The idea behind “casual” is that you don’t have to be an expert to play. Requiring the hours of practice to become an expert in order to have fun would probably be the very opposite of casual. Yes, hardcore, dedicated gamers will always be experts compared to casual players; however, a casual game shouldn’t make a gamer feel like he/she needs to put in the time to deserve to have fun.

Besides, there are obviously some game design elements that reduce the advantage experts would have on newbies. If a game’s design doesn’t give advantages to those things that an experienced player would know or do, then the casual player won’t feel like he/she is missing much.

Finster: While it may be that some players will always game the system, there should be ways to give casual players a way to have an unbalanced experience. Josh’s idea of making expert players worth more is a good example. Newbie players and casual players can get a big jump by going after the experts. Experts won’t want to waste time going after newbies except as griefers. Maybe penalizing such kills would make it less appealing?

A more concrete example can be seen with Counter-Strike. I think it was around the time of Beta 5 (before 5.2) when Half-Life 1.1 was released and really made “bunny-hopping” an important tactic. Basically, you could move faster simply by repeatedly crouch-jumping as you move. This also made you harder to hit, while affecting your own firing accuracy very little. Naturally, the game was patched so that jumping slowed you down, somewhat, and drastically reduced the accuracy of firing while jumping.

But this is an example of how no FPS engine will be perfect, and there will always be people willing and able to explore and find the limits of the FPS, which will inevitably give them greater advantage over the casual player.

I wrote a mod for UT called Bounty War that later became part of my Freehold mod. The idea was that getting frags increased your worth to other players. This served to keep vets on their toes against newbies, because a newbie could make up a lot of score by fragging a vet.

Other aspects, like removing weapon pickups and powerups, should focus on not making map memory a key aspect of winning the match. It’s a large factor that lends a large advantage to people well versed in the game.

Part of the reason the idea interests me is because first person shooters are seen as the most hardcore of the hardcore genres, and to most people trying to make an FPS that appeals to the casual audience is an oxymoron. Depending on your personality you either think the idea is stupid or an interesting design challenge.

Speaking of first person Mario-like games, there is a PS1 game called Jumping Flash that is one of the few (the only?) first person platformers. Something like that might work as a casual first person game.

I don’t believe casual necessarily means that you can play it for five minutes, although it would be nice if a game could load that quickly. B-)

That said, I think casual simply means that you don’t need to learn how to play by attrition. That is, you aren’t expected to fail over and over until you “get it”. Many mainstream (and indie) game titles make use of mechanics and controls that everyone knows…that is, everyone who has been playing games for the past couple of decades. It leaves everyone else out, so when you start shooting barrels and crates to get health or ammo, new players will say, “Well, how the heck was I supposed to know that health was in a crate?! What would lead me to even think to look in a barrel for tank shells?!?”

Memorized spawn points, one-shot kills, manual dexterity, and any number of things turn a game into a battle based on time logged rather than fun for most people. It’s kind of like MMORPGs in that sense in that you get rewarded for grinding through the game, while casual players will either be turned off by the grind or get turned off by the fact that without grinding, he/she is at a disadvantage.

I think Nintendo’s new controller is a good indication of the kinds of things that are fundamentally needed. Using a keyboard and mouse to control everything is intimidating for someone who is used to console controllers, let alone someone who has never played games before. Nintendo’s controller is presumably as intuitive to use as an escalator. You just KNOW how it will work.