One of our First Readers this week tacked on a sixth characteristic to Jesper Juul’s five characteristics of a video game that determines its audience: motivation. The motivation, this First Reader claims, is to escape reality, and that can be applied to both casual and more hard core games. It’s the level, or, rather, entirety to which one wishes to escape the everyday that makes the difference between a casual gamer and a gamer. Someone looking for a quick distraction from the mundane might turn to a 5 minute game on his or her iPhone, whereas someone looking to escape into another reality altogether might turn to a more serious and time consuming game. Isn’t this escape from reality essentially the “Zone” we talked about later in class? Classmates talked a lot about getting “in the Zone” while playing a more serious game, one person expressing the feeling as being reached when you just become the controller, so to speak. I noticed that no one really spoke the same way about casual games where the flow can be broken and reassumed at will, because it is a distraction from reality. The level of immersion in the virtual reality of more serious games that classmates claimed to achieve while in the “Zone” definitely coincides with a fuller escape from reality that this First Reader connected, correctly, I think, with more serious games. We might be onto something there.
One other post by a First Reader that was brought up in class but not really discussed was the similarity in prices for casual and serious games for consoles. The point made was that casual games tend to have less appealing graphics and simpler mechanics when compared to more serious games, so why should they be priced the same? One thing I guess we haven’t discussed much (I’ll go off on a tangent here) is the replay value of a game. Take any of the more recent Final Fantasies, for example. You can log over a hundred hours on one game before you finish it, but once you’ve finished it, that’s it for most people. Making it to that hundred hours can be a challenge, too, especially if you take long breaks in between gameplay. Forgetting where you’re at and what you’re supposed to be doing when you finally return to it might lessen your motivation to continue the game. A casual console game, however, even though it may be played in short sessions, can rack up even more hours than that because it’s easy to pick up, easy to replay, and the gameplay is simple and relatively mindless. The hours my family has collectively gotten out of Wii Sports trumps those spent on my most favorite RPGs. Conclusively, in terms of how much entertainment you will get out of a game, casual and serious games are pretty competitive, so I think it’s reasonable that these games can be similarly priced.