Email: There is a book on ‘casual gaming’ now

See for yourself:

http://kotaku.com/5427813/interviews-with-ex+hardcore-gamers–and-new-casual-ones

More people will view this website than will buy that book.

One thing I have been surprised at in my studies on gaming is just how much idiocy-on-stilts there is.

Everyone relies on conjecture and correlation to explain things that occur in the market. Go to your average message forum, even when they talk about sales, and you will find nothing more than conjecture. I suppose people would rather feel smart than actually become smart.

There are six generations of console gaming in the past. How often is the history of these generations cited aside from the last generation? Rarely if ever. There is a large correlation between what is going on with the Wii and what is going on with the NES. However, since no one ever looks at the previous generations in any analytical eye, we get all this garbage about ‘casual gamers’ and ‘non-gamers’ only because it is different from the norm of last generation.

When was the last time you heard any analyst cite something in a generation prior to the PlayStation? You never do. I don’t think they’ve even bothered doing any research into the past (if they did, they wouldn’t be so surprised about the future). For example, look at Divinch’s “reasoning” on why Mario 5 will outsell Modern Warfare 2. He says it is because Call of Duty gets yearly installments and platform Mario games do not. While Nintendo will not put out yearly installments of games like Mario 5, one can easily point to Mario 1, 2, 3, and 4 being closely yearly installments and look at the massive sales on those games. There was no intelligence or reasoning at all in that analysis. Just conjecture.

There does exist business books and business strategies that are independent of the video game market. These strategies are often used and deployed in the gaming market. Instead of, sensibly, looking them up and citing them, they are just ignored. When gamers began doing it, angry moderators fumed “we should talk about games, not business strategies”. Fine, then stop talking about sales and ‘industry chatter’. How can you possibly talk about sales and ‘industry chatter’ without talking about the business strategies? It is like talking about science but not using the scientific method. But I’ve noticed that people wish to vomit their ‘conjecture’ and ‘correlations’ regardless. “Wii games sell because they have a hardware attachment with them.” This is their grand intelligence on display. OK, Sherlock, why is Mario 5 selling then? “It is because it has a red box.” Seriously, these folks are dumber than rocks.

If you look at the quotes they have excerpted, you will find that most of them, including the females, were once-time gamers back in the 80s. In other words, the Expanded Audience are the Old School gamers. Every Expanded Audience game has its roots in old school gaming. Mario 5 is an obvious example of this but games like Wii Sports to Wii Play are very similar to games that came out in the mid to early 80s. Wii Sports Golf even has the golf courses from the NES game.

“But what about the people who had never played games before, Malstrom? Huh? HUH!?” Well, they would be playing games if they lived during the gaming boom of the mid-80s. The gaming revolution got short circuited in two ways. The first was with the 1983 crash. The second was Nintendo abandoning the (what we would call today) Expanded Audience from the NES to go jump into the Red Ocean with Sega and the Genesis. The tougher Nintendo competed, the more focused they were to win over the ‘devoted gamers’, the more their sales shrank.

Iwata gave a fitting analogy in the GDC 2006 speech called “Disrupting Development”. He said that Tetris was a game that could not be made today. If Tetris was made, someone would be putting in cutscenes, a story, and all the other trappings that modern games have. I believe this analogy sums up why gaming has declined so much. And I believe this analogy sums up why the Expanded Audience is truly the Exiled Gamers.

I told you that when I bought Mario 5 when it came out, I asked questions to the people who were lining up prior to it being released. These were people who bought Wii Fit and Wii Sports on day one. There were females there. And they told me that they like the games on the Wii because there is less “Bullshit” about them as opposed to games on the PS3. I couldn’t agree more. What did they mean by “bullshit”? They meant things like bombarding the player with cutscenes, with narratives, with character growth, and with wasting the player’s time in bloated stages. These people soundly rejected the idea of games becoming like a movie. And it does feel as if the developers are “trying to show off their genius” which is nauseating. The only genius the customers are concerned about is their own.

Despite journalists and the “Game Industry” raining their bullshit terms like “hardcore gamer” and “casual gamer” on us night and day, I don’t see anyone accepting those terms on the forums or in real life. Let’s just call everyone gamers and leave it at that.