Erik Aston said:
Can we stop all this nonsense about GTA being "one of the most casual games"? Just because the game is very popular does not mean it is casual. Just becaue the game is perceived to be played by people who may not play many other games does not mean it is casual. The most "hardcore" gamers probably actually play very few games since they may stick to a few genres and just the top few games in those genres. I don't give those arguments enough credit to discuss them at length, but worth discussing is the observation that players can play GTA in the same fashion as casual games; the numberless "I don't play the missions" players who just run around bringing mayhem to the city. While GTAIII (and the subsequent GTA games) appear to be played in a similar style to Brain Age or Wii Fit, with the length of the session varying and being unimportant for enjoyment, and with no "progress" being made, GTA actually follows in a long tradition of sandbox/adventure games dating back decades. Going all the way back to Adventure on the Atari 2600, there have been games based around exploration and player-driven storytelling. It isn't unlike children playing with dolls or action figures and making up their own storylines. Adventure obviously feels restrictive today, but at the time it was revolutionary for the way the player is dropped into a world which they are supposed to discover on their own terms. Metroid and Zelda are among the most important and well-known games to follow in this line. These games followed a set narrative, but the player got to control how it unfolded. The Zelda games are illustrative because there is a general disagreement over the importance of the storyline in them. On their own the storylines are pretty poor, yet they are cited as part of what makes Zelda so great. In fact, the story feels so amazing and epic because the player is put in charge of telling it. Even though the game must be played in a certain order, the openness of the world lets the player explore, and it starts to feel like everything they do is part of "the legend" whether a menial side task they creatively addressed on their own, or a cutscene to drive the little bits of actual plot. Eventually the player learns the rules of the game, and in turn sees the limits of what they can do, and they discover that they aren't actually telling the story, and the game is no longer fun. This is why older gamers are disappointed with newer Zelda games and say it feels like they are just completing a sequence of tasks, yet they still get big sales from people less familiar with the rules of Zelda (the items, puzzles, etc). GTAIII was so groundbreaking because it opened this world up even further, and made it so much bigger, and filled it with so many other living things. The multitude of people and cars moving around the giant city creates an extremely large and complex set of rules for the player to discover. Rockstar was able to make a world complex enough that the set narrative could be moved completely to the back burner. And because of this, you get the "I don't play the missions" folks. As I said, they may appear to be playing the same way as someone playing Brain Age. But actually, they are telling their own stories everytime they play, and learning a little bit about the rules of the game world. While the Brain Age folks are more motivated by "high scores." They learn the rules of the game right away, and then repeat the same tasks every day to improve at them. The game stops being fun when their rate of improval slows down. This type of game transfers well to social play, with games like Guitar Hero and the mini-games in Wii Fit. While people take turns theoretically to show off how high they can score, as long as each person feels like they are improving at a good rate, everyone has fun regardless of differences in skill. You're driven to buy the game after playing it for just a short while and seeing much of the content because of the addictiveness of getting better, just like old high score based arcade games drive you to keep putting quarters in. I'm not saying that this difference in playstyle is the difference between "casual" and "core." Not in the least. But all the other attributes of GTA--the content and context, the controls, the intended audience--are also very traditional and "core." The playstyle is the only thing which appears to be "casual," but it actually follows directly in the tradition of core games like Zelda. And in that light, I see no defense for the idea that GTA is "casual." And that's significant because there's been a longstanding argument that Wii is following in the footsteps of PS2 by getting the casual player, with GTA being example #1. Equating GTA and Wii Sports as both being "casual" is a quick way to explain Wii's success. But if you look deeper at the playstyles that Wii is appealing to versus PS2, PS2 was building on things that had been "core" since PS1 or before, while Wii is taking other playstyles which had previously been less popular but applying them to a context that appeals to different audiences. Well. I hope someone actually reads that. | 
