Is this how we define casual gaming?
If you happened to listen to the latest EvilCast, or follow some of us on Twitter, you may have caught on that we are now giving Blake a ton of shit for becoming a casual gamer. Why does he deserve to be the brunt of our jokes? Easy, he continuously plays what many of the “hardcore” crowd have dubbed “casual games.” You know these as flash, iOS, Facebook, and other bite-sized morsels of gaming goodness.
However, after a few days of ragging on Blake, even going so far as to remove his PC Gamer and Hardcore Gamer cards, I began to wonder when so many of us started to rag on casual gamers. I mean just look at Internet forums, Twitter, or even jump online for a quick chat and it is not hard to notice the disdain for those people who enjoy their gaming sessions in a shorter, less intense form.
Casual games, for me, are nothing more than here today gone tomorrow shovelware. Titles like Tiny Tower or GameDevStory only kept my interest for a day or two before I quickly grew bored and stopped playing them. These just did not have enough bite to keep me going, but that is me, and I am not the crowd these games are being marketed to. I know this, and those people who berate the players who do enjoy these types of entertainment should also realize this, yet most of us don’t.
Regardless if you are the target audience for these time sinks, or you prefer something a bit more traditional, the fact is these are all games. That means we are all gamers of varying sorts, all looking for the next big thing, and we all support developers who provide us our form of digital drugs. Is this really such a terrible thing?
In the end, it should not matter how you rot your eyeballs out with colorful pixels, so long as you enjoy it. So, why is it then that casual gaming has such a negative connotation to it? What did the casual crowd ever do to the hardcore crowd to merit such ridicule?
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