There have always been "casual" games -- almost everything in the early Atari 2600 catalog was accessible, pick-up-and-play stuff. As games became more sophisticated, they also required more investment of time and effort (and offered greater reward, many would argue.)
Casual games appeal to people who aren't going to sit down and read a manual -- they want something fun to do to kill some time, and I don't begrudge them that; sometimes I am one of those people. Not always, as I don't understand the Facebook games myself -- they don't really seem like games to me, because they don't really have failure conditions -- but clearly a lot of people find them fun to play around with.
I see this as part of the maturation of the game industry -- it's no longer "Space Invaders" or "Pac-Man" or "King's Quest" or "Doom," i.e. THE game du jour, but a broad landscape with room for all kinds of titles. Adventure games have been able to come back because of this new eclecticism, and I'm very happy about that.
Movies and books have room for all kinds of stuff -- there's junk and there's art, but I don't see why games should have to be different, or why everyone should agree on which is which. The healthy scene today provides more stuff that I want to play than I can actually find time to play, so I can't really complain!
|