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.
I have long lost faith in crowdsourcing.
ReplyDeleteInstead, the real problem is, how would you selfdeclare the game as "casual" (or "lightweight")? Or how would you declare it as " core" (or "hardcore")?
Last time I was writing games for phones, there was NO CLEAR WAY to categorize your game as such on iOS, and there was NO ENFORCEMENT during review getting you to pick the correct two of the offered game categories.
Worse, it feels like iOS app store evolved to have different meanings for categories. They don't match traditional genres. Have some strategic thinking in your puzzle game? Well, declare it as strategy. You also have to do it fast? Pick from arcade and action. The fact it's a puzzle game does not mean you'll choose Puzzle as a category, nor that you'll be encouraged to by the store or the customers.
Solution would be enforcement, the way Apple enforced "no duplication of OS functionality" in 2008/2009, or the way they still enforce "no third-party browser engines". Or perhaps developers should suggest a category, but have it applied by the store itself.
I don't see that happening, though, especially in those stores where editorializing is traditionally very weak.
Yeah but as you said publishing platforms don't feel the need to enforce categorization beyond checking the stuff that would endanger them. To categorize an app they'd have to review each one, at least take a quick look at them and given the sheer number of apps that would cost them serious manpower.
ReplyDeleteKongregate and Steam have tried crowd-sourcing the job but I personally don't find those labels useful. At least on Kongregate, I haven't used Steam for a long time. There are genre labels that are as vague or misleading like in your puzzle game example and there are technical and aestetic labels like "mouse only" or "good music" which in the end doesn't tell anything about how the game plays. Maybe if there was something like StackOverflow for making up software categories and labeling particular pieces of software.