07/22/2010

Subject: Gaming
Title: Demon's Souls and Casual Gaming

Yes, yes. It's another blogpost! Before you explode violently and your particles recondense into a mathematically dimensionless point, I am still making progress on the R/IN. It's going pretty much the same how the authorship process went with RoSD and RCB. Write a bunch, hit a stumbling block, leave the writing for a while to think, come up with a brilliant solution, return, ect. The important thing is, I'm actually thinking through those problems even as I do other things. So it will get done! It's shaping up to be Duke UD Forever at this point, but it's not officially in vaporware status until it goes for at least a decade without release.

But for now! I would like to share something amazing and wonderful that happened to me. Last night, I was playing that video game which is the bane of my recreational existence, Demon's Souls. I have ragequit this game more times than I can count, but the allure of intense hack-n-slash action on my PS3 keeps bringing me back. Even when I had gotten up to the end boss, who proved to be such a pain in the ass that I kept dying dying dying dying dying dying dying every time I met him.

However, last night, after grinding up my weapons and buffing up my stats, I actually killed the bastard. It took a while for this to sink in, but this means something astounding! Ready for it? HUGE FONT, GO!

I had to use every exploit, every cheap trick, every underhanded tactic, and even then the game was harder than adamantium testicles! BUT I DID IT ANYWAY! I WON THE GAME!

This deserves a line of cheerleaders:

\o/ .o. \o/ .o. \o/ \o\ /o/ \o\ /o/ \o/ \o/ .o/ \o. .o/ \o. \o/ \o/

Now, in light of this monumental accomplishment, I want to discuss something that's been on my mind for a while now. As you can tell by the title of this blogpost, it has to do with casual gaming.

In the modern days of gaming, we have a very wide selection of software and hardware to meet the needs of pretty much every flavor and shade of gamer. We've got games that are tough-as-nails to satisfy the masochist. We've got long, grindy RPGs and MMOs. We've got handheld games and systems for the gamer-on-the-go. We've got hardcore FPSes, both single-player and online. We've got puzzle games, adventure games, story games, action games, music games, ect ect ect.

Because of this, the term "gamer" has become generic to the point of near-uselessness. If you pick up any kind of electronic interactive recreation, you are technically a gamer, in the same sense that anyone who's picked up a book at any time is technically a reader. But there's readers and there's readers. There's the person who read a book once in gradeschool only because he was forced to, but never really touches books in his adult life. There's also the person who read that same book in gradeschool, found himself hooked and has become an utter bibliophile since then.

The same is true of gamers, which makes the term "gamer" not entirely useful when attempting to describe different experiences and subject matters of gaming. Like any type of media, it then becomes handy to break gaming into genres. Some of these I mentioned above, with FPSes and RPGs and the like. There is one breed of gamer that has earned bad attention over the last couple of years, the "casual" gamer.

Now too many people who see that term (especially how I put it in quotes) will feel a negative reaction at the mere concept of casual gamers. This negative reaction is the issue I want to address today.

In a demographic sense, the term "casual" gaming usually refers to lightweight, simple, easy-to-learn-and-play games. We've seen an influx of this kind of gaming in about the last six years, perhaps most exemplified in the software and hardware from Nintendo, Popcap and other companies with similar products. Their business strategy is to make games which are friendly and accessible to the large masses which, traditionally, did not frequently play video games.

Now, while this business has been hugely successful and thus will continue in future years, it's also caused some discontent among the veteran gamers. The people who do traditionally play video games, and have been playing them for decades, are upset with the money and design talent being dumped into a genre of gaming too shallow and easy for them to enjoy. This leads to an attitude of "GRRR those fuckin' casuals are ruining my game market!"

For the record, I want to state that I sternly disagree with that view. It's rather like the debate on homosexual marraige. If two guys want to get married, it's none of my business, and it certainly doesn't stop me from marrying a woman if I want to. If some 30-year-old housemom wants to take a break from kids and dishes by playing Peggle for an hour, it doesn't stop me from playing Demon's Souls. The world's game development industry is big and varied enough that there's room for all types of gamers, from the hardcore "I WANT MY GAMES TO HURT ME" crowd to the people who actually enjoy Wii Motion Controls: The Game! The world is plenty big enough for all types.

The problem comes in when we take the term "casual gamers" and make it into an insult. This has happened so many times in the history of the English language, and it needs not to happen here. There're so many words which started off with an actual, technical, non-preferential meaning, but linguistically degraded into compliments or insults due to the human mind's tendency to make everything into "what I like" and "what I don't like."

Centuries ago, the term "gentleman" refered to a person that belonged to a family of nobility or governmental importance. It wasn't an insult or a compliment. Today, we use the word to describe someone who impresses us with simple professionalism or courtesy. The term "bastard" simply used to be a person who was born of unmarried parents, and the word itself wasn't a bad thing, even if it was frowned upon to have children out of wedlock. These days, "bastard" is Generic English-Language Insult #224.7a

This same linguistic softening is happening with the term "casual gamer", and I want to dig my heels in against it right now. Allow me to put forth my own definition of the term, not as a demographic or a genre, but as a qualification of the gaming experience described.

Here's the definition: "A casual gamer is one who plays games with no intention or effort given to self-improvement in playing the game."

A "casual game" and/or "casual gamer" have nothing to do with the difficulty of a game. It's not about how hard or easy the game is. Rather, it's about working to make yourself better at the game. Using myself with Demon's Souls as an example, I fall sternly outside of the "casual" category because I worked very hard to become good at the game. No casual gamer would do this because, by definition, a "casual" gamer isn't one that works to self-improve. If the 30-year-old housemom started playing Peggle, and found herself interested enough to overcome the challenge mode and beat her own high-scores, she then ceases to be a casual gamer.

Now, even the casual gamers who make no effort at self-improvement in gaming do not deserve our resentment. Again, this industry is plenty big enough to accommodate all kinds of gamers. Surely the existence of Demon's Souls is proof enough that the existence of Wii Sports Resort isn't the loss of great some great idealogical battle. Gaming isn't ideology. It's just entertainment. While we can have heated discussions about the right and wrong ways to entertain, remember that other's enjoyment is every bit as valid and important as yours.