I’ll be honest – I don’t particularly like “social” or “casual” games. This fact may colour my opinion as expressed in this article, so consider yourselves forewarned. I fully understand that there are those who absolutely love the likes of FarmVille and Angry Birds, but to me, they represent a step backwards. “Core gamers” like myself might not like it, but an increasing number of people – some who would never dream of picking up a console controller – are turning to social networking and mobile devices to partake in “gaming”. But these aren’t the games that I know and love; they’re simplified, one-trick-pony affairs. Should the people who play these titles exclusively really be called “gamers”?

There are two parts to this question; one of self-identity and one of complexity. For the most part, people who play social or casual games probably wouldn’t identify themselves as a gamer. Chances are that games of any sort aren’t a very important aspect of their life. You wouldn’t call yourself a footballer if you didn’t dedicate a good portion of your life to the sport, so why should it be otherwise with games? For a lot of these people, games are ways of passing the time on the bus or the train, or a quirky way to interact with their myriad online “friends”, the majority of which they won’t even know in person.

The reason I identify myself as a gamer is because I love to play games and do so whenever I can. I enjoy a wide variety of different genres, over a plethora of different consoles and distribution media. There are those of us who go so far as to make a living from playing games, earning them the title of Professional Gamer; the roots of this dedication are passion, spread throughout the soil of one’s free time. To realistically be classified as a gamer, your attitude towards games needs must be anything but casual.

On the matter of complexity, I am often reminded of a certain Saturday morning television show I watched when I was much younger. It was called Live and Kicking, and among the various features it would include for its child / young teen audience was an interactive phone-in game. The object of the game was to guide a man called Hugo through various on-screen perils: the caller would press either 4, 5 or 6 on their telephone’s handset, with the tone being translated to move Hugo to the left, middle or right of the screen, respectively. One week, Hugo would be dodging boulders; the next, he might be darting between train tracks, but the basic premise was the same.

This is the level at which most casual games operate. Simple, repetitive actions, devoid of any real depth or intricacy. Some social games will add a layer or two on top of the mundanity, usually to monetise their creation, but the core mechanic will always be as basic to me as a 90’s kids’ television show segment. Compare and contrast this to fully-fledged video games, such as Dragon Age: Origins or L.A. Noire and the differences become more pronounced. For the most part, social and casual games bear as much resemblance to regular video games as table football does to the real thing.

Unfortunately, we don’t yet have a word for a game that isn’t really a game (App-Games?). For the time being, social and casual games are being thrown into the same vat as console and PC games, with the whole batch being viewed as a whole. Distressingly, the big money seems to be coming from the decidedly simpler end of the spectrum, which is bad news for us core gamers. With the amount of investment required to develop AAA titles ever-increasing, coupled with a trend towards mobile computing, one doesn’t need to stretch their imagination too far to come up with some pretty dire predictions.

We already live in a world where every console has to have some sort of movement tracking feature, which I personally believe to be no more than a gimmick in just about every case. Almost every game needs to have multiplayer tacked on to it, whether or not it makes any sense, and horde modes and zombies are pretty much guaranteed in any first person shooter. I used to joke about the FIFA Football games being the same every year, with EA only changing a number on the front, but then they basically went and did it. This complacency about what we will accept in our big-budget titles, combined with the rise of the App-Game, could herald some dark days for our beloved consoles and PCs.

This isn’t the first time that true gamers have had to defend themselves. It wasn’t so long ago that gaming was the preserve of geeks and shut-ins. Now that we have such widespread acceptance of our passion in the homes of so many, we need to stand firm against unacceptable watering-down of our beloved pastime. Don’t accept anything less than the best. Don’t be afraid to dislike a game just because it’s popular. Vote with your wallets and be proud to be a gamer.

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