Casual games shouldn't be dumb

Talking to my producer, he had the point that games companies make games that they want to play, which is not the same as what consumers want to buy. We were both agreeing that this ties into the current thinking about the Wii.

Developers are not making games that capitalise on the Wii's market strengths, because they don't think like the Wii's market. And that goes back to a misunderstanding (or mislabeling) of what the 'casual' market actually is. I consider myself to be in that market these days because, being married with two kids, I don't have time to sit down and play through an epic 20-40 hour storyline.

But I don't want to play some game that is just "press the space bar to win". The challenge as I see it is to produce a game that lends itself to an experience that is not time pressured; that I can come back to when I have the time.

Hmm. Hang on. I just read about that point here on next-gen.biz where he talks about the universal pause. That's one of the things that drove me made about Zelda: Twilight Princess. I'd be halfway through a dungeon, only to have to go look after my kids, and would just lose twenty minutes of gameplay.

Making a game that relies on a player being able to dedicate a solid hour of uninteruptible time in order to make progress just comes across as rather self-indulgent to me. Especially when there is not even an in-game justification for the lack of saves. It just feels like an arbitrary decision because (I assume) Zelda games are always like this.