The one opinion I still firmly hold from my Gamergate phase is that we really need to come up with a term to seperate casual gaming on a cellphone and gaming on damned near everything else. Mostly because it feels like data manipulation to lump mobile gaming with everything else since the overlap between someone who builds a PC and plays say Stellaris, Tyranny, and Ready or not is entirely different from my grandmother playing solitaire on her phone.
That kind of categorization just seems to lead to a kind of elitism. (Victoria 2 players are of course the most elite gamers)
I think it’s time to recognize that “video game” is a medium. Being a “gamer” is the same as being a “reader” or “someone who likes watching movies.” Specifying genre is what might make things more clear.
Like I’m a “gamer” that plays mostly obscure indie art games, isometric CRPGs, Bethesda RPGs, and will try an FPS/adventure game if the story looks compelling enough. I’m not the same kind of “gamer” as someone who plays the Ubisoft releases, or sports games, or hero shooters.
Like ultimately all of this is shit we do for fun - why do we need to categorize and judge people?
As someone who loves Victoria 2 I hope you have a very 5th German-French war over Alase-lorane. But joking aside my point is about culture and markets.
Anyways my point is that data around gaming and more specifically the use of data towards social causes can be problematic. Lots if not most folks within the gaming cultural sphere generally consider phone gaming to be lesser, now if thats true or not can and will be debated. What does matter is applying that data to the broader gaming cultyre and community, like I said in a different commment some 55 year old woman who only plays bejeweled on her phone isnt much of a factor and should be excluded to the best ability when it comes to say talking about harrassment of women in online games or communities.
Like I said I was well within the Gamergate bullshit, I watch sargon of akkad damned near everyday. I know how these chuds think and one of the things they like to do is nitpick data rather than address the point. So id rather break the data down to a fine enough point so we can better reflect the reality that the average person within a sphere may accept.
Also I would love to break it down by genre even, but like I said this is very specific to better control certain variables. Id actually would prefer to break it down to genre but I suspect that is borderline untenable, and its not like we can use an example game since then ya get games like New Vegas where im convinced half the community is either Trans, Autistic, or Trans and Autistic which would muddy the waters for RPGs as a whole.
As a trans and possibly autistic New Vegas fan, I resemble that remark.
I think trying to police strict categories though is a problem - reality doesn’t fit genre. People don’t fit genre. My Bejeweled loving grandmother got hella into the newer Civilization games, my FIFA addicted ex would dabble into furry romance games.
Even within the same game, there’s vast differences in how people can approach gameplay - I play the Sims for fucked up historical roleplay. Other people use it as a wish fulfillment vehicle where their self insert characters live their dream lives - others cheat to give themselves lots of money and just build gorgeous houses.
Video games are a combination of art and toys. There’s no “right way” to appreciate art, and no one likes when someone else tells you how to play with your toys. Thomas Kinkade paintings makes me want to vomit, while Cy Twombly paintings intoxicate me - others will not have the same reaction, and that’s part of the beauty that makes us human.
(How on earth can human beings listen to Sargon for more than 15 minutes? Even the clips I’ve heard excerpted in Hbomberguy etc make me want to claw my ears out lol)
Dont worry im a Autist who is quite into Fallout (Just look at my name) not trans though.
Anyways my lamentations that I cant sub catalog every speck of reality must be suppressed, which is why ill settle for breaking things down by system, gender, and age groups. Bout as granular of data as I can get for seeing trends, which is more than enough to beat chuds with.
Also im aware of how different folks interact with and view art. I dont really have an appreciation for traditional art outside of respect for its craftsmanship, but I adore Neolithic-Bronze age art, architecture, weapons, and armor. Plenty of folks look at it as if it was simply old stones and metal.
I have no clue how I listened to sargon, I blame middleschool and highschool sleep deprivation. Dude makes me want to commit a hate crime against the Saxons starting with him.
I agree there’s a big difference between casual games and… “advanced” games.
But splitting by platform is a bad way to do that.
Xcom2, Rome total war, alien isolation.
The full version of all those games is on mobile, none of them are even remotely “casual”.
Touch input can limit the kinds of games that play well, twitch shooters will probably never be great on mobile, but advanced strategy games are perfectly suited for mobile.
My point isnt that you cant have those games. My point is that Phone gaming is largely disconnected both in market and culture. Just because you get the occasional game that started on more traditional systems doesnt mean the two markets are interacting on any meaningful level let alone cultural.
