New Homer in Silicon is now up. (Yeah, it’s soon after my previous column, but that one was a bit late coming out, I think to avoid overlap with the GDC coverage.)
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Emily Short's Interactive Storytelling 
Thanks for this; it nails a great deal of what unnerves me about casual games, and does so a lot more clearly than my own attempts. The following is particularly useful:
Part of the implicit contract of casual games is that they will not explore anything that will cause the player emotional or moral discomfort.
Yeah, which is I think the reason why casual games are often very conservative or even borderline reactionary if you pick apart the underlying implications of their worldview.
To be fair, PlayFirst has been doing some interesting experiments introducing more substantive content for an audience willing to be challenged — Emerald City Confidential is not a mindless feel-good piece, for instance. (This is part of the reason I prefer PlayFirst to any other casual portal I know of, though the JayIsGames-affiliated Casual Games site also carries some unusual stuff.)
This was what bothered me particularly about Chocolatier – it’s a game in which race and international economics are highly conspicuous yet comfortably meaningless.
Chocolatier didn’t bug me the same way, possibly because it felt like such a fantasy in every respect — it was floating high off in some other realm of being such that I didn’t feel compelled to believe anything it told me about international economics. I mean, for instance, there are no tariffs, no wage discrepancies, no taxes, no cost for moving ingredients or finished products from one place to another… procedurally it was a million miles away from any realistic economic simulation. Whereas the house building games do try a little bit harder to be about neighborhood development and zoning considerations, in that the game goals touch on those things.
I suppose… what did it for me is that in most Taipan-type games you’re purely a small-time merchant; you buy stuff, you go to another place, you sell the stuff, production and consumption are totally out of your control. Chocolatier makes you an industrialist – and an industrialist in the colonial era, and with commodities – coffee, sugar – with a hefty colonial legacy.
And yeah, it’s a sugar-coated steampunk-lite Victorian with intercontinental airships, but – mrf. I would have given it a pass, probably, if not for the conspicuous colourblindness combined with Everywhere Is First World.
I see what you’re getting at, of course — and of course the game neatly avoids ever taking a look at the actual plantations and farms producing the ingredients you use. For me it was still Just Cartoony Enough that this didn’t bother me much.
I wonder whether there’s some possible middle territory between Chocolatier and The McDonalds Game.
Part of the implicit contract of casual games is that they will not explore anything that will cause the player emotional or moral discomfort.
I’m not so sure this is true, unless we define casual games to be games that don’t do this. Is Gravitation a casual game? Maybe not… but Don’t Look Back does inspire questioning of the “go through every level and achieve your goal” platform game, and Trapped Part 2: The Dark has some discomfort-causing moments, especially the end. And they’re browser games I found through JiG.
I hear what you’re saying about the freshmen, though. And it seems like the purpose of most casual games is indeed to be escapist in one way or another.
[Unless you’re a lot better at platform games than I am, you’ll have to watch a walkthrough to find out the ending of Don’t Look Back.]
I’d consider Don’t Look Back indie, rather than casual in the typical sense.
One of the reasons I like JayIsGames is that it covers both — I’d like to think that Floatpoint addresses some less-comfortable issues, too, and it was covered by JiG a few years ago. So was Oiligarchy, and… well, a host of other indie/serious/persuasive games that don’t fit into the casual market segment as it would be defined by, say, Big Fish Games.
But can we find many things on Big Fish, other than maybe a few items in the “Large File Adventure” segment, that you’d consider challenging in any sense? It’s overwhelmingly divided among lightweight puzzle and word games, hidden object, match-3, time management, and marble poppers. Big Fish Games also dropped Dangerous High School Girls in Trouble for daring to raise the topic (in a fairly un-explicit way) of sexual exploitation of young women. To me that sends a pretty strong signal about what they think their role is — and it involves the distribution of games as a commodity, not as an art form.
Anyway, I tried a couple of times to get through Don’t Look Back, but failed. Cerberus is too hard for me.
That’s pretty persuasive — if we distinguish indie and casual, the games I mentioned may all be indie rather than casual. I don’t use Big Fish Games (partly because the genres you talk about don’t even sound like much fun to me) but it sounds like they hold to the contract. Part of it may be the idea of games as diversions rather than art; if I’m playing say Nethack to while away some time, I’d be brought up short if the end made me feel guilty about all those poor dwarves I killed. –and maybe it should, but then I’d probably look for something else when I wanted to while away some time.
Trapped might be an interesting case here — most point and click/escape the room games are pretty casual, and often (in escape the room games) there’s no plot at all, just a locked room with lots of puzzles. Trapped is bigger than these games but I don’t think that’s what makes it less casual, though the moments I’m thinking of probably wouldn’t work as well if there hadn’t been as much buildup. This kind of game can be like text IF in a lot of ways, so maybe it’s unwise to lump them all together.
I do recommend watching the walkthrough of Don’t Look Back to see the ending, though I was always fond of looking over people’s shoulders as they played videogames. (I got past Cerberus but hit a wall a few screens later. It seemed like the game was supposed to be difficult for people who are really good at platformers, which may be a reasonable aesthetic choice but shuts out you and me.)
“That’s pretty persuasive — if we distinguish indie and casual, the games I mentioned may all be indie rather than casual.”
I think so. I admit I’m not totally consistent in the way I use those terms myself, and a lot of other people aren’t either — and of course there are indie games that *don’t* get covered at JayIsGames.
Possibly another way to look at it is that Big Fish Games sells casual games as defined from the marketer’s perspective: games targeted primarily to women, primarily downloadable, relatively inexpensive to turn out and usually similar in form to previous casual games. JiG reviews casual games as defined from the player’s perspective: games that are easy to get, often browser-based, and require little commitment of time or money to try out and enjoy. Many of the latter happen to be independently produced, and some of them are very quirky indeed.
Anyway! Thanks for the link to the Don’t Look Back walkthrough; it was nice to get a chance to see all of it.
“I should give [college freshmen] precise instructions about what to do, they should be able to follow these instructions without intellectual effort, and the result should be an A”
It’s funny, I read the same thing recently, only in reference to college graduates entering the world of work for the first time (replace the ‘A’ with an immediate raise or promotion).