Casual games are not fun, they make you suffer with minimal challenges for symbolic rewards, they are not real games and that is not the problem. Every now and then I stumble upon "casual vs hardcore games" discussion. And it's usually one sided discussion where casual games are either a plague of modern world or something positive like an stepping stone toward "real" games for people who are not "hardcore".
Both sides are right in some way but they don't put enough weight on the core issue. Some discussions scratch it by mentioning a service problem in application stores: app stores on all platforms are not doing good enough job of making good apps visible. But the problem is more fundamental. If I search for note taking app with word "note", I'd probably find some decent note taking application. If I search for a strategy game, no matter how I search I'd find all sorts of games with elements of strategy but very few are that are mainly strategies and even fewer that are decent games.
The problem is in the language, in the meaning of the words. Words don't have absolute meaning, instead their meaning is relative to subjective experience. Or in simple English, two people who speak the same language and use the same words are not speaking about 100% the same thing. Many Croatian examples come to mind like "luk" which in literary language means onion but in certain region of Croatia it means garlic. English example would be a different interpretation of word "chips" between American English and British English. When it comes to "[video] game", differences between parties like age, culture and past experiences make equally big if not bigger discrepancy in understanding the term. And that's how we got a situation where '90 PC gamers refuse to call mobile and certain browser based entertainment software a "game". In fact the term "game" is stretched so thin that anything can be called and sold as a "game" and there is scarcely any way too tell what is what kind of the game.
Once upon the time genre labels were useful but over the time some games started to combine multiple genres others took only some aspects of a certain genre and we ended up with so many hybrids and games unclassifiable by any commonly recognized genre. Perhaps the best we could in this era of perpetual change is to call one game a lookalike of another. I hate phrase "Doom clone" but it conveys more informative then "first person shooter". Downside is assumption that other party knows the basis of comparison. How many people remember Doom, C&C or Mortal Kombat? Today, enough but in a few years they may become irrelevant.
I don't really know what is the best solution, game developers are taking every shortcut toward money, publishing platforms don't feel obliged to police what they serve and tried methods reliant on crowdsourcing (like letting people assign tags/lables) have not proven themselves with quality. But I'm convinced the problem is as described above. Hope this helps someone to find the solution!
Thank you for reading the post to the end, the title was a bait.
