Pajitnov remains a lifelong Tetris player, he did once try his hand at creating a game that wasn't a puzzler. Ice and Fire was a first-person shoot released in 1994. It was also, as Pajitnov says, a complete failure.

Pajitinov returned to puzzle creations with games like Pandora's Box and Hexic HD, but his greatest success still remains Tetris.

"We don't look at Tetris as being a retro game," said Rogers. "It did more last year than any year it its history. We don't have to market it. Tetris is ten percent of all games sold on mobile phones."

While the classic remains popular, Rogers and Pajitnov continue to iterate Tetris. Their latest version features six people gaming together online using the familiar pieces and also new attack and defense items. It is currently being tested in Korea.

"That's an interesting evolution of Tetris," Rogers said. "The future is a country that has 48 million people living in it and the biggest casual gaming site in the country has 24 million registered users. That country is Korea. That's what's going to happen in the rest of the world."

The next evolution for the game, Rogers hopes, will be turning it into a competitive sport.

"We are going to turn Tetris into the first real virtual sport," Rogers said. "Sports like baseball and football were created at a time when our future was a lifetime of physical activities and physical fitness. But now that's not as important, it's more about mental fitness today."

"Tetris is a virtual sport that exercises the mind. That is the definition of a virtual sport."

With Tetris available on so many things, from phones to consoles, t-shirts to jewelry, I asked Pajitnov what his favorite Tetris spotting was.

"On a sky scraper," he said. "I heard about it and saw the pictures and thought, 'Wow, that's great, that's something.' I would like to have a real competition on that."

Wait, casual games? Yes, casual games. Sit down, you're about to learn something. Seems the number of Americans playing games on casual online gaming portals is up from 67 million in 2007 to 86 million in 2008. Besides more people playing, those playing are playing longer, comScore's research also finding that the total time spent is up 42% from 2007.

As for the most popular game portals, I know I said Newgrounds to ground you on the subject at hand, but it didn't make the top 10. Instead, the most popular sites were:

Still awake? Great! Last bit of news from the data is that, as the number of players increased, so too did the advertising presence/spend, with ad views up 29% to 8.6 billion.

OK. You can go now.

Game On! Online Gaming Surges as Gamers Seek Out Free Alternatives in Tight Economy [comScore, via VentureBeat]]

The problem is in the 'Casual' bit. The scores of newly minted gamers attracted to shorter, shallower games are more likely to ditch them when the going gets expensive, says Piers Harding-Rolls of Screen Digest, "We are not sure how the recession will affect the buying habits of these new, more casual mainstream consumers. [They] are more likely to view gaming as a discretionary luxury."

Equally, though, once they are hooked on videogames might we expect the casual crowd to seek out games with a bit more depth and longevity, just in terms of bangs per buck? Maybe a shift from Solitaire to Final Fantasy will be the downturn's lasting legacy for gaming.

Analysts Fear For Nintendo [Escapist]

I love my little Eee - it is incredibly handy for a blogging from the sofa or carrying about to events - but a games machine it is definitely not. It does do Flash though, and I have certainly enjoyed a spot of Tower Defence on the little fella. Market pundit iStockAnalyst, however, reckons things could get even bigger for the small.

"They cannot store and run big and complex games internally. They make up for this by having brilliant connectivity. So they are the perfect tool for playing online games such as MMOs and the contents of all the casual gaming portals."

Netbook boom bodes well for casual gaming [CasualGaming.Biz]

According to Casualgaming.biz, Sega plans to add over 30 new games to the site, many of which dip into the company's classic IP for inspiration. Hit the link below to check out the site. Registration is completely free, but the naked boy in Swiss Chalet feature will set you back 2,000 rings.

PlaySega.com [Official Site via Casualgaming.biz]

I think the biggest proof point in the death of consoles in my thesis is the Wii. The most successful, most difficult to acquire console in this generation is at least a generation old in hardware. The advances are in software and peripherals. Why do you need a box for that? If the real expansion is occurring because of what Nintendo has done, why do we even need a console? The technology could be adapted to run on your average set top box, at least in the next generation of set top boxes.

