Just arrived at the Casual Games keynote, The Changing Face of Casual Games, which will be given by Chris Early, the studio manager for Microsoft Casual games. It should be interesting. I've increasingly felt that Microsoft has dropped the ball with their Xbox Live Marketplace. The game selection, to me, seems far too derivative and not nearly as innovative as I expected it would become when they first announced it.

The talk should be starting in just a tick. Hopefully Early will have something interesting to say. Hit the jump to follow along.

Early: As we heard yesterday, players are changing. The casual gamer... that's different now. Everyone's playing casual games now and they're playing games in places where we never expected to play games before.

Early is taking a quick look at games over history. The consistent factor, he points out, are that they involve people and fun. People and fun were the innovators in ancient games.

Early: What kind of a platform are you going to design for, because it has an effect on the game you make.

When Microsoft introduced a graphic operating system and included games, it wasn't about fun, he says, it was about training. Solitaire was all about drag and drop and Minesweeper was all about point and click.

This was a change in games spurred by education.

Now he's talking about Facebook games, which are essentially just text. Many of the games are asynchronous, you can play with friends and there are leaderboards.

He's moving on to PuzzleQuest, one of the great casual games of 2007.

In this case they've taken the fun of matching three in a row and put it in a meta game. The game also has persistence of data, leaderboards and the mini-games means that you have a lot of chances to win.

Car Racing, is a free game in Korea. You can buy add-ons for your car from better motors to oil slicks. The game again is really just about playing with your friends and includes leaderboards and persistent data. It also adds the ability to pay cash for items.

Bioshock, not a casual game, but built into it is a casual game. If you're successful with this casual game you can unlock things that help you out. This is an example of how casual play can improve the core game.

Rock Band, Wii, Guitar Hero, what did we learn from them. They all include an aspect of physical play, they let you collaborate with your friends.

You need to think about where you are, who you are designing for, which innovative concept are you going to build in your game better than the last thing you saw. What you can't forget is the fun, the rest of it you can even call artifice.

Donkey Kong who was the hero? Jump Man, they called it Jump Man because they spent so much time perfecting that one element. After they made that fun, they made a whole series around that concept.

What are my favorite innovative concepts:

Asynchronous Play
Persistence of Data/Character
Meta Game/Value System
Casual Play Benefits Core Game (I'd love to stand at the bank and do my Bioshock Flow game and have it matter)

If you think that's interesting I think you should go see our keynote tomorrow morning where you will see a little of this announced for the first time. That's all I'm saying it's vague enough that I won't get in trouble.

Ohh, that's a juicy tip. Annnnd it's over.

Spong reports that MAME might be coming to the Xbox Live. The gossip comes from an inside source at Microsoft, according to the site.

"You've heard of MAME right? Right. We're just doing a legal version of MAME, meaning that all the game owners get paid and the users get quality product based around a community. Imagine the biggest arcade in the world, just 1,000 times bigger. It'll have as many machines as we can possibly get, all with score-rankings and other community stuff. It's not a secret that MAME was massive for hackers of the original Xbox and the pull and sales of retro game packs on current machines is still really high. If this is taken and put under the right noses, it should become the biggest thing in mainstream/hardcore gamer crossover in the industry."

Having recently chatted with Chris Early, studio manager for Microsoft Casual Games (he's also in charge of Live Arcade), I have a feeling this has been misconstrued. If there was one thing I took away from my meeting with Early was that they didn't want Arcade to become bloated, like the cell phone game biz has become. One of the keys to Arcade's success, Early said, is to ensure the quality of the titles and to make sure gamers don't get bogged down in the possible selections.

The last thing I can see happening is Microsoft opening the floodgates to thousands of titles. And we all know Msoft is not the biggest fan of hacking.

Xbox Live to Balloon in Coming Months [Spong]

Just finished a huge breakfast with Chris Early, studio manager for Microsoft Casual Games. Heck of a nice guy. He oversees the Xbox 360 s Live Arcade, MSN Games (formerly known as The Zone) and MSN Messenger games.

The breakfast was almost two hours long, mostly because I was hyped up on tea and the half a cow that was stuffed into my omelet in the form of bacon. I also had plenty of time to kill because the Game Developers Conference is just getting underway for us non-developer types.

I taped the conversation we had, meaning I m going to half to transcribe it before I can pull out specific quotes.

But in general we talked about the importance of casual gaming for Microsoft and gaming in general.

Early sees casual games as sort of a petrie dish for game development. Because of the low cost and quick turn around developers can take greater chances.

I m a huge fan of the whole Arcade Live idea. I think it, and systems like it, could help reinvigorate creativity in the industry.

One thing that worries me is that perhaps Arcade has been too success for its own good.

I asked Early if that was a concern. Is it possible that Arcade s initial and tremendous success could cause Microsoft to focus on only the titles they think will work in this particular environment and once more lock out unique and original games?

Early agreed that it was a concern, but said Microsoft s internal goal for Arcade remains unchanged.

He added that while the initial focus for Arcade has been on games that would appeal to hardcore gamers, Microsoft hopes to broaden that focus to include educational titles and games for children.

Early also mentioned that Microsoft Points weren t developed just for the Xbox 360. Apparently, this was already announced long ago, but I somehow missed it.

What that means is that down the line you might be using Mpoints to buy stuff online for your PC. Can you say Steam?

Actually, Early sort of avoided talking about the possibility of Microsoft getting whole hog into the digital distribution business. But I can t imagine they wouldn t.

I wonder if they could get something up and running in time for Vista?