These games are novelties more than anything else and are not reflective of the wider phone gaming market. Just like how idle games are largely novelties on the PC market. Like I said splitting them by system is the only practical way of filtering out and refining the data. Because even with your examples those games particularly reflect the communities around them.
My point is around culture and market, not playability.
I agree there’s a distinction between the 2 markets. I’d place it more on the style of monetisation than anything else, but I’ll admit there’s a difference.
But I still think using the platform to distinguish them is unhelpful, phones aren’t going anywhere, they’ll grow as a market and slowly absorb parts of the console and pc markets, so either the non-casual phone games industry needs to grow, or casual games will be the only games left.
I think it’s fair to say that phones are currently infested with low effort casual games with awful monetisation strategies, but they don’t have to be, and quality games do exist on the platform and do have a following, my hope is that continues to grow and finds a niche on the platform, so hopefully you see why I dislike defining the platform as casual with “novelties”
I get why ya want phone gaming to get better, but I am describing what im seeing and what I am seeing is a market thats absolutely seperate from the core gaming market.
Also I severely doubt casual console or PC gaming will be absorbed by phone, unless some phone companies accept the existence of active cooling at minimum. But there also the fact that handhelds in general are a good bit behind even consoles which tend to be behind PCs. The ultra casual gaming market that allowed the Wii to be the best selling console is the same group now largely on phones. Theres a reason Xbox and Playstation stopped factoring in Nintendo as competition. Phones need to aim towards games thatd fit into the same niche as the gameboy or DS.
Anyways I tire of this conversation have a good day dude.
If we can get people to agree on what “casual” gaming means. I’ve run into people that thought the Civ games were casual, and I don’t think of them as casual, for example.
Kinda, Balatro is still largely a more traditional card game which couldve come out just as easily 30 years ago at least from a mechanical perspective. I feel like the easiest way is just to cut out a seperate area for phone games since theres minimal market overlap with consoles and PCs. Like ive only met one dude who seriously gamed on a “phone” and a PC, the phone was a Frankenstein monster that shared more DNA with a Steam deck but ill count it. Also most good phone games are either ports from more traditional formats or puzzle games of some type, I cant think of many phone games that jumped over to PC and console.
My point is that its not necessarily a difference in mechanics or even complexity but moreso one of market and culture.
Kinda, Balatro is still largely a more traditional card game which couldve come out just as easily 30 years ago at least from a mechanical perspective
Yeah, that part feels irrelevant to me. Sid Meier’s Civilization VII just launched.
And really, Balatro has as much to do with Slay the Spire and other deckbuilders as traditional card games.
I don’t understand separating puzzle games from gaming, either. Tetris was a huge part of why the Gameboy became a thing, and it keeps being more or less reinvented today. Back then, someone playing Tetris or even just chess on a computer was playing video games, period. And that was almost enough to call them nerds. That was “only” 40 years ago, compare that with any other medium.
What I am saying, is that this separation is blurry. Also look at the vast majority of games on any current platform, including Steam, and tell me it’s not full of poorly made barely interactive piece of shit on the level of the worst phone “games”.
The problem is that phone games seem either unwilling or incapable of evolving past puzzle games. Within 10 years of the gameboys release ya had simple rpgs like pokemon let alone platformers and other genre. Combine that with the minimal overlap in games between phones and consoles/PC and ya get two notably different groupings.
Like I said this is an issue of culture and markets, slop will always exist in the entertainment industy just look at books. No the problem is how folks are interacting with them and how the market changes and grows. Note in 1998 id have seperated out different consoles from eachother let alone PC from console, but the market overlap is practically a circle now. Both because they had different markets and the fact that the types of games reflected how folks were interacting with the medium MGS, Super Mario 64, and Daggerfall probably had minimal overlap for example.
Plus I aint denying that phone games are games, my point is that grouping them up with more traditional game mediums can be misleading. If we’re talking about women in gaming culture and their prevalence as a whole for example I dont really think Sharon the 55 year old nurse in Loma Linda California really factors in just because she plays bejeweled on her phone. Alice from Ipswich England who is actively doing an inbreeding contest in CK3 with her friends may actually be a factor.
My point is for data and how to best interpret it, not what counts as a whole. Seperating things out by market interconnection is probably the cleanest way of doing things. And Phone gaming is practically an independent market.
