Transcendence in the form of a third arm

July 24, 2015 6:07 AM

"Games offer a way to simulate and view complex systems from the outside, to pick them up and play with them as a child might play with a toy machine, to understand what they are able to do and where they are broken." Bea Malsky at The New Inquiry writes about casual time management gaming, Marxism, affective/emotional labor, worker alienation, and whether just maybe Diner Dash is doing subversive feminist work.
posted by Stacey (25 comments total)

It had never occurred to me till I read this that casual games might be more female-oriented because women don't have as many chunks of free time as men do, to play console or online games. I don't know why I didn't see that before. But it makes perfect sense. It's not about whether you like gaming, it's about who's going to do the housework/caring work if you spend all day doing it.

I'm not sure I feel her hope that any revolutionary understanding will arise from playing casual games, though. If World of Warcraft is training for capitalist exploitation of others, why wouldn't Diner Dash be training for a life of underpaid caring work?
posted by emjaybee at 6:53 AM on July 24, 2015 [16 favorites]

People freaked the fuck out when I posted a link to an article five years ago pointing out that the labels of "hardcore" and "casual" gaming are coded for gender, so maybe MeFi's changed in the interim?
posted by Pope Guilty at 7:08 AM on July 24, 2015 [8 favorites]

Yes, it has. I am now a middle-aged housewife named Frieda.
posted by delfin at 7:29 AM on July 24, 2015 [2 favorites]

Wow, that Pope Guilty thread was pecked to death by ducks.
posted by maxsparber at 8:22 AM on July 24, 2015 [2 favorites]

Are casual games "more female-oriented" though? Or is it just that more women play them? More women play RPG games than men as per surveys but we don't call RPG games female-oriented.
posted by I-baLL at 8:34 AM on July 24, 2015

I remember, back in the FarmVille days of casual gaming, when I first got a tractor for my farm. Now, instead of clicking 100 times to sow my fields or whatever, I only had to click 25 times. At last! Respite from the grueling schedule of the farm. But instead I bought more land and farmed four times as much. I learned something about mechanization and capitalism, for sure.

I confess that I played the Kim Kardashian game for quite a while. On freemium games, I usually also play a meta-game of "how long can I play before the game coerces me to spend money for further advancement?" An interesting aspect of these casual games is how much like work they feel. As far as whether or not they illuminate anything about feminism or capitalism to the people playing them? Insofar as they facilitate essays like this, maybe they do.
posted by BuddhaInABucket at 8:39 AM on July 24, 2015 [5 favorites]

I think a lot of crap has happened since 2010 regarding "hardcore" and "casual" gaming, including but not limited to the decline of AAA games, the rise of indie and mobile games, and movements like Gamergate throwing mud on the titles of Gamer and Hardcore. In the Pope Guilty thread lots of women bristled at being excluded from "Hardcore" gaming, but today nobody is as interested in carrying that title.

Also, we're now all irredeemably old.
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 9:03 AM on July 24, 2015 [3 favorites]

A while back Laura Hudson also wrote a neat article about the subversiveness of Diner Dash and its genre.
posted by Holy Zarquon's Singing Fish at 9:30 AM on July 24, 2015 [3 favorites]

Hardcore gamers are people who play stuff like Dwarf Fortress and EVE Online. Everybody else is casual. Although I could make a case that AAA gamers are more casual than phone gamers; you can breeze through many bigtime console titles in an afternoon, but a lot of those phone games require an ongoing daily commitment and plenty of thought towards resource management in order to progress and excel.
posted by prize bull octorok at 9:52 AM on July 24, 2015 [5 favorites]

I played Travian for a while and it was fun for a bit but it did not take long to go from fun to a part-time job.
posted by GuyZero at 9:58 AM on July 24, 2015 [1 favorite]

A while back Laura Hudson also wrote a neat article about the subversiveness of Diner Dash and its genre.

In Persona 3 (and 4), you play a high school student who, with a group of friends, fights monsters at night. During the course of the game, you need to fight monsters to a time table, but you also have to find time to sleep, make friends, study, and so on. The first time I played the game, I was having a very stressful time at work, and I was bemused that I was taking time out of a crazy and complicated schedule to play a game where I was trying to manage a crazy and complicated schedule. Maybe the lack of hideous night-monsters in real life made it all the more soothing. I don't know.

That =Hudson article was great, by the way. I would love to see an expanded version....
posted by GenjiandProust at 10:25 AM on July 24, 2015 [4 favorites]

I enjoy time management games. For me, the beauty of them is that they require my total and complete attention. Lose focus for a second, and everything goes to hell. They seem to stimulate some kind of brain-wave state that allows me to forget everything else in my real life that may be going to hell. I played them the most at a time in my life when my personal circumstances felt out of control, probably because they offered the chance to be in control on a screen. Like the author of this piece, I'd spent many years working in the service industry, doing precisely the same kind of time management as the characters in the games and when I did that kind of work, I took a lot of pride in being able to prioritize and juggle multiple tasks for a reward in the form of tips. Now, I'm too old to be employable in that industry and my life IS going to hell rapidly. I think I'll go and download Diner Dash on my phone...
posted by alltomorrowsparties at 10:29 AM on July 24, 2015 [7 favorites]

This article has some interesting things to say, but it rests on some iffy assumptions.

