Rockin' Legends or The Other Type of Game.

So, last Wednesday I finally got off my butt and got myself Guitar Hero 3. So far it's great, completed it on Medium and then went up to Hard, but I'm still unused to using the fifth fret, but it shouldn't be too long before I get the hang of it. I hope. There really is something special about standing in the middle of your livingroom, holding an undersized plastic guitar while singing along to old classics. Apart from doing that I'm finally having a midterm break. A whole week away from the pains and horrors that is school. I'll probably sit around doing practically nothing to recharge my batteries, which I'm really going to need, since as soon as this week is over I'm faced with two tests (again), this time in physics and Spanish. El Blergh.

Rightio, like the title so cleverly implies I'll be talking (or writing) about the other type of games today. There's a lot of people out there who think that videogames = violence, and while that is true in several ways the largest part of the videogame industry lies elsewhere, namely in casual games. For those with no idea of what it is, a casual game is a very simple game usually consisting of some form of puzzle solving. It's really odd how something as simple as Bejeweled can be so hopelessly addicting, and it makes me pose myself the question, how? Most gamers loves it when a game has a great storyline and interesting characters with some kind of depth combined with some kind of action. Casual games has none of that, unless with action you also count three diamonds of the same colour being combined and then dissapearing. The reason why they still love these, in comparison, boring games might be in the fact that they're used more as a form of recreation. Take a game as Guitar Hero for example (oh, do you see how cleverly I connect my two topics?). Essentially, it's a very simple game. There's the five frets and the pick thingy, that's six buttons total needed to play the game. Pretty much anyone can handle that, from the ultimate hardcore player to the retired grandfather. There's several difficulties ranging from easy to next to impossible, yet they all give you the illusion that you are, in fact, Keith Richards.
Though perhaps the most important point with casual games is that the time investment needed is very low. There's a lot of people who say that they don't play games because they don't have the time for it with jobs, families, and such getting in the way. But with casual games they can simply play a song or two on Guitar Hero before having to return to the horrible reality consisting of duties.

In conclusion then. The popularity of casual games comes from their simplicity, a nice break from the stressful reality or the more challenging shooter games, that you can play for just as long as you have time for.
Thus you have the shooter games and you have the puzzle games, perhaps the future holds a combination of the two (something we've already had a taste of in Valve's Portal).