Why thinking of games as "casual" is a mistake

[cAPSLOCK]

Or "why Nintendo is curb stomping the competition"

I found a really fascinating article buy a guy named Sean Malstom, please read it and give your thoughts.

"Birdmen and the Casual Fallacy" http://malstrom.50webs.com/birdman.html

"The real reason why so many in the Industry have rallied about casual gaming since the domination of the Wii is to escape blame for piss poor decision making. They talk of casual gaming like it was a ‘new trend’ despite it always existing and its increase on PCs were generating newspaper articles half a decade ago. By describing ‘casual gaming’ as an unforeseen explosion, they save their necks from investors who would have rightly penalized them for making bad business decisions. Pre-Wii, Nintendo talked about appealing to non-gamers and former gamers. Casual gamers are neither of those two."

If you can't be bothered to read for 30 minutes, do this thread a favor and don't post. Chances are if you come in talking about "hardcore" and "casual" arguments you'll just be exposed for exactly the kind of thinking the article is talking about rather than convince anyone of anything other than your ignorance.

 

Anyway, my personal thoughts:

I found this article really eye-opening. It's changed my perception of how I personally approach thinking about games. Truth be told I never touched Wii Sports for more than 30 minutes at a time (I R LEET HEER ME CALL U A FAGORT) once a month or so until I really started digging into the game with the medals and what not.

All in all a lot of this stuff has bubbled around in my head, like when I got REALLY into Wii Sports or listened to Nintendo quotes talking about non-gamers and lapsed gamers, but this article does a brilliant job of connecting all these things and explaining the larger implications.

The whole "casual" gaming thing never really stuck with me anyway, as my wife and some family members would do Wii Sports for hours and hours, or Mario Party 8 for hours and hours and hours and hours.  Sure they didn't want to load up Armed Assault for some hardcore military sim action, but they sure as hell put in the hours when the right conditions came along--not casual gaming in the least.

Anyway, I'm not afraid to admit my perception was off in a lot of respects prior to reading this article. Like many Nintendo surprised me, but it's because their thinking was 100 steps ahead of us, including the higher ups in the industry. Perhaps all of us here, as more serious gamers, can learn something by looking downstream instead of concentrating on the upstream.

I'd love to read your thoughts, enjoy the article.