For me, the most fundamental brilliance about the design of Super Hexagon is how it parallels the mastery of learning a musical instrument (as well as other skills), primarily because of the relativity of perceived difficulty.  Super Hexagon has six difficulty stages which are broken into two sets of three.  When i first started to play the game, Stage 1 (labeled “Hard”) felt daunting enough as it was – everything seemed to be moving incredibly quickly, and i was constantly dying in 10s or less.  This happened often – probably literally hundreds of times – before i got past that point and then it took maybe another 50-75 tries to hit the 20s mark.  As i got more comfortable with it, it became easier to reach higher rates of achievement, but much of it still felt like floundering and a reactionary approach to the game as opposed to true mastery.

The main difficulty difference between Stage 3 (labeled “Hardest”) versus Stage 1 is speed – not just the speed of the obstacles coming at you, but also how quickly you move as a player.  Despite my level of comfort increasing in Stages 1 and 2 where getting 30-40s was, if not easy, at least more graspable, that slight increase of speed and mobility of Stage 3 schooled me for probably at least 200-300 gameplays before i passed 15s for the first time.  At this point i was fairly obsessed with the game, trying to achieve the 60s mark, and i discovered that trying to play Stage 1 and 2 would throw me off because the timing felt so different from Stage 1, so i deliberately stopped playing those stages for a good week or so while i attempted to master Stage 3.

I think it was when i was able to get to the 40-50s mark in Stage 3 that I decided to take a break and go back to Stage 1, and I discovered to my surprise that Stage 1 didn’t just feel easy, it felt slow.  I remember the sensation of playing the game for the first time and thinking that i had to react so quickly to everything, something that would induce an adrenaline rush and a sense of urgency.  But after I had trained myself to get used to the way Stage 3 was timed, I went back to Stage 1 and felt like i had all of the time in the world to react to what was going on – enough that I could sometimes make a poor judgement call, realize that a fraction of a second later, and then make an error correction that would cause me to not die, which is something that felt impossible when i first started.  And once i got good enough at Stage 3 and started to play the “challenge stages”, Stage 6 schooled me in the same way that Stage 3 had initially, and then when i got good enough at that and went back to Stage 3, Stage 3 similarly felt not just easy but slow.  This feeling was further amplified the more people i showed the game to who would try the first stage, watch me play the sixth stage, and be flabbergasted at how i could react so quickly when it no longer felt quick to me at all.  Conceptually this ended up being reinforced by people who started to obsess with the game as much as me that would describe a similar experience of those early stages feeling like a crawl compared to the later stages once they became expert players.

There are many many similar experiences that i’ve had with other video games, particularly music video games, and i know that there are a lot of professions, particularly sports, in which that comes into play as well.  In one of James Burke’s early television shows Connections, Burke used race car driving as that analogy, saying that professional race car drivers are so practiced in driving at fast speeds that they feel like they have all of the time in the world to react to situations around them that they’ve turned into instinct and reflex.  With sports and other professions, there’s a science behind how someone can be trained to get to that level of achievement, a pedagogical approach combined with hours and days of practice.  With Super Hexagon, the game design monopolizes on that science, creating an experience that is easy for anyone to grasp just by picking up the game and pressing “go”, but takes hours and days to master, and, more importantly, rewarding the time spent by the player in very concrete measurable and iterative ways that motivate the player to want to get even better. I knew i was improving at the game, and that fueled me to reach that next step of expertise by constantly analysing how i could improve on my technique, then applying those techniques and practicing them over and over again, all motivated by sheer determination of wanting to reach a decent level of mastery – which i eventually did.

Although the paradigm of Maverick Bird is more akin to Flappy Bird than Super Hexagon, the craft of the game design reminds me strongly of Super Hexagon in a way that Flappy Bird fails to achieve.

With Flappy Bird, there’s a measurable finite amount of situations the player has to learn in order to master the game.  Not to say that the game is easy; the margin of error to pass through the pipes and iterate your score is very narrow, and the physics of maneuvering the flappy bird takes some getting used to.  You’re given no “training mode” or any degree of forgiveness for imperfection.  You either get through the pipe, or you die.  But once you get used to the gravity physics and learn how to manipulate the flapping to get to where you need to get through the pipes, achieving high scores is seemingly left to simple practice and repetition.