For example, it conflates "casual games" with the two games it analyzes, Diner Dash and Kim Kardashian: Hollywood, to the point that it sometimes uses the terms interchangeably. But is this valid? Are these two games the most popular casual games, or representative of casual games in general? I don't know the answer to those questions, but the piece should first establish why these two games in particular are being studied as stand-ins for the casual game market as a whole. Perhaps looking at rankings of the most popular casual games to see what they generally comprise.

It also, at least to me, seems to imply that these sort of time management or job-oriented games are particular to casual games, but that's not the case. Time management games have a long history on many platforms and computers, and there is also a long history of "job games" that involve jobs like running a train or a baseball team, though these are popular in Japan and not the US. How do these non-casual games fit into their analysis?

Without this legwork it seems like the author picked these two casual games because they best fit the thesis, rather than establishing that "time management" and "job" games are fundamentally connected to casual games, and that these two particular games can be studied to say something about casual games or gaming as a whole.

Hardcore gamers are people who play stuff like Dwarf Fortress and EVE Online. Everybody else is casual.

Nah, there are other niche groups. Those people who obsessively play fighters to the point that they learn to count the frames, for example. Those people are nuts.
posted by Sangermaine at 10:46 AM on July 24, 2015 [5 favorites]

When I was in high school, a classmate of mine justified his sexism to me by dismissing my interest in Nintendogs and suggesting it to be a legitimate game, because I love how it broke the model of it being points-based, and a game that you didn't have to complete levels for. "That's not a game. You know why? Because it's NOT hardcore. There are no points or people to kill. You know what's hardcore? First Person shooters and Super Smash Bros tournaments." He also turned out to be a fundamentalist, evangelical Christian who works for the Republican Party.

I'm starting to think that my life's narrative and anecdotes is just a long-running joke that ends in, "Look, you survived another example of systematic misogyny!"
posted by yueliang at 11:16 AM on July 24, 2015 [15 favorites]

I always got the impression, from friends and from print magazines, that "hardcore gamers" were the ones who sank tons of money into upgrading their PCs, spent as much time downloading patches and updates as playing the games, and looked down their noses at console gamers. Like the audiophiles of the videogame world.
That as time went on, console gamers claimed space under the "hardcore" umbrella still seems funny to me.

NB: I couldn't even afford a computer before 2000, but I had friends who talked about their computers the way other dudes talked about their cars, and fifteen years ago, the performance gap between consoles and PCs was much more obvious.
posted by Mister Moofoo at 11:17 AM on July 24, 2015 [1 favorite]

I've long thought "hardcore" and "casual" was a pretty meaningless and needlessly polarized/polarizing way of looking at games and players, and never thought either label properly fit anyone I knew.

Take something like The Sims. Some people can easily lose days playing it, creating stuff for it, hacking file formats, coming up with "Legacy Challenges" and so on... yet I don't think anyone ever called it a "hardcore" game.

Nope, "hardcore" was supposed to apply somehow to another friend who played Halo intermittently while watching a movie on another screen.

I occasionally get deep into RPGs; I read everything people write about character builds and strategy, and want to try every possibility. I have a spreadsheet to keep track of my 52+ Champions Online characters. But I have no interest in PVP, grinding, or raiding. And one of the other things I loved about Champions Online was playing dress-up with the costume creator.

Can't stand time management games, farming games etc. but I can get lost for hours in "casual" puzzle games.
posted by Foosnark at 11:30 AM on July 24, 2015 [1 favorite]

I think it's starting to get to the point where "casual" v "hardcore" is more an indication of how much time it takes to get to a stopping point. Most phone games fit this mold because it's the nature of the genre. Console games have moved toward this and I think it's because the console demographic has aged. They've gone from games that you have to sit down as play for a couple of hours with no variable difficulty settings so you have to grind and grind to get good enough for the boss monster to games you can save WHENEVER YOU WANT (a huge step in making them more "casual") and can play on Story mode or whatever the devs called it so you don't have to worry about making sure you're level 40 when you go fight the big boss. Levels are designed to be done in about an hour and I can't remember the last time a game required 80 hours to finish the primary story line.

I don't even bother with computer games anymore. Computers are what I use for work. I don't want to use one at home too.
posted by fiercekitten at 11:49 AM on July 24, 2015 [1 favorite]

They've gone from games that you have to sit down as play for a couple of hours with no variable difficulty settings so you have to grind and grind to get good enough for the boss monster to games you can save WHENEVER YOU WANT (a huge step in making them more "casual") and can play on Story mode or whatever the devs called it so you don't have to worry about making sure you're level 40 when you go fight the big boss. Levels are designed to be done in about an hour and I can't remember the last time a game required 80 hours to finish the primary story line.

