Causality of Casualty

‘Petz’, ‘Horsez’, ‘Catz’, ‘Petz 2: Go 2 The Zoo.’ The undeniable truth is the casual gamer is taking over the market. But is this a bad thing? Or is it a blessing in disguise. This editorial provides an in-depth look at both sides, as well as the repercussions of re-vamping a creative market. The market is expanding. More people are playing games, more money goes to developers; the game industry is growing. Right?

Many insiders in the entertainment industry are aware of the potential harm an overabundance of poorly developed games being sold to an immature market can cause. The shelves for Nintendo’s popular Wii console are already being filled with no frills iterations and cheap imitations of what few would call “good” games.
The labour, effort and creativity that goes into developing simple titles, or rehashes with differently mapped controls, is not only damaging in its obvious dwarfing of games as a form of “digital art” but also isolating to an audience who is being marginalised due to their commitment and investment.
A Debasement of quality, met with the appraisal of a wider audience, only influences more developers to tack controls onto already licensed games or carefully place a ‘z’ at the end of a 60 minute power point presentation, saved to a DS cartridge. So the “plague” spreads, the shelves fill up with copies of copies, and lazy developers are rewarded with mountains of easily earned dollars.

Indeed blaming developers is a simple way to summarize the problem, but to understand a product, the process itself must be queried. Obvious inspirations such as money, is surely one of the foremost concepts considered by budding businesses. A fair incentive.
“Why drink from a withering well, when a seemingly endless, spring of water has just sprouted from the ground!”
Basically, consumers are supplying developers with a larger profit margin with considerably less expenditure and risk. And so rich is this spring that the directive of a decade spanning progress through quality in gaming, can be ignored for the easily satisfied hunger of a new market.
So with all signs pointing to a revamp of quality under the guise of the new sub genre of ‘casual’ gaming, where do other more committed video game players stand to uphold the tradition they grew up with? What will happen when each and every developer get coerced into creating sub-par games to stay competitive in a market that is at the same time being absorbed by corporate hounds; eager to eliminate competition and dominate the industry as easily as possible; and with as much revenue as well.
In this incredibly pessimistic case the positives of a possible change of production must be considered, if only to stay sane.
With the Nintendo Wii, we are seeing not necessarily a revamp of quality but a reconstruction of priority. With graphical saturation imminent, they have elected to begin a new design model, with a specific accentuation on unique game play. So it is the growing market in this case that is broadening the range of developers and lengthening the longevity of video games as an enjoyable form of entertainment. By broadening the way the race can be run, instead of just running as fast as possible in a singular direction.
Also many fantastic titles have been created since the conception of this new sub-genre, such as new Music simulators, revolutionary sport games, specific XBLA original titles and more.
What will become of the current issue, depends heavily on the movements of the big players in this specific industry, namely the developers and publishers. But this should not de-power you, the consumer. You still have a voice, you keep it in your wallets, you are each an entire economy and a force to be reckoned with, do not let wither what you can help fix. Support the developers who support you, rid yourself of terms like ‘hardcore’ and ‘casual’ instead support the medium as a whole, refuse anything below the already established.
This will indeed help gaming grow.

~ Michele
(complaining)