Yesterday, I lamented on the death of hardcore gaming and the rise of the casual gaming. Coincidentially, another evil has been spawned from this series of events: the "Nongame" game, which either is a collection of minigames, or a nongame outright. In short, companies are releasing in increasing frequency collections of minigames or nongames rather than focusing on gameplay-intensive.

Nintendo started this some time ago with Mario Paint and other groups soon followed. Think of the many Mario Parties (you KNOW they're going to do Mario Party 8, whether we like it or not), Monkey Ball, WarioWare, Bishi Bashi Special, Feel the Magic, Osu! Tatakae! Ouedan!, etc. Nintendogs is inexplicably popular (my sister was like "They're cute," to which I reply "It's the fucking Dogz craze again; you got bored before and you will again.") and I've noticed Wiitards (thanks Zig) out defending Bob Ross Painting in full force, citing Family Guy as the reason this painter is awesome even if the actual software will most likely suck.

In the end, this rise of nongames is brainwashing people; I've checked the Gamefaqs and Nsider forums for the Wii and see people talking about the possibilities of cooking or carpentry-themed minigames (even if these aren't really fantasies as one can do these as real-life hobbies) being turned into games of their own right (though I admit I suggested rather than doing carpentry as a game in it's own right, give players the ability to board up a house in a Night of the Living Dead type scenario). Nevermind that the controller is basically a 3d analog stick that has the potential to improve REAL games (e.g. notice how when dual-wielding in FPS games, your guns share the same crosshair; imagine if you could aim at seperate targets); wiimps seem to want non-games at the moment even if a few weeks ago they were spouting gameplay>graphics in perfect unison. Unless I'm floored at E3, I'm very skeptical as to their new console which is a crying shame as I liked the controller and would've liked to develop games for it.