The one opinion I still firmly hold from my Gamergate phase is that we really need to come up with a term to seperate casual gaming on a cellphone and gaming on damned near everything else. Mostly because it feels like data manipulation to lump mobile gaming with everything else since the overlap between someone who builds a PC and plays say Stellaris, Tyranny, and Ready or not is entirely different from my grandmother playing solitaire on her phone.
That kind of categorization just seems to lead to a kind of elitism. (Victoria 2 players are of course the most elite gamers)
I think it’s time to recognize that “video game” is a medium. Being a “gamer” is the same as being a “reader” or “someone who likes watching movies.” Specifying genre is what might make things more clear.
Like I’m a “gamer” that plays mostly obscure indie art games, isometric CRPGs, Bethesda RPGs, and will try an FPS/adventure game if the story looks compelling enough. I’m not the same kind of “gamer” as someone who plays the Ubisoft releases, or sports games, or hero shooters.
Like ultimately all of this is shit we do for fun - why do we need to categorize and judge people?
As someone who loves Victoria 2 I hope you have a very 5th German-French war over Alase-lorane. But joking aside my point is about culture and markets.
Anyways my point is that data around gaming and more specifically the use of data towards social causes can be problematic. Lots if not most folks within the gaming cultural sphere generally consider phone gaming to be lesser, now if thats true or not can and will be debated. What does matter is applying that data to the broader gaming cultyre and community, like I said in a different commment some 55 year old woman who only plays bejeweled on her phone isnt much of a factor and should be excluded to the best ability when it comes to say talking about harrassment of women in online games or communities.
Like I said I was well within the Gamergate bullshit, I watch sargon of akkad damned near everyday. I know how these chuds think and one of the things they like to do is nitpick data rather than address the point. So id rather break the data down to a fine enough point so we can better reflect the reality that the average person within a sphere may accept.
Also I would love to break it down by genre even, but like I said this is very specific to better control certain variables. Id actually would prefer to break it down to genre but I suspect that is borderline untenable, and its not like we can use an example game since then ya get games like New Vegas where im convinced half the community is either Trans, Autistic, or Trans and Autistic which would muddy the waters for RPGs as a whole.
As a trans and possibly autistic New Vegas fan, I resemble that remark.
I think trying to police strict categories though is a problem - reality doesn’t fit genre. People don’t fit genre. My Bejeweled loving grandmother got hella into the newer Civilization games, my FIFA addicted ex would dabble into furry romance games.
Even within the same game, there’s vast differences in how people can approach gameplay - I play the Sims for fucked up historical roleplay. Other people use it as a wish fulfillment vehicle where their self insert characters live their dream lives - others cheat to give themselves lots of money and just build gorgeous houses.
Video games are a combination of art and toys. There’s no “right way” to appreciate art, and no one likes when someone else tells you how to play with your toys. Thomas Kinkade paintings makes me want to vomit, while Cy Twombly paintings intoxicate me - others will not have the same reaction, and that’s part of the beauty that makes us human.
(How on earth can human beings listen to Sargon for more than 15 minutes? Even the clips I’ve heard excerpted in Hbomberguy etc make me want to claw my ears out lol)
Dont worry im a Autist who is quite into Fallout (Just look at my name) not trans though.
Anyways my lamentations that I cant sub catalog every speck of reality must be suppressed, which is why ill settle for breaking things down by system, gender, and age groups. Bout as granular of data as I can get for seeing trends, which is more than enough to beat chuds with.
Also im aware of how different folks interact with and view art. I dont really have an appreciation for traditional art outside of respect for its craftsmanship, but I adore Neolithic-Bronze age art, architecture, weapons, and armor. Plenty of folks look at it as if it was simply old stones and metal.
I have no clue how I listened to sargon, I blame middleschool and highschool sleep deprivation. Dude makes me want to commit a hate crime against the Saxons starting with him.
I agree there’s a big difference between casual games and… “advanced” games.
But splitting by platform is a bad way to do that. Xcom2, Rome total war, alien isolation. The full version of all those games is on mobile, none of them are even remotely “casual”.
Touch input can limit the kinds of games that play well, twitch shooters will probably never be great on mobile, but advanced strategy games are perfectly suited for mobile.
My point isnt that you cant have those games. My point is that Phone gaming is largely disconnected both in market and culture. Just because you get the occasional game that started on more traditional systems doesnt mean the two markets are interacting on any meaningful level let alone cultural.