Welch does concede that console are more streamlined and easier to use than, say, PCs. His crystal ball gazing is more along the lines of Google-type cloud that doesn't even use hardware at all. Agree? Disagree?

Q&A with PlayFirst’s John Welch [VentureBeat via EDGE] [Pic]

The purpose of this series of articles is to attempt to shed some light on emerging trends likely to influence game design philosophy, and therefore, our industry at large in the next few years.

Rather than an essay in futurology, which is by definition very hypothetical, the trends described in these articles are already in motion — so the question we should ask ourselves is not whether these trends will appear, but rather what their impact will be on video game design.

It's a quick read and worth checking out; I'm curious to see how Luben will tackle the 'megatrends' in his next article, as they don't necessarily have the immediate relevancy of the set in the first article.

The Megatrends of Game Design, Part 1 [Gamasutra]

Develop reports that Capps also expressed plans to utilize the recently purchased Chair Entertainment to increase its stable of intellectual property. “We want to learn from casual games," he's quoted as saying, telling casual game developers on hand "we’re really jealous of the things you do and we’re going to steal all your ideas.”

He then chainsawed them all in half and took their brains back to Epic Games science labs for further study.

Epic Games looks to comic books for building new IP [Develop]

Wii Fit has gotten a ton of attention recently; reviews, criticism, and complaints have all cropped up in the wake of its release. Over at Lost Garden, Wii Fit is a launching spot for a broader game design discussion: Wii Fit and its ilk aren't exception, they're "merely the tiny tip of an immense iceberg. Almost any human skill, be it physical, cultural, political or economic can be turned into a game that enlightens and enables." Assuming, of course, it can fit a couple of criteria:

It turns out that most learnable skills can be turned into a game. However, there are constraints. A skill must meet the following criteria before it can be turned into a game:

1. Decomposable into simpler skills
2. Skills can be nested
3. Skills can be arranged in a smooth learning curve
4. Skills are measurable
5. Performance can be rewarded
6. Skills are locally useful.

As with anything posted at Lost Garden, it's a thought provoking little essay; while this sort of stuff will have little impact on the hardcore among us, one wonders what designers will come up with next — and how.

What actitivies can be turned into games? [Lost Garden]

When you’re reaching out to somebody who plays one or two games a year, it’s very easy. You don’t need to follow the rules of previous markets. But as they play more and competitors emerge, you have to rethink the way you do the games. The casual audience is becoming more demanding, for sure, and we need to make sure we’re proving more than what they’re anticipating... Young girls, for instance, are now used to games that are made just for them – and have started thinking they want something better.

Imagine Babies, anyone? Anyone?

Casuals Demanding More [CasualGaming]

Yeah, fuck all this stuff about casual gaming. I think people still want games that are groundbreaking...We're hopefully going to prove that there's also a very big audience for people who want entertainment in another form, who think of games as being a narrative device that can challenge movies.

Rockstar Games' Dan Houser on Grand Theft Auto IV and Digitally Degentrifying New York [New York Magazine via Eurogamer]
<<a href="http://www.designmuseum.org/__entry/4399?style=design_image_popup">Image>

Another big challenge, from the development point of view, is that sometimes you think you've come up with a great idea. In my core gamer heart of hearts, I think I've created something amazing! But then we show it to focus groups and it's not as well received as I would've hoped.

Some employees complained that they should have the games, which were on their old computers, on the new PCs so the state installed them on all of the computers.

But after an anonymous tipster wrote to complain to the local newspaper that people really shouldn't be spending their time casual gaming, the state decided to remove games from all of it's more than 3,000 PCs.

Oh come on, why should the Child Support and Public Health folks have to work any harder than the DMV people? What they really should do is install World of Warcraft on all the PCs... and then load the computer's up with liquid cooling and neon tubing. I hear that's all the rage in Texas government.

Games on state computers stirs flap [Missoulian]

New Stats Show Casual Explosion [Next-Gen]

There will be more announcements that will be, if you will, licensed intellectual property that will be looking at the more casual consumer that we see as a bigger force in the business...we think there's a different type of consumer that...doesn't want the authentic simulation game that we currently offer.

Moore: We must do better on Wii and DS [MCV]