That’s definitely a contrasting experience to that of playing Maverick Bird which i’ve now played for at least twice as long as its flappy counterpart, and I’m not only still learning how to get any level of mastery, but i’m also determined to do so in a way that i’m not motivated by Flappy Bird.  With Cavanagh’s clone, it feels worth it to spend the time to experiment and explore new techniques and approaches and hone the precision of my gameplay in an attempt to more achieve more consistently, and that’s more complicated than it initially seems because of how the arc path of the maverick bird’s “flap” is not equal to the rate in which obstacles roll by (which is also true of Flappy Bird but to a much lesser degree), which means that the same obstacles sometimes requires a completely different action depending on where the bird is in its flight path, which can be subtly manipulated to make it easier or harder depending on when you’ve flapped previously.

And never mind what the “drop” action does to add more flexibility and depth to the gameplay.

From all of this, it makes it seem that Maverick Bird is the superior Flappy Bird experience.  It captures the essence of Flappy Bird’s simplicity and expands on it in a Super Hexagon kind of way, complete with high-powered techno soundtrack.  It’s immensely gratifying to get better at the game, not just to get a new high score, but to reliably get higher scores or become more consistent in dealing with obstacles and how to prepare for them.

That said, Flappy Bird does achieve something that Maverick Bird doesn’t do, something that i think is fundamental to skill-building that today’s world sometimes loses sight of.  I had said that once the mechanics of Flappy Bird is mastered, high achievability is seemingly achieved through simple repetition, but the reality of it is more complicated than that and more profound.  To excel at Flappy Bird, the player has to have patience and perseverance, be willing to put in the time to practice the repetitions, which results in a level of confidence that getting the platinum medal 9 times out of 10 is a given, that achieving newer high scores is just a matter of time.  And in that way, Flappy Bird is more akin to what is needed by the aspiring professional musician, the snare line of a world class DCI or WGI drumline that works to play every single simple and complex note with absolute clarity, the aspiring concert pianist who practices his scales every day for two hours prior to working on the actual music no matter how many times he’s played them before, the collegiate music conductor who spends the first ten minutes of every rehearsal with long tones, making sure that everyone in her ensemble is using their ears to blend and balance.

Perseverance in that Flappy Bird sensibility, therefore, feels more like a test of will and determination that has to come from within where Maverick Bird is Flappy Bird’s virtuosic and flashy partner, where the test of will and determination is inherently encouraged by the subtly complex game design.  Both of them serve as an interesting complement to each other, and to me serves as an interesting set of analogies to important life skills; it’s the Flappy Bird sort of perseverance through almost a decade of patience and determination that got me to where i am today as a musician and what i humbly feel is a successful career as a collegiate marching band instructor and music composer.  It’s the Maverick Bird sort of desire for virtuosic excellence and mastery that drives me to constantly exceed my own set of expectations and goals in those realms and in every other aspect of my life, to apply the fundamentals that i’ve drilled so meticulously into innovative and polished results.

It’s possible that that analogy is a little self-masturbatory and stretches a bit thin.  That’s okay; both Birds are still damned fun to play, if nothing else, you can take away that as the bottom line if you want.

The electronic music program in my undergrad at West Chester helped engrain in me a preference of electronic music as an interactive performance art versus a static “tape piece” that involves no live element. Not that i don’t think that tape pieces have value or their place in our modern music history, it can just be more challenging for a piece to resonate with me as both a composer or an audience member if conceived that way.

That’s really a separate discussion; i bring this up because in the past half year or so my brother has started dabbling into creating flash games and i thought it would be fun to try my hand at creating the background music. The more i would discover about some of flash’s flexibility when it comes to music handling, the more my brain shifted the musical conception away from “background music” to “interactive sound experience”.

Most flash games i’ve played across the internet have a typical video game sound paradigm. There are two types of sounds: background music that will change occasionally based on a scene change or a severe game state change, and foreground effects that are more directly interactive with the character. For a lot of games, particularly certain genres of games such as 2-d scrollers, i think that paradigm works pretty well and can only be mucked about with when you have a particularly unique element to the game, but the two games that my brother have in development that i’m involved in are more puzzle like in nature and involve various evolving game states that lend itself well to having the music programmed with a much more direct relationship with what’s happening in the actual game.

