N'Gai Croal
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Nov 5, 2007 12:03 AM
Since we added our email address to
the blog, we've been getting a small but steady stream of emails from
readers of our humble scribblings. A few weeks ago, we received a note
from Darren Pai, a 37 year-old communications consultant from Honolulu,
Hawaii (favorite games of all time: Resident Evil 4, Final Fantasy X,
Powerball on the Sega Genesis) with an interesting complaint. (No, not
about the Level Up staff and its unimpeachable work.) It seems a father
with a two year-old daughter and another child on the way, he's finding
that many modern hardcore games are designed in ways that are
incompatible with the life of a family man. Is there hope for this emerging "hardcasual" demographic? For Pai's full
critique--and his suggestions as to how developers can make his life
better--see his email which we've reprinted below with his permission.
May I please suggest a topic for a
future story? In my opinion game developers are neglecting the audience
upon which this industry was built. Gamers like myself, who are now
grown up with careers, families and other responsibilities simply no
longer have the time to battle their way through 40 hours of game play
to save the world. Even finding blocks of time to get through the next
level of a game are hard to come by when your toddler is running around
and you've had to bring work home to prepare a draft for your boss to
review.
It seems that games for "hardcore"
gamers make the assumption that you have large blocks of time to sit in
front of a console. So-called "casual" games can be entertaining for
short periods of time, but that's not why I play video games. I want
the presentation, the action, the experience of a "big" game. Gamers
like myself don't want casual games, we want that hardcore gaming
experience redesigned to reflect the way we live.
For this reason, I've developed a new set of criteria for selecting games.
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