Exactly. Today's gamers are weak. Nintendo Hard games would break them. Sit them down in front of Ninja Gaiden or the original TMNT NES game and they'd be curled in a fetal position crying in 10 minutes.
posted by Sangermaine at 12:16 PM on July 24, 2015

Exactly. Today's gamers are weak. Nintendo Hard games would break them. Sit them down in front of Ninja Gaiden

THOSE GODDAMN EAGLES

or the original TMNT NES game

THAT GODDAMN WATER LEVEL

I'll be spending the rest of my day perfecting my thousand yard stare, thanks Sangermaine
posted by prize bull octorok at 12:31 PM on July 24, 2015

.Exactly. Today's gamers are weak.

I think you entirely missed the point about demographics there.
posted by the agents of KAOS at 12:52 PM on July 24, 2015 [1 favorite]

fiercekitten > I think it's starting to get to the point where "casual" v "hardcore" is more an indication of how much time it takes to get to a stopping point.

OtOH I've been playing Bloodborne on and off for the past few months. I am pretty much always at a stopping point; at any time I can save my game and put it down. But I'm pretty sure it is commonly considered a Hardcore Game.

I still haven't finished the main storyline even once. I've mostly just been happily wandering around its gorgeous environments, grinding for levels. I am totally playing it like a Filthy Casual and I am glad; it's just my Monster Killer Dress-Up playset.
posted by egypturnash at 12:55 PM on July 24, 2015 [5 favorites]

I've been convalescing from an injury lately and have been playing a lot of video games on the PC I built and maintain for such activities. I've had my hands in Dragon Age: Inquisition, Witcher 3, Pillars of Eternity.

Concurrently, I have been revisiting Virtual Villagers 5 on the iPad (a perfect format for that), Virtual Families 2, Fallout Shelter, and on PC again, Zoo Tycoon 2 (there are so many mods!) and even Wildlife Park 2: Horses.

I think VF2 is the most "casual" of all these in regards to gameplay (also the most feminine). I am defining casual here as simplicity of mechanics and depth. This is the whole of it: You adopt a tiny person, accept a marriage proposal from their PC, procreate, buy groceries, make them clean the house and work until they die. When they die, you choose a child to repeat the process with, and with the coins they earn from work, you buy house upgrades which are almost all only decorative. Of course, you can also buy coins with real currency, but it's rather ineffective. This runs in real time, so the experience of the game is effectively checking in once a day to give groceries, clean house, and make sure Dad is working (Dad, because Mom has to tend to the babies exclusively). I lost interest rapidly because it lacks any of the puzzle solving that VV5 contains.

I don't talk about my 'casual' exploration, though. The rare moment when someone, typically male, inquires into whether I've "played games before", I give them only the opening list with a measured nonchalance, as if I hadn't been exploring every possible side quest and struggling with the urge to minmax my characters. By no means do I mention anything about being hardcore -- I learned to avoid that folly in my teens, since as a woman, it immediately gets you grilled on your retention of esoteric video game trivia to prove your gaming cred. Not to mention it's flat out unfashionable to label yourself as such right now.

It's been interesting to watch as I've moved from spaces that are predominantly male and tech-related to ones that are mostly female and fitness-related. Positive and volunteered recognition of myself as a gamer has all but ceased. Once, when I was grooming my gelding at the barn, an ipod's playlist ticked over, beginning a song that lifted my spirits and caused me to stop abruptly to search the source out.

"Is that," I asked of an acquaintance, growing bold, "No, I'm sure it is, that's from Skyrim!" I was beaming, excited, enthusiastic to talk about travels in Tamriel. Imagine my surprise when she flushed, and almost stammered, "Oh... it is? Huh.. I wonder how that got there.." As she continued to excuse herself, I worked through the confusion that washed over me. This recognition was... embarrassing, in this space? Not to be spoken of? Here, it was a Boyfriend Thing, a frivolous time waster for boys at that. So, as a good learner, I don't talk about it in those circles any more.

That went a bit sideways, but I do like to reflect with a constrained sorrow on how all these very carefully weighted behaviors have come to be that way.
posted by equestrian at 2:11 PM on July 24, 2015 [2 favorites]

Now I'm sitting here listening to the Morrowind theme song with a tear in one eye of overwhelming fondness and appreciation for what was probably my ultimate childhood gaming experience; and a tear in the other that it is often not recognized as a "valid" experience, because I was unfortunate enough to be born without a penis.

Metafilter, I love your bittersweet rawness.
posted by equestrian at 2:26 PM on July 24, 2015 [1 favorite]

Exactly. Today's gamers are weak. Nintendo Hard games would break them.

Oh, please. If that's the metric we are using, put any "gamer" down at a bridge table, and the grannies will have him crying for his tender, comforting console before the first round of bidding is over.
posted by GenjiandProust at 3:25 PM on July 24, 2015 [5 favorites]

Those people who obsessively play fighters to the point that they learn to count the frames, for example. Those people are nuts.

Christ. The things I learn are things on Metafilter.
posted by AdamCSnider at 5:02 PM on July 24, 2015