It’s hard to explain without the games being complete to show examples; once those games go live i’ll probably write a post about the music and my philosophies behind its creation. But to exemplify the approach i’m taking with these games, here’s a two examples of existing games out there and how i would approach the sound experience with them. The first is a directly interactive sound experience based on gameplay elements, and the second is a more passive sound experience in which the background music evolves based on the evolution of the gameplay story.

Example One: dropsum 1.3

The “arcade game” gameplay has the most diverse gamestates that lend to sound manipulation, so i’m basing my brainstorming off of that.

The first easy thing to consider is the “required” number. The game starts off as a “9 required”. After you complete a certain amount of stages, the game changes to “11 required”, then “15 required”, then “19 required” (which no one has ever reached because it’s frickin’ impossible). This to me naturally lends itself to creating a base music layer that’s founded on time signatures: 9/8 for the 9 required, 11/8 for the 11 required, 15/8 for the 15 required, then probably 4/4 for the 19 required because for those that could ever get that far and are paying attention enough, it will throw them completely off.

The second easy thing to consider is the bubble numbers themselves. When you first start the game, you only get numbers up to 4. As you complete stages, more bubble numbers get added to increase the difficulty. I think the highest number i’ve ever gotten was 12. That lends itself to pitch classes, as in when you only have bubbles numbering up to 4, there’s only 4 pitches in the music vocabulary, when it gets to 5 you add a pitch, &c. I could see this done as either directly correlative to the base 9/8 layer material (the 9/8 layer is a rhythmic ostinato that starts off with 4 pitches and then adds more pitches to it as the numbers go up) or as a separate layer (the 9/8 base layer establishes a tonal vocabulary and a melody is put on top of that that only uses 4 pitches to start but then adds more pitches to it as the numbers go up).

The next thing to consider is color. Color in the bubbles change too quickly for the music to undergo drastic changes; you want the music to be indicative of the gameplay flow, and adding and removing completely new music elements based on the appearance and disappearance of color on the playfield would contradict the gameplay flow and feel disruptive. But the colors are also not ignorable; visually they’re right in your face and they’re key to you succeeding in the game, so for there to be *no* aural correlation to that visual element feels wrong. An easy solution is to have each color represent a timbre and just add that timbre to the existing melody line (based on the “bubble numbers are melody” idea), and maybe the presence (read: volume) of that particular timbre is directly related to how much of that color there is. For example, if the main melody is a piano single-note melody, yellow could be that same melody up the octave with a glock sound that you can only barely hear when there’s 5 or less yellows on the board, and every 5 yellows the volume increases.

Powerups are an interesting thing to this game too mainly because there’s a finite number of powerups that you can have. That’s a severe gameplay flaw, but lends itself great to creating some sort of countermelody or chordal backdrop that gets more ‘full’ the more powerups you have. The problem with that concept is that that aural aesthetic creates a sense of reward for having a full set of powerups which doesn’t quite correlate to real gameplay strategy since you need to get rid of powerups to make way for more powerful powerups if you have a lot of useless ones. That wouldn’t deter me from exploring that idea, but it may prevent me from feeling comfortable using sound in that way because of the contradicting message.

Example Two: The Company of Myself

my youtube playthrough

The music for TCoM is actually very well suited to the game and doesn’t need change. But if philosophically i were to change the music style and approach, it would go something like this:

There’s a typical background music loop that incorporates a melody of some sort. At the start of every new scene, elements of a countermelody get added. Say the countermelody is 12 notes total in a loop. At the end of scene 1, two of those notes get revealed. At the end of scene 2, two more notes get revealed. &c. That countermelody volumewise is clearly put in the background and stays there. This leads up to the scene where we first encounter Kathryn where the countermelody switches from background to foreground, fully complementing the main melody. In the scene where Kathryn “dies”, that countermelody abruptly shuts off.

Actually, at that moment when Kathryn dies, it’d probably be better for the entire music track to shut off for the remainder of that scene. Then when the next scene comes in, there’s a slow fade-in to the main music loop, but there’s a character change to that music loop, something that clearly reflects on the plot reveal of Kathryn’s death. Maybe the Kathryn countermelody is still incorporated, but in a fragmented and dissonant way as opposed to as a complement.

