Gone were the days when we consider gamers as the nerds or geeks who lock up in their rooms and play video games all day. However, even with the considerable change in societies’ point-of-view about us, there is still this general perception that gamers are looked down upon by those of the “higher ranks of the food chain” in our societies’ heirarchy.

In my efforts to try and show to the world, especially to  Filipinos that gamers are in fact as diverse as the amount of games being published. I set up the Pinay Gamer section of the blog to show that there are in fact Pinay Gamers out there and also they’re not the type of gamers you can just look down upon (physically, mentally and career-wise).

“Yes believe it or not but the Pinay Gamer section serves more than just a fans service section of the blog FYI.”

But I’m not going to go through that line of discussion today because I’m focusing on the fact that the gamers nowadays capture a wider scope of people than was previously thought of.

So Ano Nga ba Gamers Ngayon?

Considering the general idea of people, gamers consists of people who play videogames. May it be pc, consoles or handhelds, they belong under the general category of “gamers”. I’m not going to bring into this post the other form of games such as TCG, Board Games, Pen & Paper and such because they are in fact part of another side of the spectrum, though they still belong into “gaming” per se, the focus of this post is more on videogames.

With that said and done, let’s move on to the sub-category of gamers. Within the gaming group there are two types of gamers that make up most if not all of people playing videogames. The first and apparently most obvious are the Hardcore Gamers or basically, the people who include playing videogames integral of their life. This classifications spans platforms so basically as long as you play a lot of games in your time, you belong here.

The other general classification of gamers are the Casual Gamers, they are the people who just play videogames to pass the time or that because it’s the “in” thing to do right now that they play. Examples of such gamers is,

  1. Old people who like to play card games on the pc (eg. my parents),
  2. People who have consoles that collect dust because they barely touched the thing,
  3. People who own handhelds but use them for other things aside from playing a puzzle game here or there.

Also, I’d like to mention this small classification of gamers that brings amusement and headaches within the game community, the fanboys. Basically, they’re the type of gamers worshiping certain game titles, game consoles, game developers or whatever which they attribute to their twisted view of love.

But, I won’t be delving into that right now because I’m going to write about them in the future :D

To clear things up, the general classifications I’ve presented here and their examples don’t represent everyone in the gaming world so please don’t go crying at me that I missed out on some major aspects of it k?

Browser Games

In online gaming, there’s this online game that uses merely browsers as its medium. They’re called browser games. Examples of these games are Travian, Ikariam, Utopia, Kings of Chaos, Casvian and the like. They are games that follow a simple process of gathering resources, building units and structures, advancing technology and dealing all out warfare against other players. This is done all in pen and paper style over the browser you use.

These games serve as a distraction and alternative if any other games are accessible for the player. They don’t necessarily eat up your time like mmorpgs and you can access your accounts anywhere as long as you have a pc and internet access. These games however don’t really make you come back unlike mmorpgs because

  1. You don’t really have any other reason save for a distraction whenever you play browser games,so you won’t be coming back as much to your browser game (unless you practically have nothing else to do)
  2. Browser games don’t necessarily provide you an thrilling or entrancing game experience (unless this is the type where you just keep on beating other people senseless)

However in recent developments, browser games have started to incorporate flash that practically makes a browser game interact faster and still keeping it browser based. This is just the first step browser games took but this isn’t the real reason why browser games started to flourish.

The Facebook Factor

The internet’s new social network sensation, Facebook became the trigger for people to start casual gaming. A lot of people have started using this social network as a means to connect, chat and practically connect with anyone and everyone. Much like the now slowly fading Friendster.

Browser games saw this as an opportunity to connect into a market that they never reached before. The first signs of success of browser games connecting to the masses is one of the pioneers in Facebook, Restaurant City. Personally I was one of the people who actually got hooked with the game after seeing my cousin (who never was much of a gamer save for basketball and wrestling games) during one of our vacations.

Everyone who was anyone who was on Facebook that time was busy cooking in their own little restaurants. Even those who previously had  no inclinations to play videogames became hooked. The mix of it’s easy gameplay and constant stream of achievable goals became the reason why people would shout at random moments “I need pala this <insert ingredient here> for my menu! Pahingi naman!”.

Then from there the onslaught of games came rushing in (e.g. farmville, mafia wars, friends for sale etc.). At first it was kind of cute, however there came to a point where employees started to Facebook more than they should and that led to company’s blocking the site even if it’s just a social networking site.

Plants vs. Zombies


Another example of a casual game that has reached heights is Popcap’s Plants Vs. Zombies. Through word of mouth people got to find out and enjoy the game. Though unlike in online games, the window for PvZ to be famous was a narrow window. However, it can’t be denied that the game’s popularity is still felt up to this day.

The Future

The potential of casual games right now is big, it’s market wider in scope compared to the usual games developers release for the consoles, pc or handhelds. The fact that these games are smaller in size (which means you can download and play these games faster) and the fact that majority of them are now within your grasp (Facebook games in particular) only means that this is not just a passing trend.

Personally, I’m seeing that casual gaming is still growing, with more people owning iPhones it’s just logical to say that it’s going to be chock-full of more causal games as its list of applications. I just hope it comes to a time when gaming itself has started to grow out of it’s niche as some would call it.

Though that time is still far away– I’m being very optimistic about it.

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