These games are novelties more than anything else and are not reflective of the wider phone gaming market. Just like how idle games are largely novelties on the PC market. Like I said splitting them by system is the only practical way of filtering out and refining the data. Because even with your examples those games particularly reflect the communities around them.
My point is around culture and market, not playability.
I agree there’s a distinction between the 2 markets. I’d place it more on the style of monetisation than anything else, but I’ll admit there’s a difference.
But I still think using the platform to distinguish them is unhelpful, phones aren’t going anywhere, they’ll grow as a market and slowly absorb parts of the console and pc markets, so either the non-casual phone games industry needs to grow, or casual games will be the only games left. I think it’s fair to say that phones are currently infested with low effort casual games with awful monetisation strategies, but they don’t have to be, and quality games do exist on the platform and do have a following, my hope is that continues to grow and finds a niche on the platform, so hopefully you see why I dislike defining the platform as casual with “novelties”
I get why ya want phone gaming to get better, but I am describing what im seeing and what I am seeing is a market thats absolutely seperate from the core gaming market.
Also I severely doubt casual console or PC gaming will be absorbed by phone, unless some phone companies accept the existence of active cooling at minimum. But there also the fact that handhelds in general are a good bit behind even consoles which tend to be behind PCs. The ultra casual gaming market that allowed the Wii to be the best selling console is the same group now largely on phones. Theres a reason Xbox and Playstation stopped factoring in Nintendo as competition. Phones need to aim towards games thatd fit into the same niche as the gameboy or DS.
Anyways I tire of this conversation have a good day dude.
If we can get people to agree on what “casual” gaming means. I’ve run into people that thought the Civ games were casual, and I don’t think of them as casual, for example.
Yeah, it’s not a matter of being elitists, it’s just a different thing altogether
Where do you draw the line?
I passed the Balatro virus to my mother, she plays on a tablet. Is Balatro casual?
Kinda, Balatro is still largely a more traditional card game which couldve come out just as easily 30 years ago at least from a mechanical perspective. I feel like the easiest way is just to cut out a seperate area for phone games since theres minimal market overlap with consoles and PCs. Like ive only met one dude who seriously gamed on a “phone” and a PC, the phone was a Frankenstein monster that shared more DNA with a Steam deck but ill count it. Also most good phone games are either ports from more traditional formats or puzzle games of some type, I cant think of many phone games that jumped over to PC and console.
My point is that its not necessarily a difference in mechanics or even complexity but moreso one of market and culture.
Yeah, that part feels irrelevant to me. Sid Meier’s Civilization VII just launched.
And really, Balatro has as much to do with Slay the Spire and other deckbuilders as traditional card games.
I don’t understand separating puzzle games from gaming, either. Tetris was a huge part of why the Gameboy became a thing, and it keeps being more or less reinvented today. Back then, someone playing Tetris or even just chess on a computer was playing video games, period. And that was almost enough to call them nerds. That was “only” 40 years ago, compare that with any other medium.
What I am saying, is that this separation is blurry. Also look at the vast majority of games on any current platform, including Steam, and tell me it’s not full of poorly made barely interactive piece of shit on the level of the worst phone “games”.
The problem is that phone games seem either unwilling or incapable of evolving past puzzle games. Within 10 years of the gameboys release ya had simple rpgs like pokemon let alone platformers and other genre. Combine that with the minimal overlap in games between phones and consoles/PC and ya get two notably different groupings.
Like I said this is an issue of culture and markets, slop will always exist in the entertainment industy just look at books. No the problem is how folks are interacting with them and how the market changes and grows. Note in 1998 id have seperated out different consoles from eachother let alone PC from console, but the market overlap is practically a circle now. Both because they had different markets and the fact that the types of games reflected how folks were interacting with the medium MGS, Super Mario 64, and Daggerfall probably had minimal overlap for example.
Plus I aint denying that phone games are games, my point is that grouping them up with more traditional game mediums can be misleading. If we’re talking about women in gaming culture and their prevalence as a whole for example I dont really think Sharon the 55 year old nurse in Loma Linda California really factors in just because she plays bejeweled on her phone. Alice from Ipswich England who is actively doing an inbreeding contest in CK3 with her friends may actually be a factor.
My point is for data and how to best interpret it, not what counts as a whole. Seperating things out by market interconnection is probably the cleanest way of doing things. And Phone gaming is practically an independent market.