I feel there could be some musical correlation to the creation and execution of “history copies”, but the easy answer of creating some sort of ‘echo’ remnant would require a lot of care in the main loop’s composition to make sure that the echo doesn’t clash with itself. A different approach could be to create a different “flavor” of the main loop for each history iteration, and to enhance that with changing some of the visual background elements upon each history creation. For example, every time that a history iteration needs to be created, create some visual decay or abstractness in the background, and have the music loop include some dissonance or semi-tones that give it a less stable character.

That might have to peak in a level like the last one where you’re creating a *lot* of multiple history copies in order to achieve completion of the level, but if you do it five times and then just leave it, that might not be so bad visually if you’re able to continue the effect aurally in some way at least for another 10 or 15 iterations. it’d be tricky but doable; it probably lends itself to maybe creating a gameplay paradigm where there’s only a finite version of history copies you are allowed to make before you have to restart (which would probably eliminate the last level from existing).

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Those are just two examples off of the top of my head that i feel approach the sound experience in the game differently than the way a lot of game music tends to be implemented. Again, not every game can use this sort of aesthetic, but for games that have that sort of interactive potential – either directly interactive like the first example, or scene/story based evolution like the second example – it feels like something that’s greatly underutilized that could greatly enhance a person’s playing experience and level of depth to the game at both a conscious and subconscious level.

We’ll see how that turns out with my brother’s games once they’re fully developed.

The idea to make a video of me playing chain factor came as a result of me not finding any online videos of gameplay that could help guide my own play to being better, so i decided to make my own video of one of my better runs. I got lucky – the run that i ended up recording was the first run that i did, and while it’s not my best score, i felt it was good enough for me to use.

the run actually took about 22 minutes to complete, so the first step was to speed up the video so that it would meet youtube’s 10 minute specification limit (although i do realize that yt’s limitation has more to do with filesize rather than length). Doing that meant that i couldn’t use the original music/soundtrack without it sounding ridiculous, so the next step was to find music to go with the run. Ten minutes is longer than songs typically are, but i immediately rejected the idea of using more than one song because i didn’t want the video to be broken in half by two songs. The only piece of music that I had in my iTunes library that was close to ten minutes was Cheating, Lying, Stealing by David Lang. so i sped it up slightly to get it to the needed length, and planned to just stick it in the background of the video.

Once i had chosen the tune, it didn’t feel right to just have the piece sit in the background while the video did nothing but show a static gameplay field. So i decided some basic manipulation would be easy to do. So the “tremor effect” for all of the opening kick drum segments was born. At the time, i was to just going to do that in appropriate places and call it good, but once i started to put in the effect and thought about what was happening in the rest of the music, it wasn’t enough. I felt like the music deserved more – it’s a fantastic piece with a lot of immediate appeal as well as a lot of analytical depth. To have the video manipulation not reflect that depth goes against my general artistic principles. So i started brainstorming in my head ideas for what should happen in each section of the piece.

And it kept growing. and growing. and, um.

here’s a basic rundown of each section: the effects, the motivation behind them, the evolution of them, and some of the technical construction of them:

Section A (0’00”-0’34”) – Tremor Effect: I went to the web to figure out how to do this in FCP since i don’t have a copy of After Effects or a similar program. Basically it involved creating a copy of the snippet of video in question, and then doing a right and left reposition multiple times every two frames. I decided that the only thing that i wanted to actually tremor was the playfield, so i had to create cropped copies of the right “score” side, the left “Back To Menu” side, and the bottom “Level Up” side that would run independently of the playfield. This would be key to later sections.

Section B (0’34”-1’06”) – Echo layers: Originally, the idea i had was to create a “ghost layer” every time the cello changed notes. Each layer was supposed to clearly come from the spot that it just got left off, and all of the layers were supposed to be slower. I tried this at first and decided after i watched a few layers that it moved too slowly and was too boring, so i changed the concept to instead make the layers a mix of slower and quicker and have them start in a spot where at the very end of the section they would all converge to the same moment.

This was very early in my FCP video editing chops – if i had done the middle/late sections first, i would have done these sections differently. Probably a little cleaner, and also more interesting.

Sections A’, B’, A” (1’06”-2’41”) – Recap and Ripple: The ripple is the only thing that i did differently for the section recaps. That was a basic FCP video effect; nothing too special there.

