Thursday, 11 Aug 2005
This article from Gamasutra.com was posted on the company forum today: Difficulty and the Interstitial Gamer
According to the article, an interstitial gamer is an individual who enjoys playing computer and console games, but needs to balance that interest with a job, family, household maintenance, and well, real life. They are the people who grew up playing games, but suddenly found themselves with other responsibilities as they approached or blew past the 30 year mark, forcing them to give up their old student days of hardcore gaming for hours on end. They are too advanced to be dubbed “casual gamers,” but too busy with other aspects of life to devote their entire weekend plus every evening to epic 60+ hour games.
They are, in essence, people just like me.
The article criticizes the game industry for focusing only on churning out beautiful, maddeningly difficult games that only appeal to the hardcore gaming set (aka students under the age of 22 who don’t have jobs, kids, or rent to pay) instead of targeting the folks who actually have the discretionary income available for $50 games, $300 next-gen consoles, and $500 video cards. Hardcore gamers have the free time to spend on difficult levels that require the player to repeat the same level over and over in order to reach the next save checkpoint, but what about those of us who have finances to manage, meals to cook, laundry to wash, and workouts to perform?
When I run into a game that is an absolute pain in the ass like this within the first 30 minutes of game play, I have a 90% chance of quitting right there and popping in something that I can enjoy without any ramp up time at all like, oh, Monkey Ball, Dead or Alive 3, or (hehe) Animal Crossing. When you have only 45-60 minutes available every other night for gaming, you want to play something that actually allows you to get somewhere in that amount of time. Many games nowadays have control schemes that are so complex and intros that are so long and tedious that they lose my interest within 10 minutes.
Don’t get me wrong–I don’t want to play nothing but Popcap-style web games for the rest of my life, but there has to be a balance between the steep learning curve and time commitment required of Battlefield 2 and the point-and-click mindlessness of Bejeweled.
My sister is a casual gamer who could easily shift over to interstitial if there were more game options out there for her. She got into puzzle games via Snood for her Mac in college, and now owns a lime green GBA SP with half a dozen games. She plays Bejeweled on her PDA, and enjoys cute Nintendo racing, pinball, and mini-golf games on her SP. I’ve tried to get her interested in some of the more grown up offerings I have for the Xbox or Game Cube, but let’s face it–why would a busy young professional want to slog through an hour of tutorials and manual reading just to START a game like Knights of the Old Republic when she can just turn on the GBA and play through four or five levels of Yoshi’s Island?
If the average gamer is indeed 29 years old with men making up only 59% of the gaming population, developers really need to take a long, hard look at what is considered a “good” game if they want to expand their appeal to the growing number of gamers who no longer fit the stereotype of the pimply, 15 year old male with nothing better to do than grind away at a game for 60+ hours a week.