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	gladiator_x - May 04, 2006 (08:54 PM) You know, maybe theres not all bad to the casual gamer. To be honest, I'm ecstatic the hardcore gamer is dying out. The games of the casual don't appeal to the hardcore, but they are wildly different, opening new lanes of creation. The differences between splinter cell and doom are minimal if you compare it to the difference between the entire hardcore canon of games versus the developing casual canon. And criticizing the minigame genre is unfair. You can say you don't like it, like I don't like sports games but it is a viable genre. Its a return the the roots of gaming, where games were pure fun, like pong or some of those ancient atari games. So they are easy and simple, they're very fun to play. For a neophyte, pong is going to be alot more fun than Halo, or something else suitably difficult. There are plenty of reasons to say goodbye to hardcore.
	magicjuggler - May 05, 2006 (04:26 AM) This isn't to criticize casual gamers; there are plenty of games that can appeal to all crowds, like Splinter Cell (which popularized REAL stealh-based gaming, something previously limited to the Thief series) and GTA III (as the previous 2 GTA games had a relatively small fanbase). The ultimate problem we're talkimg about is the rise of non-game games. Some party games are enjoyable: DDR for instance. However, we don't need a new Mario Party every year (I remember being able to associae Mario w/ Mario 64) or entire single-player minigame collections (e.g. where's the replay value in Feel the Magic once you beat it. I'm baffled by the sports genre but even I can see why some people would buy those games (e.g. they didn't make the cut).
	zigfried - May 05, 2006 (01:58 PM) 1) Pong really wasn't very good. Simplicity does attract people, but I call it the Sno-globe effect: they look, they shake, they move on. There needs to be at least some amount of depth. However, I do agree that too much depth will turn absolute neophytes away. Consider Pac-Man. Pac-Man was a lot deeper than Pong, but it was still fairly simple. It appealed to people with its simplicity, but it held peoples' interest longer than Pong (because of its depth). Ultimately, Pac-Man had a very positive effect on the public perception of gaming. Like Magicjuggler said, there shouldn't be a new Mario Party every year. When a new one is released each year, that implies that Nintendo/Hudson *expects* the game to get stale quickly. That's not the ambitious attitude that drove the Asteroids or Tempest development team. 2) With its high quality and somewhat forgiving difficulty, Halo introduced (and re-introduced) a lot of people to the FPS genre. It also convinced a lot of PC gamers that console games can be good. As far as hit modern games go, I think it's one of the more accessible games that both casual and hardcore gamers can enjoy. I agree with the point that for a very first video game, someone would probably be more suited to Tetris than Halo. I just don't like to see Halo used as an example of an "inaccessible" game, because it's anything but. //Zig
	magicjuggler - May 05, 2006 (06:08 PM) It's a weird line one has to walk when designing a game. You have to make the game have little to no learning curve yet make it so in-depth that the more one plays, the more they come to appreciate the tiny mechanics that define the game. With Halo, casuals could pick up the game and fight stuff, yet the more advanced people would learn these little tricks like grenade-bouncing or weapon-comboing to make life easier. As it stands, I like Nintendo's controller, if only because motion-sensing if done right could seriously challenge analog sticks for developers now have an extra axis of movement to play around with (e.g imagine a flight game where you move your controller foward to accelerate your craft, etc), thus reducing the needed number of buttons. Sometimes, too many buttons are a bad thing; if you've played "Die by The Sword" or "Trespasser," you'll know what I mean. The thing I don't like is how people are talking about cooking, carpentry, etc. as viable concepts for games when one could do cooler things (e.g. a spell-based game that generates spells based on your movements of the Revmote; reprogramming clunky PC games to use this system, etc.). In the end, it's not the idea of cooking games or old games that appeals to me. It's the fact some Linux enthusiasts will eventually port the OS and the OpenGL library over to the system, meaning random guys like me can make amateur titles for it.
	gladiator_x - May 06, 2006 (10:39 AM) Zigfried Halo is not an accessible game to a non-gamer. It is easy to imagine Halo as accessible when you have been gaming for a long time, but as a total newb, Halo is not the place you want to start. how many buttons are on the Xbox controller. 14ish? Moreish? When I have tried to play a game like Halo or a similar one, this is the first surprising stumbling block. You can tell them that this fucking button fires and this fucking button reloads a thousand times, but there are just too many variables and buttons to hold in mind with at once. From my experience, the ability to sort through 10 buttons at the same time, using the right one when you want to is not a skill that is picked up in the tutorial, but something that gamers develop after playing many video games. Which is why these people I play with prefer playing Timesplitters 2 on my Gamecube, which probably scores higher than Halo only in its ability to take itself less seriously. When you're just trying to interact in the game, it makes everything more frustrating. The fun of playing the game doesn't even exist until you can work the fucking buttons. So what keeps the non-gamer playing? Surely not the plot, which is just another iteration of only you can save the world which alreadly fills 95% of games out there, though it is well-executed. Going online isn't a good alternative either. You will just get your ass kicked by really good, offensive, racist 16 yr olds as you are mocked for losing or camping or being gay or whatever. Microsoft has a really cool idea for dealing with that with the new Xbox live structure with the four zones, though but current gen gamers are SOL. The problem of making a game for newbies, total neophytes, is much bigger than most people think. It is not a goal to be accomplished by incorporating it into a larger scheme or throwing a good tutorial at it. Nintendo has made accessibiliy a major goal and maybe a few other smaller game companies that I haven't heard about. When my non-gaming friends come over, there are only a few games they are willing to play: Super Smash Bros Melee, Timesplitters 2, DDR (some people), Donkey Konga, and Katamari Damacy.
	magicjuggler - May 06, 2006 (01:38 PM) I've tried it before, and depending on the game (I'm excellent at Counter Strike, yet tend to do horribly in Starcraft) I can only play so long before the chain of "SampFAGs, Pwn t3h n00bl3ts, 1 m t3h haxxz0r" (or something else like that) gets infuriating. I spoke with another gamer in person and his response to a person who kept harrassing him to duel in WOW was "You want a real duel. Here's my address (address). Man to man combat, me and my Colt .45" before signing off. That said, it's weird because the moment Nintendo comes and LIMITS that which can be done online (Friend Codes, inability to chat except in lobbies, etc), higher percentages of DS users go online than Xbox users. I'm afraid I am digressing from the original topic. Simple games can be good if done right: Monkey Ball and Katamari Damacy are prime examples of this. What I am worried about is the proliferation of non-games like Mario Party, Cooking Mama, Electroplankton, Bob Ross Painting, etc.
	gladiator_x - May 07, 2006 (11:10 AM) I've not heard much about electoplankton, but I can agree that Mario Party is awful. Its basically an electronic boardgame whose best feature is that 8 discs of mario party take less space than 8 boxes and sets of dice. But I think we should be open-minded about Wiigames that are about using the stick. Being that its a new element, the first games are bound to be a little crude, simple and experimental. Going controller to controller in the past has been easy because they are evolutions of one another with few gentle changes. The Wii is a step sideways and back.
	zigfried - May 07, 2006 (12:00 PM) I was trying to say that Halo is accessible to both hardcore and casual, but not to first-time gamers. I wasn't suggesting that someone use Halo as an example to absolute non-gamers. That would be silly! My point was that Halo is very accessible to anyone who already games, whether they're labeled as "casual" or "hardcore". Generation of Chaos, on the other hand... now there's a game that's accessible to only the most hard-core players. I'd also say that the plot actually is part of Halo's appeal. I'm curious to see how Nintendo honestly ends up marketing the Wii. From what they've said, it sounds like they're trying to attract non-gamers (the kinds of people who you mention only playing Katamari, Timesplitters, etc). However, I can't see non-gamers buying lots of games. If you didn't happen to already own Katamari/etc, would your non-gaming friends buy them? And since you do own them, have your friends felt the need to buy them, too? On the other hand, the whole "downloadable games" aspect is aimed at an entirely different audience -- people who have already been gaming for a while. And, even though Nintendo is advertising its non-gamer appeal, the Wii's actual press is being disseminated through gamer publications. I guess the trick will be to see if Nintendo can appeal to one audience without boring the other. Like with any system, it'll take a mix of game types to achieve that. And not just in terms of simple/complex... some games will have to intentionally not use the crazier aspects of the new controller. Then again, maybe Nintendo's real strategy is to only produce a few games, but to have 90% sell-through on each one. Perhaps the Wii is intended less as a dedicated console, and more as a living-room party toy... but right now, Nintendo is still handling their press through the usual methods, so I find that possibility unlikely. I agree that, since it's so different, we should probably be open-minded with the new controller. Of course, there is a limit to patience, and Nintendo needs to be careful. They shouldn't want their system to be branded in the minds of consumers as inane and over-simplistic. They should want it to be branded as innovative and fun. //Zig