Section C part 1 (2’41”-3’39”) – Moving Menu/Score: Originally i had an idea of having either the score or the menu jitter around for every piano hit, but since i lost my score to the piece from when i analyzed/performed it in college, it ended up being too daunting and impractical. I still wanted the menu and score to move, so i simplified the criteria.

i took the screen and replicated it six times: one for the cropped version of the playfield, one for the “Level” indicator on the bottom, one for a white bar on the left side along with the sound toggles, one for the “Back to Menu” that was on top of it, one for the white bar on the right side, and one for the score that was on top of it. The white bars served as a backdrop for the moving menu and scores, and i’m guessing that i probably did this in the most inefficient way possible – i didn’t create a .tga of a static white backgorund, i just cropped a white portion of the playfield and then zoomed it by 1000 percent. I’m betting that this took extra processing power because even though the video was “invisible” since i only picked a portion of it, i imagine that the video was still running in the background, which would have caused for more cpu needed and more time to render. but oh well.

getting the menu and score to move was a fairly simple matter of finding the frames with the audio that i wanted to line the move with and then creating two adjacent keyframes: one to hold the previous position, and one to immediately move it to the new position. i also added some motion blur to give the move some more “depth”.

Section C part 2 (2’56”-3’39”) – Number Fill: Conceptually the gradual number fill turned out exactly how i wanted it – start with a basic number fill, gradually hit a point where the entire board is filled with numbers by the end. In some of its execution i’m also pretty happy with what i did; it was a deliberate choice to start with a predictable pattern before finding new ways to break it – start with all 7s, then 6s, then 5s, then break that by doing something different, then break that by doing a more random pattern, then break that by turning the numbers upside down, &c. Even so, i’m not *completely* satisfied with that section because at some point it loses its sense of direction because i didn’t pace it properly and think enough ahead.

This was the first time that i deliberately decided to take a snapshot of all of the numbers indivdually into still .tga’s as opposed to grabbing small clips of video. It did me a lot of good in the long run i think – it would have been a headache both cropping-wise, timing-wise, and rendering-wise if all of those numbers were film instead of snapshots.

Section D (3’39” – 5’28”) – Rotating Playfield and Number Trails: The slowly rotating board felt appropriate for the mood of this section; since everything prior to this part was primarily percussive, the more legato sense of this section needed a more legato visual effect. The white-faded rotation that lines up with the piano cluster hits is meant to be a variation of the original “Batman” rotating segue, and although you can’t tell, it’s a copy of whatever the current playfield is at the time. Originally i had it in negative colors, but it was too distracting from the main playfield action, so i decided to change my approach.

The number trails were fairly straightforward to do, but is also one of my favorite effects in the whole video. It recycled the .tga snapshots of the previous section, just placed in strategic spots with the piano cluster hits as well. The thing that i wrestled with a little here was how the growing number of “stuck” numbers obscured the playfield, problematic because despite all of the video manipulations i was doing, the main premise behind the video was still to demonstrate gameplay. Ultimately i decided that i liked the effect too much for the lack of complete clarity to matter enough, and i’m glad i kept it in.

Section E (5’28” – 6’13”) – Moving Playfield: Another ‘gradually evolving’ section where i tried to establish the basis for the section by zooming in place, then breaking that expectation by zooming to different spots, then breaking that by adding x-axis rotation, then breaking that by adding z-axis rotation. Standard fcp functionality, but i think it’s fairly effective. i’m annoyed that by doing the z rotation, the “crop” changed so that you could visibly see the score as it rotated, but i was too lazy to try to create a moving crop to match the rotation. too much work for too little return.

Section F (6’15” – 9’06”) – Pendulum Playfield/Zoom Echo Playfields/Snare Drum Flashes: The original concept i had for the Pendulum Playfield was instead to have the hits be “mirror polarity”, as in for every hit it would flip between a mirror playfield and the regular playfield. I nixed that idea for the same reason i was wary about the “sticky” numbers in that i felt that it would obscure the actual gameplay too much. When i first did the pendulum swinging, it was an extreme and unchanging swing the whole way, and the result was pretty dissatisfying because after establishing the swing, it didn’t go anywhere and got boring too quickly. The gradual increase of the swing gave it direction but a subtle one; hopefully it’s something that you can easily not notice because it’s gradual enough and there’s too much other stuff going on, and before you realize it, the swing is at its peak.

The zoom echo playfields effect was a fairly straightforward execution at this point since i had done a different version of that earlier in the piece. I systematically created two ‘echo playfields’ that would zoom out to 1000 percent centered on a random spot, then two ‘echo playfields’ that would zoom in to zero percent centered on a random spot. This repeated for every moving note in the violin part. I toyed around with trying to make the playfields change opacity over time, but having multiple layers on top of each other achieved the effect well enough and any more lessened the impact of the swinging pendulum which i still wanted to be main focus. i did put the opacity of all of the layers back to 100% when they all came back in a collapse to try to create more visual tension. That particular moment i tried about 10 times and i’m still not completely happy with it. I had this idea of playfields zooming suddenly in in rapid succession and in rapid velocity, but i couldn’t get the effect to work the right way, so i settled for the final effect here because at this point i was also impatient to get the whole project done. I think i have a better idea of what to do if i ever tried something like that again.

The snare drum flashes came from taking a few snapshots from the background combo flashes, photoshopping out the gridlines, and then putting them all in frame by frickin’ frame. Granted, once i got the main repeating pattern, i could copy/paste the repeating pattern and place it when i needed to, but for each one i also had to make sure that where it hit didn’t potentially collide with new objects in the playfield, so it involved looking at each one fairly carefully, and when the pattern was interrupted, i’d have to shift the whole pattern around.

the snare drum hits in the music contribute greatly to the tension of the climax, and although i think i conveyed that okay in my visualization of it, it gets completely lost because of the echo playfields zooming in. I’m not completely happy with how that turned out, but again, after so many failed attempts and just wanting the whole thing to be done, i decided to call it good.

As for the final recaps of the opening sections, i put some consideration into doing something different with it to give it a better bookend but decided against it because doing anything different felt like it would have been completely out of context.

The whole project took me roughly six or so weeks to complete. crazy considering that originally i was going to make it a one-session video edit and call it finished, but i’m glad that it turned out the way that it did, because i’m happy with how it turned out, and it’s expanded my vocabulary and conceptualizations of what i can do with video manipulation which will hopefully help me with my Green Lantern project.

go me.

in its infancy, “video game” meant “arcade game”, starting (essentially) with Pong and then developing into a thriving arcade culture of individuals who plopped quarter after quarter gobbling pellets, shooting asteroids or space invaders, or jumping over barrels. And whlie my personal experience in arcades growing up didn’t match the stereotype of angsty/rebellious teenagers, society definitely bought into that impression on both sides of the fence, and as the popularity of video games started to rise so did the concern of parents that video games were a bad influence on youth. Video games are a waste of money, they make our kids not interested in reading, they make our kids violent or lose touch with the real world, &c.

It’s impossible to say where video games would be right now if the Nintendo Entertainment System hadn’t revitalized the home video game industry after the video game crash of 1983. I think it was likely a mixed blessing for arcade machine developers; on the one hand, the success of the NES console took people away from the arcades and more money into cartridges, but on the other hand, if the NES hsdn’t resurged video gaming back into popular culture, the arcade industry would have probably died on its own.

The interesting thing to note about the arcade industry versus the home industry was how those competing yet co-dependent paths slowly diverged over time both in society’s attitudes about them and the experiences they tried to create. During the third and fourth generation of home consoles from the mid-80s to late-90s, home consoles were still “behind” when it came to replicating the arcade experience. The graphics weren’t as sharp, the home joystick didn’t have the same sort of “feel” as an arcade joystick, and more importantly, home consoles couldn’t match the social aspect of arcade video gaming, particularly in the early 90s when Street Fighter II and Mortal Kombat brought people back to the arcades. But the home console market at that time was able to compete in a way that the prior home console market failed because they had a particular slice of video game aesthetic that wasn’t meant to replicate the arcade experience, it was supposed to stand on its own. Super Mario Brothers, Legend of Zelda, Metroid, Sonic the Hedgehog, and early RPGs like the early Final Fantasy and Dragon Warrior games helped define the home market audience versus the arcade audience.

It was the next generation of video game consoles (Playstation, N64, Saturn) that started to shift the dynamics and attitudes in game development as technology and graphics for home consoles started to accelerate and create the market that still has strong influence today. The long platform/RPG and other “console specialized” sorts of games still had a strong following, but it was also around this time that consoles had advanced enough to create a truer arcade experience or create an experience that (in some views) *surpassed* the arcade experience in gaming. And when the next generation of consoles came out years after (PS2, Xbox, Gamecube, Dreamcast), the arcade video game industry had to change its tactic to keep the arcade experience unique, which is how games with non-standard controllers rose to dominance, particularly music video games like Dance Dance Revolution and other bemani.

Through these decades of video game history, the overwhelming majority of consoles and systems were still aimed at the everchanging youth. Video games that were smash hits in the 8-bit era were abandoned as a home market aesthetic in favor of games that emphasized graphic superiority and/or a greater sense of epicism. and as that philosophy of “better graphics! more dazzle! who cares about gameplay? just blow things up!” gained momentem and became a standard to uphold in entertainment in general (don’t even get me started on the Michael Bay’s Transformers), it created a separation between the older and newer generation of gamers, leaving older gamers in the dust.

Until a new video game aesthetic started to creep into the mainstream which in its infancy was pretty invisible to the likes of me but is now impossible to ignore: the online casual flash game.

I’m not sure when casual flash games rose to such popularity, but it’s evident how much it has a strong foothold in the new video gaming culture not just because of the popularity of sites like kongregate, yahoo games, the casual game apps that exist on facebook &c, but also how much prominence casual games have in the current gen. consoles. The PS3 and XBox 360 certainly still have the genre of hardcore gamers that are looking for games that make full use of their power to give them that Next Dazzling first person shooter/racing game/sports game, but there’s an entire online paradigm for both of these consoles that is dedicated to the downloading and buying of casual games not unlike what is possible to do on the internet. In fact, some of the games that are available through those consoles’ online services are ones that were found on the internet first and developed as an enhanced version, such as N+ and Flow.

In addition to this, you have the Wii. Nintendo’s whole marketing strategy for the Wii other than its innovative controls is that it’s the video game console for the whole family, and with launches such as Wii Sports, Wii Play, and the like, it’s clear that part of the new controller design is optimized to help enhance the casual game experience with the unique Wii interface.

When i think about how and why casual games have risen to such prominence, a few key factors come into play. First off, i feel that the online casual flash game was the first video game genre that was targeted towards older people, particularly corporate office workers. Even small businesses have integrated high-speed internet as a part of their infrastructure, and when people need a break and are tired of reading news or looking at pictures or whatever, more people find a casual flash game to occupy their time. it’s the new version of the newspaper crossword puzzle or word scramble, and it succeeds at grabbing that new audience because a) the games are generally simpler in concept and execution than typical video games (compare point and click or finding words as opposed to executing a haryuken), and b) the games are generally short to finish, an instant gratification/momentary distraction sort of thing rather than a long involved mission that involves more walking and random encounters than people want to have even in real life.

Secondly, there’s the ease in which any random joe can program and develop a quality casual game. As opposed to console games which require a team of programmers and artists and what have you to put together, flash is relatively easy enough to learn that basic games can be a one-man show, and with sites like kongregate, they can gain free and instant exposure to tens of thousands of people. It’s even hit a point where those that can’t comprehend Flash can go to sites like simcarnival where a special application exists to make that process even easier, requiring practically no programming experience whatsoever.

Third, and in my opinion the most significant, some of the casual games that have come out of this have risen to true brilliance, and this is where i feel the video game trend has come full circle. Because surely there are current more standard video games that have their own sense of brilliance and success such as WoW or the Final Fantasy series or GTA or Mortal Kombat, but it’s been a long time since there has been a video game in which the brilliance matches the sensibility of how Pac Man and Tetris and Centipede and Asteroids were brilliant, or how Legend of Zelda and the original Super Mario Brothers were brilliant: that despite its seeming simplicity in concept, gameplay, and graphics, they never get tiresome or old.

And because of all of this, i have a suspicion that the Big 3 console companies are on their last legs in the market of video games unless the momentum can be rebuilt up because of the likes of Rock Band and Guitar Hero. Otherwise, i strongly suspect that people will soon be more likely to buy a $5 texas hold ’em application on their smartphone or pull up a game of chain factor or their favorite kongregate game than spend $50+ on a console video game.

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Originally posted on darkblog resonate. I prefer any thoughts or comments there.